I’m still subscribed to my former home’s community on NextDoor. Partially, because it slipped through the cracks and I neglected to address it after I had moved out, but also in part because it’s turned into this inadvertent source of amusement, fascination and a constant reminder of how glad I am to not live in the community anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the shit out of my old house. The house itself was great, and if it were remotely possible to uproot homes, and plop them down onto other places like Sim City, I totally would. It’s just that it just happened to exist in a community that went in completely the wrong direction from where I had hoped it would.
Needless to say, based on shit I read on NextDoor on nearly a daily basis, the neighborhood has progressively been getting worse since I moved out. And after every single I read about disgruntled residents of my old community, and all the neighboring communities dealing with some unfortunate issues on too often of a basis, all I can do is shake my head and take a huge sigh of relief.
Like, the first few weeks of life after the move, I was admittedly in a state of unease at the general change in life. But as the transition eased, and the NextDoor notifications continued to trickle in, with stories of break-ins, shared security cam recordings of suspicious activity, and oh yeah a shooting incident, all melancholy feelings were gone and completely replaced with pure, unadulterated relief.
Residents airing out their grievances, passively-aggressively shaming behaviors they don’t agree with, and my favorite, the rant featured above, are daily occurrences on NextDoor now, and it’s like a trainwreck that I can enjoy even more, now that I’m but a mere bystander, and not a fellow resident.
I never wanted to admit it while living there, but god damn my house was in the hood. Nobody ever wants to admit that unfortunate distinction.
Behind the litany of beige boxes, the quaint little gazebo up front, and the flowers in the public areas, was a community full of shady characters, law-breakers, thieves among us, and just an undesirable place to live. Motherfuckers who let their dogs roam free and shit wherever they want without getting picked up after, children all growing up around the wrong crowds with parents that don’t raise them well, and constant agitations like teenagers on dirt bikes, shit heads throwing their trash wherever they want, and people driving too fast in the neighborhood.
I denied all this bullshit as long as I could, as to not make me feel like I was drowning in the despair of living a reality inside of a hood, but now that I’m free from it, I can’t not feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Seriously, every time a NextDoor notification comes in, and the headline is a succinct all-caps blurb like BREAK IN ALERT or SHOOTING, my I can feel my pupils dilate, my eyes widen, and my jaw drop a little bit at the incredulous way the neighborhood continues to go downhill. I feel bad for all the people on NextDoor who are trying their damnedest to communicate and create a community, because undoubtedly the bad behaving people of the hood are mostly likely not on, and don’t care about what their actions are doing.
But I’m just glad none of it is my problem anymore. Not a day goes by where I don’t say that I’m relieved to not be living in the hood anymore, and as whatever god as my witness, I hope that it never happens again.
