Gwendolyn Sobkowiak | staff writer

I’m from South Oakland. Yes, South Oakland, Pittsburgh. Before you ask, no, I don’t mean I’m just living there while I go to Duquesne. No, I don’t mean I moved there, and it’s been long enough that I call it home.

I literally mean that I grew up on Dawson Street, a 10-minute walk from the Cathedral of Learning, amidst the chaos of drunk Pitt freshmen and 90-year-old Italian couples.

I’ve never really referred to myself as a city girl. I mean, I definitely grew up in a city, but the phrase carries a street-smart, ‘quick in a conflict’ connotation that I’ve never really jived with. I kind of felt like everyone knew what to do if they started getting heckled while walking Downtown. It seems pretty self-explanatory to keep your head up and keep moving.

I have one sister, who’s two years older than I am, and the two of us were never anxious about going around our neighborhood. We walked to the One Stop on Boulevard of the Allies, back before its entire counter space was overtaken by box vapes and 5-hour Energies. It didn’t really feel like I was living in the bustling downtown of a metropolitan district, so I never really put much thought into my city upbringing.

I remember reading an adaptation of one of Aesop’s fables, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” when I was in elementary school. For those of you who haven’t read it, a country mouse is invited away from his tiny matchbox home to visit his cousin mouse in the big city. Being from a simple and peaceful upbringing, the country mouse is intrigued and overwhelmed by the luxuries the city offers. The mice feast upon exotic delicacies and view the teeming landscape from a tall glass-walled building. However, the city offers new and terrifying dangers for the unsuspecting mouse, and he quickly grows sour to the feeling of constant danger. Ultimately, the country mouse learns to value his simple life on the outskirts.

The larger morals were lost on me, valuing simplicity over luxury, not always seeing the other grass as greener, or the high cost that luxury often brings. Instead, I found it odd how anti-city the story sounded.

Sure, the big city is dangerous for little mice, but isn’t the country as well? Didn’t they have farm cats, and even hawks swooping down to feast on them? It felt odd to make the city out to be such a dangerous and horrific place when, to me, it felt just about the same as everywhere else.

It wasn’t until college that I noticed how my friends from the country, or even the suburbs, talked about and viewed the city. It wasn’t that they didn’t like it, but they spoke about it as though it was populated by grotesque body snatchers waiting to accost them on any given street corner. It was a place to be visited, rather than lived in, and most of them ultimately hoped to move back to their suburban paradises after graduation, if not sooner. I felt a growing disdain for the separation that they appeared to put between themselves and the city people.

Are we really that different? Is there something that I wasn’t getting? The longer I’ve spent in college, the more I feel the old fable is true. I mean, of course, the bit about valuing safety over luxury is. But the idea that the places we grow up shape us on a deeper perceptual level, rings true as well. The two mice view the world through different lenses because of the ways their nervous systems have become accustomed to living and what they ultimately value. It’s a bigger distinction than just area code.

Upon closer examination, many of the people I knew who had grown up in the suburbs appeared to be overly sheltered and out of touch with the world beyond their neighborhood. They often viewed things through an “out of sight, out of mind” lens. The problems some people in the city faced, like struggles with affordable housing, underfunded public education or economic inequality, could have been the problems of Martians for as much as it mattered to them.

They often personalize events that have little to do with them because they are unfamiliar with other people behaving without them in mind. When the man Downtown yelled to my friends and me, warning us about the Russian spies invading the city, they talked about it for hours after. They felt as though they had been specially selected to be harassed. They failed to understand or care that this man was experiencing mental health problems and needed help that the city was failing to provide. His words had about as much to do with them as anyone else whom he had spoken to that day.

I have come to understand that the country and city mouse dynamic is alive and well. The country mice view the city as dangerous, and we city mice, in turn, view the suburbs as boring and unremarkable. It’s not that I view the city as some utopia of harmony, or that I’m minimizing the discomfort of people entering a new area. I’m just wrinkling my nose at the idea of seeing a new place and experiencing it with so much disdain.

I’ve found that my friends from outside of the city often think of things like public transportation as grimy and refuse to ride it. Instead of wondering how they can make the city better, they look at it with horror and edge slowly back to their “live, laugh, love” houses and talk about how dirty the homeless people downtown are.

It bums me out to think that their perspective doesn’t imbue them with a greater sense of empathy. Living in the city means meeting people from every walk of life on their varied journeys. The experiences that I have don’t usually make me feel such hate toward other people because most times, people aren’t trying to hurt me with their actions.

Each of us is just busy, trying to go about our days, trying to see our loved ones, trying to get our work done. I genuinely like most of the touch-point interactions I have with the people of Pittsburgh. It’s fun to be a part of a community, especially when you actively put love into it. I feel bad for my country mouse friends and their perspectives of fear with which they approach this new environment. It’s difficult to navigate spaces that we’ve never entered. I just wish that they would do so with a bit more grace.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu