People love to personify New Orleans, glorifying the city as a sentient, mystical being–a being who will take you under her wing and share her magic with yet another transient inhabitant. More than one person expressed something along these lines when prompted by my boyfriend Paul—ever the conversationalist—asking what they loved about this city: “She’ll show you things about yourself you never knew before.”

This city sure did end up showing me a thing or two, but it wasn’t the message I’d expected (which I guess is the point). What she had to say to me was loud and clear, and what she had to say was this: she didn’t want me, and she didn’t want me at all.

Living here showed me that what I’d meant to do by leaving Chicago, and missed the mark so terribly on, was to go home. Ohio by way of New Orleans is a funny way to trek, but sometimes you have to really steer off course to realize where you were heading at all. I’ve learned the hard way what matters to me—and hard or not, I’m glad I’ve learned it: my family, my community, my home; my wide expanse of midwestern, rural land. All of which is not found here.

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I don’t know why I moved here, really—I’d always been vaguely interested, I was uninspired in Chicago, I came here on vacation and had a wonderful time, my impulsive streak got the best of me. I wanted something different than the life I'd been living but didn’t understand what that looked like. My coworker at the time, who had lived here briefly once before, told me something before I left Chicago that I’ve learned the hard way was true: New Orleans is a wonderful place to visit and a very difficult place to live.

I started to write about my time here as a way to process my complicated feelings from the past two years. After spending a while painfully trying to organize my thoughts in a coherent manner, I shut my computer and said, “Why am I doing this? Writing is Paul’s thing. I could keep struggling through expressing my pent-up feelings and experiences in this way, or, I could work through it in the same way I’ve been trying to cope with the past two years of struggle here: I could draw about it.”

So I did.

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New Orleans was not kind to me. We’ve repelled against each other with force. For two years I've sludged through day after day of depression in this city and I’m ready to offload the weight from concealing what it's been like. To be clear, the following exercise is not for sharing my personal tribulations and struggles with the internet at large, but rather to name the external factors that beat me down further when I was already low.

People are very protective of this city and quick to feud anything even remotely critical of it, so before I share this series, my disclaimer is this: if the following project offends you, I don’t know what to say. Many people have a wonderful experience in the “Big Easy.” I wanted to, but for the most part, I didn’t. This was my reality; I won’t minimize it to make other people more comfortable with theirs. 

If you love this city, I’m happy for you. I didn’t, so I’m leaving.

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All that to say this: for the next while I’ll be sharing my visual journal of my time here. Though I had a lot of fun with this project, it’s admittedly focused on the negative aspects of my experience—some of which I’m embarrassed to share, but it is what it is. This is a hard city to not respond to in some way—there’s much beloved local ephemera and symbolism for that very reason. 

While they may be less beloved, the following symbols are mine.

2023-2025