Hello! It’s nice to meet you.

My name is Alicia and I’m a third generation Washingtonian — an elder millennial, daughter to a Vietnam Vet and a poet, and a perpetually overly caffeinated highlighted blonde whose life has been impacted by all the significant events of her generation: 9/11, the DC Sniper, and the collapse of our global financial system just as I was entering the workforce with a liberal arts diploma in hand.

I went out into the world inspired by my idols in Silicon Valley and corporate broadcast radio, tried my hand at entrepreneurship in San Francisco and got cast on British reality TV, spent a few years living in France surrounded by Champagne vineyards and told myself that, should writing and more creative pursuits not make me wildly rich, I could always return home and pursue a stable career with the federal government when I turned 40.

I did, eventually, return home — except now I’m approaching middle age in this stunning microcosm of the world that raised me, where local news is national news is international news, and yet where the local news is rapidly disappearing, and the diversity, values and institutions that shaped me are increasingly under threat.

It’s a world, in other words, where my back-up plan isn’t quite as feasible as it once seemed.

This newsletter — With Love from Washington — is my attempt to make sense of all the above — a project partially inspired by the “government stories” my mother used to tell me in lieu of bedtime stories as a young child. A “government story” might have been about Nixon and Watergate, but it could just as well be about the lives of everyday Washingtonians — stories about civil servants, snarky Style columnists at The Washington Post, or how Aunt Bonnie would get into heated arguments with our next-door neighbor over the development of nuclear test sites in Nevada.

I can’t singlehandedly preserve the Kennedy Center, or the East Wing of the White House, or the Metro Section of The Washington Post. What I can do, though, is preserve part of the memory of what Washington once was along with the emotional truth of what it’s like to live through this moment.

If that’s something that resonates with you, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.