Anyone who lived in Nashville in 2010 knows exactly where they were this weekend.

Me? I was sitting at home watching the storm destroy the city live on TV, comfortable in the fact I was far removed from the damage. Only a few short hours later I was being evacuated. Not only from my house and the neighborhood I love, but from life as I knew it until that point. It would be 4 days before I realized it though.

Over the last half decade people always ask how bad it must've sucked to lose everything you own. Honestly though, that wasn't the worst part. The worst was the 96 hours of not knowing. The 96 hours of having no idea if your home was one of the few spared or one of the many completely devastated. Mine was of course one of the latter.

The way the city pulled together in the aftermath made dealing with the actual loss a piece of cake compared to the days prior. It still makes me beam with pride today. My street alone looked more like Baghdad than suburbia, but next to the demolition and debris were hundreds of people just wanting to help. Whatever "help" meant at the moment, someone was there offering it. My neighbors, many of whom I'd never met, suddenly became extra sets of hands or just a shoulder to lean on. Black and white, young and old, hipster and whatever the opposite of hipster is, all working together to do what had to be done. Long before the New York Times called us "The It City" or ABC decided to make a soap opera about us, Nashville proved we're the greatest city on the planet.

While it may have turned into a charity t-shirt and eventually a meme, in May 2010 "We Are Nashville" meant more than anyone who wasn't a part of it could ever understand.