Macon, Georgia

How to love a place in spite of itself (and still work to make it better)

Back in March, I met Christele Parham and her husband Ariane at a workshop designed to train and learn from organizations like Macon Black Tech. During her presentation to the rest of the cohort, Christele pitched Macon as the next startup hub in the South and poetically described her love of the relatively small town. “If you’re ever in Macon,” she told me after the training was done, “we’d love to have you!”

I knew I’d be back through Atlanta sometime in the future for work, but Macon wasn’t exactly at the top of my travel plans. What’s the big deal? Why did she have so much love for a place she wasn’t even from? I wanted to find out, so I took her up on her offer and drove down to Macon in July.

One element of my job involves connecting with and training entrepreneurial support organizations like accelerators, incubators, and innovation hubs. It’s the intersection where the startup world meets economic development at the question: “how can we attract entrepreneurs to this place and help them grow their startups here, in our special city when they could go any place else?” You need things like co-working spaces, public-private partnerships, access to mentorship and investment, tax incentives, a network of other entrepreneurs, affordable housing, and, quite importantly, a vibe worth moving to.

All of the free resources and incentives in the world aren’t enough to make a decision like where to move and start your business. If that were the case, everyone looking to start a business right now should move to Orlando, Florida.¹ Making decisions like where to build the foundation of your company based purely on logic likely won’t keep those businesses in the same place for very long. There needs to be something else pulling them - the startups, the founders, the employees, etc – to that place; it’s something you can’t quite put into words or reason, but you can feel it in your body.

A mentor and former boss of mine used to explain this work not as some corporate, cut-and-paste strategy of economic development, but rather: topophilia, or the bond between a person and a place.

Topophilia is the sense that you belong somewhere, that your sense of self is tied to where you physically are, and that the way you love that place feels unable to be replicated anywhere else. You are committed to being there and want everyone to be there with you. You can complain about it all the time, but that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped loving it.

Economic development and topophilia can have an extremely delicate relationship. Economic development is growth and improvement; topophilia is loving a place in spite of itself. Economic development is a new, accessible, well-lit bar with cute drinks that cost you $15 a piece; topophilia is loving the old shitty bar, even if you had to leave it with pepper spray in your hand. They’re not always at odds but it’s easy for one to eclipse the other.

Macon wasn’t exactly at the top of my list of places to visit in the van. The middle of July is not the right time to visit Georgia, let alone in a van without air conditioning. I hadn’t spent much time in the South in the van except to work on the build with my dad. It’s not like I’d been avoiding visiting, but after spending nearly 30 years in the same region, why would I choose to be there when I could be anywhere?

Christele met me in the parking lot of the Tubman Museum, right next to a bright, beautiful mural of the Ocmulgee River at sunset that read: WELCOME TO MACON. Standing at 5 foot nothing with the biggest smile in the world, Christele is an absolute powerhouse: it didn’t surprise me at all when she stopped to talk to every other person on the street, all of whom she knew on a first-name basis. She led me to the main intersection in the town of just over 157,000 people to set me up at a co-working space for the rest of the day.

Downtown Macon surprised me with how busy a mid-sized downtown district could be in the middle of the week. With its charming old-school storefronts, converted mixed-use apartment buildings, and well-maintained pedestrian patterns, the city capitalizes on its history instead of knocking down old structures to make room for chrome counterparts.

“Wow, downtown is really something, huh?” I asked her.

“When I first moved here, everything downtown used to close at 9, even on the weekends,” she said. “The work from the past couple of years – we’ve really seen it blossom. People are starting to feel more welcome.”

I felt that almost immediately. Even in the July heat and humidity, being in Macon felt easy, like staying at an old friend’s house and naturally knowing where they keep the coffee mugs and extra towels. I relaxed my default clenched jaw, allowing an increasingly noticeable drawl to fall out of me.

After a few meetings, Christele invited me to meet with a few friends of hers at a coffee shop. I couldn’t help myself and ordered a frozen peach sweet tea. When in Rome.

We sat with two of her friends from Macon, Erin, and Stephanie, and enjoyed our quintessentially Southern drinks. The three women had a naturally quick pace in their conversation filled with laughs, teasing, and inside jokes; to be totally honest, when you’ve been alone in a van for a while, it feels nice to be included in conversations, even if you’re on the outside of it. (My best party trick for conversations like these is the casually bring up astrology and see if anyone takes the bait to ask for a reading — the truth is, everyone loves to talk about themselves, and astrology is a convenient vehicle to do that.)

After some time of talking about new TV shows we liked, drama in the town that I couldn’t keep up with, astrology birth charts, and the joys of trashy novels, the conversation turned to the van.

The typical procedural questions were asked first: When did you start? How do you shower? How do you deal with the heat in the summer? These questions are simple enough to answer and often have a straightforward response. Easy ask, easy answer.

Erin was bubbly and charismatic and easily popped from one topic to the next: a classic Libra. Stephanie, while also charismatic, had a demeanor about her that made me want to sit up straight in my seat. That made sense for a college professor; it made even more sense for a Scorpio.

Our conversation then moved beyond logistics and into motive, plans, and scope. This is also practiced on my part: I can easily explain the thought process of how I ended up there and what specific goals I have in mind like visiting National Parks or hitting a year in the van. That’s not to say that every conversation is scripted, but these are questions I’ve had to answer over and over again both for myself and for others. Hell, I’ve written some of these answers before; none of this is hard to explain.

But in the midst of the easy, casual line of questioning, Stephanie turned to me and locked eyes before asking me a question with a decidedly different tone: “so, what is it you’re running from?”

There was a slight pause from the group to assess if she was being serious or not.

“You can’t just ask her that!” Erin interjected, giggling.

Christele and Erin laughed that kind of uncomfortable laugh meant to ease the tension and shrugged it off with “you don’t have to answer that, she’s just being nosy.”

But Stephanie did not use the open opportunity to rephrase or clarify her question with some softer intonation. She held my eye contact indicating to me that she did in fact expect a genuine response.

I didn’t balk or interpret her question as theoretical. I knew she intended me to answer. I just didn’t know what to say.

“Well,” I said slowly, “I have a list of things I want to do, not run from. I guess it’s more about chasing than being chased.”

She didn’t miss a beat: “So then, what are you chasing?”

Another unrehearsed pause from me.

“National Parks, solitude, new experiences, independence; lots of things, I think. I guess.” I answered, slightly disappointed in my own surface-level response.

“Plus,” Erin added, “you don’t have to be doing anything! It sounds fun!”

Christele joined with “right, and did you know we’re probably getting a National Park here soon in Macon? It’s going to be so cool — “

“How will you know when you’re done chasing?”

Despite feeling a bit dumbfounded by my own thoughtlessness, I appreciated her intensity. It felt less like I was being put on the spot and more that I was being taken seriously. But I knew I wouldn’t have a better answer for her yet. For the sake of conversational courtesy and, frankly, discomfort in my own inability to answer, I gave up the response.

“I guess I’ll just have to wait to find that out,” I concluded finally.

She smiled softly, though she, too, seemed slightly disappointed in my lack of an answer. Instead, she left the question lingering in the air for me to come back to on my own time before changing the subject: “if you do write a book, you should make it smutty. People eat that shit up. Have you seen the episode of How to Build a Sex Room on Netflix about building a sex van?”

After a lengthy discussion about how impractical a sex swing in a van would be, we all parted ways. I still don’t have an answer to her original question, “what are you running from?” I would let it go if I thought there just was no good answer, but I know that there is.

That evening, Christele and I met downtown for dinner; I was again taken aback by how excited the city seemed on a weekday evening. I couldn’t even find parking on the main few streets in town by the restaurant without circling a few times. Macon was one of the many small cities that saw an influx of residents during the pandemic, but unlike similarly-sized towns out West like Billings or Boise, Macon actually wants new people to come. You could see that warm invitation in the form of blunt, city-sanctioned initiatives like adding string lights to the town “square” to offer safer walking conditions - economic development - but more importantly, you can also see it in the form of easy conversations you have with people who genuinely love being there and want you to be there too - topophilia. String lights don’t make people love a place.

Christele and I spent dinner talking about relationships, careers, politics, and her topophilia for Macon, a place she was neither born nor raised but rather chose to be. Of course, the choice wasn’t in a vacuum.

“When Ariane and I were dating at first, about eight years ago, he would visit South Florida and I would visit Macon,” she told me. “It was so ironic that I loved Macon so much because people would want to come to Florida all the time. No one was planning vacations to visit Macon.”

“Okay but other than Ariane, how did you… you know, actually, make friends here? What do you do?” I asked her.

She told me about her former blog, “Life in Macon.” “I started going to community events and blogging about what was going on in the city. I just got tired of people saying there’s nothing to do here.”

Loving a place because we feel an innate pull to it is emotional; dedicating time, energy, and commitment to a place because we want to make it even better is practical. Our communities need both to truly thrive. When we over-index on economic development, we end up with the soulless suburbs; when we lean too far into topophilia, towns slowly die with the people that love them. 

“That’s an aspect of community we don’t talk about enough: It takes time to build,” Christele continued. “I’ve been here for eight years. I never thought I’d be this person as an introvert, but the ability to see people. I didn’t think this would be my life, this like Hart of Dixie kind of small town taking care of each other.”

She told me about how the people in Macon look out for each other; how she can walk into a restaurant and the hostess will tell her that so-and-so just stopped by and said hi to her; how when she’s sick, people bring her soup and when she’s healthy, people like seeing her out.

When I started living in the van, all I wanted was unlimited, completely independent choice: the choice of where to be, who to be with, when to go, and how long to stay. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of a decade feeling stuck. There are no external factors to my choices: just me, living every day how I choose, in perpetuity.

But there are moments of too many options when the paradox of choice sets in, and you end up being unable to decide anything. When every single day is a never-ending series of choices, you do actually have to decide everything, independently, all of the time. Unmitigated freedom will end up costing you your sanity from time to time. At a certain point, what are you chasing? More freedom? 

Christele built not only a business but a social structure in Macon. It helped to find her people, of course, which came with time, but I don’t have a single doubt that she could have built a life anywhere she went. The choice of where was somewhat ancillary, and yet, now core to her sense of self. It was both natural and manufactured.

After dinner, we stopped at one of the city’s new photo booths and lightly scoffed at the idea of paying $5 for four photos together. “Who is paying for this?” she asked half-jokingly. We made fun of the gentrifying sidewalk while admitting it was nice to walk alone at night downtown.

As we concluded the day and walked back to the van, I caught my accent sinking even further into a soft, melodic drawl. I liked hearing my voice slip into something more comfortable in response to the conversations around me. I liked the way my hair curled and bounced in the humidity, unlike the limp waves I’d become begrudgingly accepted to out West. I liked the way people chatted with strangers as if they were old friends and how people cared about each other’s lives, even if it veered into small-town gossip from time to time. 

It can be difficult to defend my desire to end up back in the South, especially when every other option in the country is available to me. But I couldn’t deny my own topophilia for being back - my accent felt it, my hair felt it, and I felt it. It was close to the feeling Christele had coming to Macon for the first time: a connection to a place that no amount of string lights or photo booths can facilitate for you.

1. https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/2281