Living Between Coasts: What the East and West Teach About Identity and Belonging
If you’re in a tender season, this reflection gently explores identity shifts, historical references to the layered pasts of the east coast, south, and west. Come in when you’re ready.
FROM THE EAST COAST SOUTH TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: A JOURNEY OF BELONGING
The way I see the coasts, well, I see them as mirrors — one rooted in history, the other reaching toward possibility. Both live inside of me already, even with just one week on the West Coast. In the summer of 2025, my husband, Chris, and I moved from Asheville, North Carolina to Seattle, Washington.
Our dark blue Nissan Rogue was stacked to the brim with trinkets and things to help us establish a home here for just one year, at minimum, and perhaps for a decade or two to come. As we traveled from North Carolina to stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Las Vegas, New Mexico, to Salt Lake City, Utah, to Kennewick, Washington to finally land in Seattle after a long road trip — all I could ponder on were the distinct and stunning differences between the east and West Coast.
RESILIENCE AND STORYTELLING: LESSONS FROM GROWING UP ON THE EAST COAST
The philosophy of the east coast is often steeped in “work hard, earn it, prove it.” Rooted in grit, tradition, and legacy, it has a tenacious spirit to it — direct, fast-paced, witty, sometimes brusque, but deeply loyal once you’re “in”. The people of the east pride themselves on resilience and being “built for the storm” — often while throwing soirées during the gnarliest of hurricanes.
I grew up in Florida, with East Coast humidity, intensity, and the “weather-shapes-you” kind of life. Hurricanes, heat, storms — that’s the stuff that builds in resilience and influences an individual to bear burdens and responsibilities. Sometimes just getting in and out of a 110 degree car in the deep throes of summer was enough to influence you to want to lay down and not get back up for a long while — but you can cook an egg on the asphalt during a July day in Florida, thus, you keep going.
Lineage on the East Coast is important; your name means something, it imprints to you, and your history matters. It’s the home of Ivy League institutions, old cities with bones buried beneath the cobblestone that never should have been, and family legacies that date back to the opening hours of the country. Proximity and density of cities means that many folks are in near constant contact, which breeds friction and fierce community all the same.
That side of life for me — for what I’ve witnessed, honored, ceremoniously embraced and let go — holds a depth for me that’s honest. A sense that the life I grew up with has carried weight and I’m proud of the good, wonderful parts of southern, east coast living. The North East Coast and inland New England holds a winter toughness, fall romanticism, and summer intensity. The South East Coast holds tradition, legacy, grit, honors roots, finds beauty in belonging, and identity shapes and molds easily.
Hospitality is rooted in my bones because of the American south. Storytelling drips from my tongue because it’s a part of my heritage to sit on porches under pink and purple skies, telling tales from our family lore. Resilience is braided into my hair by the climate and the history — sweltering summers, generational trauma (the blunt truth that the lands are coated in the horrors of slavery, segregation, intense poverty, and religious intensity) — and all of it demands a grit from you that gets in your lungs.
My ancestors are scattered from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, the farmlands of Georgia, and the swamps of Florida. There’s poetry in the thunderstorms rolling in wild and fierce, magnolia trees and live oaks with Spanish moss, and church bells dinging while horses graze in the fields of Ocala, Florida — my hometown. The violence that existed in my adolescent neighborhood helped me to have a clear read on survival early on, shaped my frame of reference and wide viewpoints, and ultimately, influenced me to turn my eyes to philanthropic focuses to positively shift society forward. Joy was always waltzing in the same neighborhood, though, with roosters crowing in the early morning and Regional Mexican music played vibrantly for front yard parties every weekend.
The East Coast, especially the South, teaches you to live with contradictions — sweetness and suffering, tradition and longing for change. That duality lives in my work: I honor both what sustains us and what asks to be reimagined.
FROM GOLD RUSH TO SILICON VALLEY: THE WEST’S IDENTITY OF POSSIBILITY
The philosophy of the West Coast is rooted in “flow with it, find yourself, expand.” The West Coast is a place to dabble and wiggle into possibility, openness, reinvention. The West in and of itself has to be mentioned here in as diligent of a way as the east coast south has been defined. The West Coast, right now at least, feels like the place that holds a looser grip on life; that re-aligns itself daily with balance. While The West holds the re-shaping and mythology of The American Dream; on the East Coast this was a dream tied to immigration, hard work, and legacy. You come to Ellis Island, you build something, you pass it down; it was rooted in arrival, belonging, and the aforementioned grit to persevere.
When the frontier opened, the dream shifted from one of survival and industry through hard work to reinvention; from the Gold Rush, Hollywood, Silicon Valley — there was a sense of leaving the land of the East behind you and starting anew. The West redefined the dream of limitless possibility, while much of the Eastern view of it was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” within systems that were already up and running.
Thus, the energy of the West Coast, called to Chris and I to do the same: to redefine our limitless possibilities after achieving so many of our desires in the East and growing up in the South. The East Coast helped roots, survival, lineage, endurance, belonging, tradition, and stability while the West and West Coast called out of us a new sense of story that seemed to be steeped in reinvention, full-color living, and divine self-expression.
Of course, as I found myself in lands I’d visited for holidays, but not for living… I began analyzing, researching, and diving into works and such to understand the culture of the West and the West Coast. The West Coast has the archetypal themes and vibes of easygoing expression, experimental, sometimes less direct, but willing to try on new ways of being — perhaps slightly more than the traditional East Coast (just at a glance). Folks seem to pride themselves on individuality and vision here, being early adopters, and moving with the flow of creativity. While the East Coast steeps in, the West Coast seeps in. The landscape seems to shape the psyche — I found myself lingering in what I’ve mentally buried when rolling through the desert while the oceans and mountains both offered space, expansion, and depth.
Which leads me, finally, to the history that is still seeping in the West — one that I could keenly note just by rolling through aforementioned deserts. I began watching “American Primeval” once we arrived. The title refers to “the Netflix western series, with the title implying that the brutal, unforgiving events of the mid-19th century American West represent the foundational “earliest period” of a violent and wild American society. While “primeval” literally means “very ancient,” the title uses the term to connect the lawless frontier era of the 1850s Utah War with the idea of a raw, fundamental, and unrefined “beginning” of American culture, suggesting a dark and violent origin from which modern society emerged.”
History seeps here, too, and I’d be remiss not to mention it here while I speak of the themes and personality of the West Coast – easygoing, mild weather, innovation, expansion, expression, and a near sixth sense for early adoption.
The West is still offering her layers, and I am eager to receive them, but enjoying the unveiling process.
SEATTLE, SURVIVAL, AND SELF-EXPRESSION: LESSONS IN REINVENTION
I carry the East Coast’s grit in my bones and the West Coast’s expansiveness in my breath. I know what it means to survive heavy seasons, and I know what it takes to reinvent yourself beyond them. My work isn’t theory — it’s a living coastline, the meeting place of resilience and reinvention. This new coast embraced us with open arms, recognizing the bridge between us — that we’ve reimagined ourselves in the East time and time again, and we’re here to do it with her… with Seattle, again.
Inhabiting the present has been saturating my days with long walks before and after work, sometimes for a lunch break because the water calls to me to listen to its waves. We often stare at Lake Washington throughout the day and we watched the Corn Moon rise over the hills, just right of Mercer Island. The boat traffic asks us to notice the easy living — something we enjoyed in the South, under the blazing sun with alligators sunbathing on the banks around us and herons hunting for fish in the swamps.
The skyline rises and falls in living color; not just gray and white and brown, but a varied palette of deep glass blues and greens, earthy brick reds, copper, aqua, white, and on clear days… Mt. Rainier and nature’s ultimate backdrop contextualizes it all. The shipyards host hundreds of shipping containers, pickling the views with orange and red, while the city buses are a royal purple reminiscent of the saturation of the same color in New Orleans.
Reinvention is a way of life; not a one-time speckle in our days, but a sturdy spiral that asks us to walk up the steps we can’t fully see. On the East Coast, we laid a few businesses to rest, and on the West Coast, I am fully slipping into the comfort of being a lifestyle designer, coach, speaker, and soon-to-be author.
There is a sense of survival I left back East that holds the olden days of my youth as it was and there’s a clarity that’s crystalized about our next season on the West Coast that everything feels prismatic. Everything around me is saturated by the desires I’m allowing to both take root as deeply as the pines and be as fluid as the waves in Lake Washington.
From entangled relationships to sovereign clarity, to attachment loops to inhabited boundaries, from proving and performing traditions to owning the depth of new adoptions — this side of America has beckoned us to the promise of possibility and the pursuit of our own inhabited enoughness.
HONORING ROOTS, CHOOSING HORIZONS: THE HEART OF HARMONIOUS LIVING
The coastline I carry isn’t just geographical — it’s personal. East Coast survival still lives in my bones; West Coast reinvention fills my lungs. Together, they’ve taught me that enoughness is not found in performance, but in inhabiting both roots and horizon.
Here’s what I know: resilience and reinvention don’t cancel each other out. They belong together. You get to keep the roots that steadied you and say yes to the new horizon. That’s the heart of my group program — learning to live in that meeting place. If that’s what you’re craving, I’d love to have you join us. If you’re in the midst of your own identity shifts, seeking to be in a room full of leaders who have had many of their own — this is for you.
My hope is that you, too, feel less pressure to pick one identity, one role, one coast — and more freedom to inhabit your contradictions.
I hold the traumas of both coasts in my awareness — the brutality buried in the South’s soil and the mythologized promises of the West. My vision isn’t to bypass that history, but to live differently because of it: to create spaces where survival no longer has to be the only story, where reinvention doesn’t mean leaving the past behind but weaving it into a more whole future. That’s what I hope for in my own move West — and it’s the heart of The Harmonious Living Group Program: building lives that honor our roots while choosing a more expansive, truthful future.
Media Links:
Images used throughout the article can be found here from Pinterest; other images were sourced from Canva. Collage template is by Xanthe Appleyard.
“‘American Primeval’: What Does ‘Primeval’ Mean and How Does It Apply to the Netflix Series?” Yahoo Entertainment, 8 Mar. 2024, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/american-primeval-does-primeval-mean-060918508.html.
Newman, Jason. “‘American Primeval’: The Brutal History Behind Netflix’s Violent Frontier Story.” The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Mar. 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/american-primeval-brutal-history-violence-real-story-1236112619/.
