When you have the political, religious, and social beliefs I have, viewing Nashville and more specifically, Tennessee, with a negative lens is easy. It’s also easy when I see how the explosion of tourism over the last few years has changed the downtown I used to know. Sometimes to get a clear view of a situation, you must take a step back. In this case, it took me physically leaving to see what Nashville has given me.
I’ve lived outside of that world for over 5 years now and lately, I’ve found myself reminiscing about what exactly Nashville means to me. Not what it is or even what it used to be, but how it shaped me. This may not be interesting to anyone else. But I find it fascinating to look back over 14 years at all the small, seemingly unrelated decisions that have led to where and who I am today.
I can trace almost everything about my life today back to a single moment. Sometime in the summer of 2008, I decided to start running. It was an odd choice considering I had no friends who were runners and I had been a smoker for years. I lived in Hermitage, TN at the time so most of my running was done on the Stones River Greenway. After you get a mile or 2 down the path there is an absolutely ridiculous hill that you climb for no good reason since as soon as you reach the top you run right back down again.
It was on the way up one side of that hill, on an especially hot, muggy Nashville summer day that I remember thinking “I have to either stop running or stop smoking. These 2 things cannot coexist.” I didn’t quit completely for another year and a half, but running was what started my process of quitting.
Since none of my friends were runners I went in search of a community where I could get advice and encouragement. I found that on a site called RunningAhead that let me track my run stats and chat with others. It’s where someone reminded me to get a tetanus shot after I tripped over a jagged metal pole Metro Public Works left sticking up out of a sidewalk. It’s where I got roasted (rightfully so) for claiming a story about Will Ferrell running a marathon wasn’t real because he didn’t “look like a runner”.
It’s also where I saw a thread that convinced me to re-sign up for Twitter since a lot of other runners were there. I didn’t end up using Twitter for anything related to running, but it’s where I made connections that changed my life. The first I remember was Dani (@chaoskitten82) who invited me to a TweetUp at a bar in downtown Nashville.
I’m not exactly an outgoing person so that was a terrifying event for me, but I met her and she introduced me to lots of people. I remember meeting Kate O’Neill, Dave Delaney, and many other influential people in the Nashville tech scene. My list of followers on Twitter grew exponentially after that event and I was interacting with so many new nerd friends!
Not long after that, I saw a tweet calling for volunteers for an event called PodCamp and I signed up. I spent a lot of evenings meeting with Lucas Hendrickson, Chuck Bryant, Courtenay Rogers, and others planning that event. As soon as that one was over I volunteered for its companion event BarCamp. I met so many smart, amazing people through my years working in various roles for those events. I met even more through networking events like the Centresource mixer, Nashcocktail, and others.
I also met friends of friends through those events, and eventually ended up dating one of them. A few hours before that first date was the last time I smoked a cigarette. At the time my “crutch” was that I only smoked when I drank and was convinced I couldn’t stop that. But that night I didn’t even think about smoking once despite having a couple of drinks on the date. I still have my last pack of Camels that has had 1 cigarette left in it since that day. A year later that would turn out to be very significant.
That girl invited me to a small happy hour group of friends that provided lots of great memories. Gatlinburg cabin trips sponsored by Yazoo Brewery, pontoon boat days, and so much more. By 2011 we were no longer dating, but I was still hanging out with that same group of friends. On October 28th, 2011 I walked into our usual Friday happy hour spot and noticed a new face.
Erin was gorgeous, had beautiful curly hair, and was still wearing the sexy Halloween costume she had worn to work that day. She struck up a conversation with me and we talked for most of the night. We had both been raised by conservative, religious families so we bonded over all the “classic” movies we had never seen. Later I would find out if I had lit up a cigarette she wouldn’t have been interested in me. But I had already quit smoking, so that night she sent me a Twitter DM with her number “just in case I wanted it”.
Not long after we started dating I escaped a job I hated and went to work for a startup with Chuck who I had met through volunteering with PodCamp and BarCamp. About a year and a half later I had coffee with another friend, Jacques, who I had met previously through tech networking events. He connected me with a company that was hiring. Nearly 2 years after I first met Erin at that happy hour meetup, we were in Texas where I proposed. And one day later I got a job offer from the company Jacques had connected me with.
The next month we got married, bought a house, and I started that new job with Thrive Marketing (now TechnologyAdvice). If you’re going to go through the stress of getting married, buying your first house, and starting a new job, why not do all of them in the same month?! That job turned into 5 amazing years that helped me grow as a developer and provided the freedom and financial support we needed to make our move to the PNW in 2016.
I have so many memories from an awesome tech community, made connections I still have to this day, am happily married to my best friend, live across the country, helped raise an amazing kid, love the outdoors, and even climbed a mountain. It’s all a chain reaction from when I decided to start running 14 years ago. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been living in Nashville. Regardless of where I live it will always be the city that made me.