post-vacation blues

I stopped writing awhile back because I realized I kept repeating myself. I wanted to give myself a break and change how I thought about things before I started to write again. I only write a couple times a year now. Hard to believe a couple of year ago when I was studying English in college. Now I want to write down some of my thoughts again, but I think I will be repeating myself once again. It makes me realize that the real reason I stopped writing was because I didn’t have new insights worth writing about. Nothing worth saying.

It’s been exactly a year since I’ve moved to SF. A lot has happened since my last essay. I passed CFA Level II. I’m single now. I got OWD certified. I went to Iceland for three weeks this summer. I feel somewhat heartbroken, but not too much. I’ve been working remotely for the past couple of months. I’m about to go to Mexico for a couple months in the last stretch of remote work. It seems like a lot has changed, and maybe it has, but I don’t feel too different. I keep on telling others that I have changed, but I really feel like I haven’t. The core features of my life are still the same. I’m still lonely. I still yearn for connection. I still feel weak.

It’s foggy out right now, so at least that matches my mood. Although, it’s currently wildfire season, so some of that is just air pollution. I don’t know where my life goes from here. I’m not living the life I want to live. I need friends to live the life I want to live. All I am doing is keeping myself preoccupied until I am in love again. Nothing matters otherwise. All this travel, all these first dates, all of this art I make — it doesn’t really matter, does it? I feel like I am just keeping myself busy. Otherwise life is too boring. I would rather die than live boring life.

I’m thinking about getting back into music. I’ve been thinking about what type of glamour I would like to pursue, and I think it is the glamour of a popstar. I like music a lot, obviously, but I realize I am not as driven in creating songs as I am in other pursuits. I do care about glamour and communicating what I want to say. I’m just not sure that music is how I want to do it. Writing is also so much harder for me now than it was in the past. Words just don’t flow out of me like they use to. I feel like I’m expending considerable energy in writing. It doesn’t really bring me pleasure anymore. I’m just writing now because it’s been awhile since I wrote last, and I feel like a lot has happened, so I feel like I should write something down while these events are still fresh in my head.

In Iceland, I had a thought about how everyone was in their own journey. Sometimes, my journey and someone else’s journey intersects for a bit. Maybe we’re in the same city for a bit. Maybe we go on a trip together. But just because we travel the same road in our journey for a bit doesn’t mean that our journeys are permanently intertwined. More often than not, people grow apart and leave to continue their journeys separately.

I feel like, for so long, I’ve tried to hold onto those moments when I meet someone real and our journeys intersect for a bit. I try so hard to make those moments last forever. When they do pass, I try to hard afterwards to relive what I felt through my writing and music and art. I had a profound thought while tripping in the wilderness that I needed to let these moments go. I was laying down on the grass with my friend, and then my friend wanted to keep on walking on the trail, and I started crying because I didn’t want the moment to end. I started ranting on about how the jellyfish surrounding us earlier was actually just the bubble of the moment we were both experiencing, and how it was fading, marking the end of the moment.

After all this time, I still have not found a way to live my life to be happy. Sometimes I feel beautiful. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve made so many changes in my life. I’ve developed some generalized artistry and athleticism, making me significantly more interesting than I was in the past. I guess it has made me happier, but not that much happier. I am a cooler person than I was in college, but I also have less friends than I did in college. It’s harder to make friends after college. I wish some friend group would just adopt me, but that’s just something that only happens in movies. I want to be found by beautiful people.