I’m on the Eastern Seaboard for the week, which begs the question: What is the Eastern Seaboard?* This is a term I should know, especially as I write it now into a sentence, but I don’t. Not really. I use the term with the confidence I might use a table saw, but I use it nonetheless. This one day might result in cutting a finger off, but for now, I suppose I risk eye rolls.

I’m on the Eastern Seaboard for the week, and I’ll say it till it falls apart. More specifically, I’m on a cape in New Jersey. I say “on” here instead of “in” because I’ve been told that by saying “in,” I have sewn a bright red “T” on my shirt, inviting public shaming for the biggest sin of all: being a Tourist.

This information I take eagerly.

The fear of being seen as a Tourist is something that’s plagued me since I was six, visions of fanny packs and bucket hats swirling in my head. Hand in hand with visiting grandparents in my childhood town of Colonial Williamsburg, I knew the gravity of what I faced (the risk of looking like a middle-aged cartoon scratching my balding head with a Huh? in a thought bubble above me) and made sure not to enjoy or be surprised by anything lest I be taken for a Tourist, instead affecting boredom and annoyance for the day.

Maybe it was the fear of seeming out of place or the fear of so desperately relying on something—or someone— else, but I made it the better part of my life’s mission to look like I knew what I was doing. Chalk it up to being a military kid or being a child of parents who live in wonder of the world and I in mindless opposition to them.

I know that I’m not alone in this. We all at times pretend to know more than we do, be more comfortable than we are. That whole fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. I remember, in the beginning stages of my relationship, asking my boyfriend if he knew Petty Cash (a restaurant in LA that makes my favorite nachos). He replied, “I don’t really listen to them, but I’ve heard of them.” This made me laugh and also love him.

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This behavior, in small doses and when caught in the act, can be cute (see anecdote above). It’s endearing when someone is trying to impress you and you can see right through it, reminiscent of those Jimmy Kimmel videos of kids on the street answering questions about taxes and presidents.

But when that desire is internalized, that desire to appear so unlike a Tourist of life, you—or I, more accurately—become something even worse than a Tourist. You (sorry—I!) become boring. There is nothing quite as dull as watching someone seemingly bored by life. The most compelling thing of all? Watching someone moved by it.

I remember realizing this a decade ago as I fell in love with the way a friend was excited by everything. SpaghettiOs? The best thing ever—all this flavor in one can?! SpaghettiOs with tiny hot dogs? Are you KIDDING? What could be better?

Like a dog, she might squeal and hug your legs after you’d only just walked outside to take out the trash. She was freely surprised and delighted, and that was and still is one of my favorite things about her. Her excitement made me excited—about cheese quesadillas, about everything.

As an immensely (internally) curious person, I had been fighting for years the desire to let myself notice things in public. At 19, I longed to stare, chin to the sky, up the length of the tallest buildings in New York, but I wouldn’t let myself. God forbid someone think I’m not a local, as if they couldn’t tell by every other thing about me. Ice in my drink on a hot day in Europe? That, too, would give me away. Because, yes, it is the ice-ordering that would give away my American-ness and not my fumbled Spanish or American accent.

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, wrote in her poem “Sometimes” instructions for living a life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

And Mary Oliver, like my aforementioned friend, truly did seem to be astonished by everything. Her poems are alive with awe and wonder at blades of grass and bird feathers. And what a gift it is that that astonishment lives on for us to experience.

As a teenager, I thought that showing astonishment was to admit my naivete—my youth—at a time when I wanted nothing more than to be an adult. Surprise and wonder felt embarrassing, feelings to be thought or written in a journal but never shown, never said. What silly rules we create for ourselves.

I’ve been unlearning this tendency for years now, increasingly eager to say things like, “What is the difference between scotch and whiskey?” or “I don’t know how to play Poker” and “How do you get rid of hiccups?” I even might admit that I don’t know if the right preposition is “in” or “on” when discussing a cape or the Eastern Seaboard. And why not “at?”

For now, you can find me in the Victorian town of Cape May, losing my balance on a bike because I’m admiring too closely the pastel, ornamented houses around me. Or maybe, if not there, on the screened-in porch, breathing in the last of August’s sweet, heavy air, learning from a family who knows so much about this town and its history, its shortcuts and secrets. This place where I am just a Tourist, committing again and again what was once most humiliating faux paus in my adolescent mind, looking up directions while standing on the corner of a busy intersection.

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*I have since Googled the Eastern Seaboard and see that the Eastern Seaboard is, in fact, just a bourgeois way to say the East Coast, popular with novelists and those with a Transatlantic accent.