The Skyscrapers That Held Me: What Philadelphia Gave Me That No One Else Could

I had never lived anywhere as long as I lived in Philadelphia—seventeen years. My childhood was a blur of addresses—from Pennsylvania to two Texas cities, then back to new Pennsylvania towns every few years. Safety was never stable. Home was provisional. Even as a child, I felt displaced, like a tiny boat that never found a harbor. When we moved, my body went along, but my heart lagged behind, still scanning the old corners of a room and aching for the smell of the previous kitchen or the shape and color of the previous yard.

Before I moved to Philadelphia, my sense of self depended entirely on who surrounded me. When no one was there, I felt myself vanish, becoming disembodied and boundless. The combination of skyscrapers and people changed that. The sheer magnitude of the city—with its omnipresent crowds, ubiquitous glass, and nonstop movement—gave me proof of existence. Even alone in a coffee shop or reading on a park bench, I could feel my edges. I existed because everything around me vibrated with life.

Part of the reason I never developed a strong sense of self is that I was born into a lineage of unmirrored people. My mother was birthed by stress itself—raised in a large family where attention was scarce, where everyone did the best they could but tenderness was rationed thin. She lived in her head: analytical, hardworking, intelligent—but not embodied. She loved me dearly, but I felt like one of those baby monkeys in Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments—fed, cared for, even protected, but without the warmth of a soft body to cling to. She was the wire mother: sturdy, reliable, doing everything right, but unable to offer the soothing presence that says, You’re here, I’m here, and you are safe in my arms. My father, too, came from arrested development—a man who remained a boy, still trying to meet the needs of his younger self, the one who had been abandoned by his own father and coddled by a mother living in survival. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one was given what they needed, so no one knew how to give it. The result was that I came into the world unseen, unmirrored, and uncontained.

In self-psychology, they call this mirroring—when a child’s identity takes shape based on how caregivers reflect it back. Without it, the self can feel diffuse, scattered, hungry for structure. I was hungry for decades without knowing what for.

When I arrived in Philadelphia at twenty-five, the city itself began to hold me. The skyscrapers became my sanctum. Their glass steadied me when I couldn’t steady myself. Their permanence gave me continuity. They created a sense of containment that no home or family system ever had.

There’s a story Joan Parisi Wilcox once shared in our Andean mysticism class that I’ve never forgotten. She recounted a moment from author John Perkins: a paqo, a shamanic priest from the Andes, visited New York City with him. The paqo walked up to a massive apartment building, placed his hands on the bricks, and pressed his ear to the wall as though listening for a heartbeat. Then he said the spirit of the building was lonely. The people who lived there didn’t think about it, didn’t thank it, didn’t recognize it as a being.

That story validated what I’d sensed all my life: buildings are alive. They keep us warm and dry, hold our dreams, give us refuge, witness our breakdowns, and delight in our laughter. They become colleagues, sometimes family. When I worked in a small office on the ninth floor of a high-rise on Walnut Street, I often greeted the walls with a soft touch before starting my therapy sessions. Those walls had heard hundreds of stories. They held me while I held others. When I felt stuck in life or unsure how to overcome a challenge, I’d stare out the window at the skyline, the Liberty Place spires catching the day’s last light like tuning forks. From that view, I received new ideas and inspiration.

A man I once dated told me he couldn’t understand my love for the city. To him, skyscrapers were patriarchal monuments, disconnected from the earth. But I’ve always felt their roots. They rise because they’re grounded. Their foundations reach as deep as their crowns stretch high. They lifted me out of smallness. They taught me that reaching is a form of devotion to the ground strong enough to support such an ascent.

I know little about architectural terms—Gothic, Federal, Georgian. But I know how buildings make me feel. Driving down the Schuylkill Expressway with jazz or blues thrumming through the speakers, I’d watch the skyline shift color: fog-silver in November, diamond-blue in January, honey-gold in July. The scrolling ticker on the PECO Building wishing Happy Holidays always felt like a wink from the city herself.

My apartment at 11th and Spruce was the longest I ever lived anywhere: six and a half years. Four stories of brick, seven moss-slicked steps leading to black double doors, a buzzer that jolted residents’ nerves, and three tall windows overlooking the tree-lined street. I painted the walls blood red and dangled my feet out those windows during thunderstorms, watching people rush toward Broad Street to celebrate playoff victories. Sunlight poured into my 525-square-foot sanctuary like benediction. That building cried and celebrated with me. Within its walls, I wept over my first cat’s passing, grieved ended relationships, blew up balloons for political fundraisers, rolled out games of Twister, held women’s circles, practiced my graduation speech pretending I was Michelle Obama, and celebrated passed tests and new jobs.

Philadelphia and I practiced a kind of ayni—the Andean principle of sacred reciprocity, of giving and receiving in right relationship. I offered her my courage, my song, my dance, my endless curiosity. I built snowmen along Spruce Street, sang kirtan in yoga studios, spun barefoot in dance studios, taught English to new immigrants at the Nationalities Service Center, practiced French in sunlit classrooms at the Alliance Française, wandered through theaters and galleries, tasted food from every continent. I gave her my passion, my effort to become whole. She returned everything in kind—community, rhythm, vitality, a pulse that matched my own. She taught me humanity.

Last spring, on the edge of another transformation—from healer to storyteller—I returned. Walking down Broad Street toward the Suzanne Roberts Theatre for a BalletX show, I caught my reflection in the glass of an office tower. The woman looking back was softer, fuller, but radiant. Years ago, I’d have checked my reflection for approval—hair, clothes, posture. This time I saw the light coming from me. Confidence had replaced the need to prove. Fear had loosened its grip. I met her eyes and thought, You made it.

The same day, across from my old office at 1518 Walnut, I picked up a small stone and held it in my palm. It became my next kulla, or medicine stone, in my misha, or medicine bundle—a living piece of Philadelphia I could carry forward for creativity and inspiration. The city has always been feminine to me—chaotic, generative, wild, endlessly creating order out of disorder. Yes, there were years when the litter and graffiti overwhelmed me, but that neglect belonged to those who couldn’t see her, not to her. She gives so much. This stone carries her pulse—the hum of subways, the camaraderie of strangers, the shimmer of sunlight on glass.

In the Andean path, we speak of mesas, bundles built stone by stone. Each kulla carries the essence of a place that has transformed us. Looking back, my years in Philadelphia were my mesa. Each building, each street, each reflection in glass became a stone in the bundle of my becoming. The city that once contained me taught me how to hold myself. The skyscrapers that steadied me gave me a sense of self sturdy enough to dissolve again, sturdy enough to risk another transformation.

Now, as I shift from healer to storyteller, I can feel her blessing me from afar by reminding me who I am when I return. Philadelphia is gritty, radiant, and real—a teacher disguised as a city. She honors difference, celebrates the messy and the emergent, and makes space for the wounded and the wild. That kind of authenticity healed something in me that therapy never could.

The paqo in Joan Parisi Wilcox’s story once pressed his ear to a building and heard loneliness. When I press my inner ear to Philadelphia, I hear a steady hum—a chorus of lives woven together, a living ayni. I gave my energy to the city, and she gave hers to me. We shaped each other.

What remains now is remembrance. Even when everything external shifts, the gifts we’ve gathered from places, people, and experiences live on in our mesas, in our bodies, in our stories. We don’t lose them. We become them.