I lived in Washington, D.C., for five years. I worked there. I walked the streets every day. And every single day, without fail, there was a moment that stopped me. Sometimes it was the Capitol dome catching the light on a clear morning. Sometimes it was the White House lit up at night, glowing against the dark sky like something permanent and sure. Sometimes it was just turning a corner and finding myself face to face with a monument I had walked past a hundred times, feeling it land differently that day.
The city did something to me every time. It reminded me what we were part of. What all of it was for. The buildings, the museums, the memorials, the weight of the names carved into stone. I have never been able to fully describe the feeling I carried there. I never had to, because anyone who has spent real time in that city knows exactly what I mean.
I went back to DC this month for a Chamberlain Network Fellows meeting. It was the first time the city did not invoke that feeling.
Something essential was gone
What I felt instead when I looked at that skyline was something heavier. The fencing. The military presence. The security that does not say protection anymore. It says something else now, something harder and colder. The physical landscape of that city has been marked in ways that are impossible to unsee once you have seen them.
For someone who spent five years loving that city the way I loved it, walking those streets the way I walked them, feeling what I felt every morning on my way downtown, it was like visiting a place that used to be home and finding that something essential had been removed from it.
I carried that weight the whole trip without fully understanding what it was. I kept pushing past it. Grateful to be there. Grateful to be doing the work. Grateful for the room we were sitting in together.
I want to be honest; I was not sure I had anything left in the tank for this work when I boarded the plane to come to the meeting. My health has taken things from me. The last few years have taken things from me in ways I did not see coming and did not choose. And then that city felt different too, heavier than I remembered, like one more thing that had been quietly changed while I was not looking.
Where I found it
It was not until I sat down at the gate on my way home, with my bag at my feet and my flight delayed, that hope finally surfaced and I understood.
The feeling I had been looking for in that city all week, that feeling of pride and possibility and being part of something larger than myself, I had felt it. Not from the buildings or the monuments or the dome lit up against the sky.
I felt it from the people in that room.
From the conversations that went too long and nobody wanted to stop. From watching veterans who came from different places and different backgrounds find each other through the same stubborn, unshakeable belief that this country is worth fighting for. From being reminded, without anyone having to say it out loud, that the work does not live in the marble and the stone. It lives in the people willing to carry it.
That is what happens when veterans come together. We spent our service learning that nothing that matters gets done alone. Somewhere after the uniform comes off, it is easy to forget that. A room like that one does not let you.
The city felt different this trip. Smaller somehow. Heavier.
But being with that group felt like something I had not felt in a long time. It felt like what Washington used to feel like on those mornings walking to work, when the dome would catch the light and I would think: this is real, this matters, I am part of something.
They gave that back to me. I did not know how much I needed it until I was sitting at that gate trying to figure out why I felt both emptied out and fuller than I had in years.
Now I know.