lost and found

It has been raining hard in SF over the past couple of weeks. I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks, but I’ve heard from my coworkers that it’s the most rain they have ever seen. Thankfully, I live on the 21st floor, so I don’t have to worry about the rain, comfortably sipping decaf green tea in my bed while listening to some EDM playlist Spotify shuffled.

I have written an essay on my birthday every now and then for the past couple of years. No matter how much I try to avoid it, there’s something about my birthday that just forces me to confront my reality and judge myself for how I have been for the past year. I remember one post distinctly — “another birthday, another question” — I wrote in a London cafe in the first weeks of studying abroad. I had just broke up with my girlfriend at the time, and I was reading The Myth of Sisyphus and contemplating why I put in the effort to remain alive. It was a different time and a difficult time. It’s hard for me to even access the personality I had back then. I wrote a lot, so effortlessly in a manner in which I find hard to believe I was ever capable of writing.

Last January, I spent my birthday prepping case studies for buyside recruiting. This January, I have secured a seat at a hedge fund, and I have moved to SF for it. I caught up with one of my NY friends earlier this week, and we talked about how so much of our lives have changed in the past couple of weeks now that we have changed jobs. More so for me than her. Our environment has changed, our day-to-day responsibilities have changed, and our future has changed as well. The three months that have gone by for us has been extremely different from the three months that have gone by in the other associates in our class. Time has passed slower for us than it had for them. Three months is just another earnings cycle, and in my two and a half years on the sellside, I have been through more than I could count.

It made me realize that I do value change in my life. I don’t think I need to move every other year anymore, since I have career plans that require staying put for a bit, but I do like the fact that I have moved away from NY. I think I would have been happy in NY, but I would have been the same person I was three months ago or six months ago. I needed to change my environment to change myself as a person, and this move was able to accomplish that.

It’s only been three months since I have moved to SF, but everything feels different. I have been able to get back into making art, thankfully, at the expense of my social life, unfortunately. Although sometimes I wish I had someone to talk to, I don’t think I need it as much as I did before. I’ve always thought of loneliness as a weakness to be overcome, and I think I am better at dealing with that weakness since I have moved here.

In the past couple years of my life, I would say that my social life has, for the most part, been without volatility. I don’t seek the tumultuous life, at least not anymore, and my life has been rather tame as of late. Compared to the lives I hear through second-hand accounts, my life is stable. Although, in the absence of tumult, I tend to find chaos for myself. I don’t deal with betrayal or abandonment that much, but it does happen on occasion. Nothing serious though. However, because I don’t deal with it too much, I have become quite sensitive to any sort of perceived betrayal or abandonment, no matter how small. And lately, my willingness to ghost people has gone up quite a bit. Life is short. No second chances.

I’ve become colder as of late. When people hurt me, my interest to reconcile has diminished. Repairing friendship takes energy and is often messy. It requires both patience and willingness, both of which consume a lot energy, and I am not willing to expand the same energy on patience and willingness as I did before. I am more conscious of protecting my energy, and I’ve become more willing to use passive aggression as a tool to deescalate situations. I’ve been more willing to ghost people without explanation if someone breaks my trust, which has happened recently. As I’ve said to my friends numerous times, “Honesty is for da homies.” If you are not my homie, then you do not get my honesty.

I watch Neon Genesis Evangelion every now and then to remind myself of how much my attitudes towards loneliness has changed over the years. The first time I watched the original series was over covid, when I had injured my back while building my backyard patio and had to be confined to my bed for about two weeks. I couple weeks later, I watched the End of Evangelion. At the time, I don’t think I really understood the series, but I knew that it would be impactful in my life, that I would reflect on it often over the next couple of years.

I was right. I recently got an End of Evangelion poster to hang up in my studio apartment. I do think about the series a lot, not necessarily what happened within the series but how the series made me feel back then and now. Today, I continued the series by watching Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, which is a sort of recap of the original series with a couple deleted scenes. I didn’t feel how I felt when I first watched the series, but it did remind me of that week in my bed peeing into a water bottle because I was in so much pain I couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom. Now that I have moved out of my house, I am watching in under different circumstances, when so many things have happened in between. Since then, I have moved twice, changed jobs, and made and lost friends. The commentary about loneliness, however, still struck a chord despite all the time in between.

I used to be extremely bothered whenever I lost a friend, but as of late, I’ve only been moderately bothered by the loss of friendship. There were two in particular this past year of people who have influenced me a lot who I have lost touch with. One was by my choice, and the other was by their choice. The friendship I chose to end was because someone had let me down in a pretty serious way, mostly through neglect (as opposed to betrayal), and I’m unwilling to trust them again. I’ve often heard the saying, “Trust is difficult to build but easy to break.” I’ve never really understood that saying until now, mostly because I’ve been lucky enough to have the small number friends I do have to be reliable. It is partly due to the luck I have in meeting incredibly healthy people and also partly due to my tendecies to self-select into loyal friendships. But now I do get it. It’s harder to trust someone who has broken your trust than you have never trusted to begin with. It’s a sad moment, when someone goes from “know and trust” to “know but don’t trust”.

The second friendship was more complicated. It was someone I had met briefly with whom I shared a couple of intense moments. Because of those moments we shared, things became awkward, and we never really recovered from that. I have my own view of what happened between us, and I’m sure they have their own thoughts as well. I’m sure that we both saw how things happened quite differently. I still think about this person a lot. Although I wish this friendship could’ve had a different ending, there’s not much I would have changed about how it unfolded. It reflects another saying I’ve heard, “Some people you want as part of your story are only meant to be a chapter.” Although I wanted this person to be in my life, I accept the limitations in our communciation as a necessary part of the events that happened between us. Not all conflict can be resolved constructively. Perhaps there’s a future in which we could reconcile, but I’m not counting on it.

I’m not sure what to expect for the year ahead. I’ve been mealprepping and eating with extreme restraint for the past couple of weeks, but today I decided that I wanted to make myself a pizza. I haven’t had pizza in such a long time. I hope that’s not the attitude I will have for the next year. Ever since I resumed my meds, I have been extremely disciplined and focused, and I hope that progresses onwards. I plan on just studying and making art for the next couple of years, and I’ll decide to be social again when I do my MBA. Until then, I’m not particularly looking for friendship or anything. If something comes along, I won’t reject it, but more than ever before, I am comfortable with my own company.