transition

I moved my furniture into a storage unit yesterday, and my apartment is empty. I am also trying to finish off all the wine I got from Trader Joe’s when I first moved in, so I’ve been getting blasted more often than I would like. It is a weird feeling drinking on my balcony in an empty apartment because it reminds me of transition. Every time I moved somewhere, the apartment would be empty, and I would reflect how I have changed since my last transition. In this case, the last time I moved was a little more than a year ago, from NY to SF.

So much has changed, and so much has not changed. I have on record videos and drawings I have made in the past year, so at least I have documentation of hobbies I picked up. I passed the CFA Level 2, so at least I didn’t waste my life on the 300 hours I put into studying. I am still hung up over the same people in my past. I still feel as lonely as I did when I first moved here. I’ve established a good reputation professionally, and I’m about to Hawaii for the winter. I will bounce around different surfing locations until they call me back to the office.

Even though I’ve made progress in my life for the past year, there aren’t that many moments in which I felt alive. In fact, the only time this past year I really felt alive was when I was doing my car tent tour around Iceland or when I was catching up with old friends in NY, both of which definitely not in SF. There were some moments I had fun in SF, like when I got matching tattoos together for a first date, or playing squash at the Bay Club at 2 PM on a Thursday, or my first park day at Mission Dolores. To be honest, these experiences are easily replaceable. Experiences that aren’t rare aren’t special. I don’t really reflect on these experiences. If they didn’t happen, then I don’t think much would change in my life.

The nature of relationships is asymmetric, and it will always mean more to one person than the other. There are some relationships that mean a lot to me, and I wonder if they mean as much as they did to me as they did to my counterpart. Knowing the nature of relationships, probably not. But that doesn’t stop me from still thinking about the people in my past. My friend recently gave me the advice, “You seem to still let people in your past to influence you even now. Maybe you shouldn’t.” I’ve been thinking whether I should listen to her.

I’ve realized recently that I’m a very sterile person. I would like to be warm, but I just don’t feel warm. I enjoy airports and workplace happy hours and international style architecture because they are also sterile, and they remind me of myself. Being warm is very… not me, no matter how much I wished things were otherwise. I feel like I am most attractive when people just look at me from a distance, and once I open my mouth, I just give off the vibes of a networking event. It is hard for me to be genuinely into someone, so the only thing I can offer is business casual chats. I’ve frequently received feedback that conversations with me are reminiscent of a job interview, which I would say is pretty accurate considering the importance and extent in which business casual is part of my personality.

I wonder in this regard if warmness is something you cultivate, or if it is something you are born with. Is this a personality trait I could acquire, like organization, or is this something you are born with, like work ethic? I wasn’t really raised in a warm household, and as an only child, there’s only so many ways I could cope before I run out of any emotion left to give.

I decided to release one of my songs on Spotify. It was a song I wrote and produced in 2021, when I was still living with my parents at the height of covid. I don’t know why it took me so long to release it. Part of the reason is that I didn’t want to engage in any outside business activities that I would have to disclose to my employer. I also didn’t take my own artistic pursuits that seriously either, and if I didn’t take myself seriously then I wouldn’t be hurt by others when my creations don’t live up to my expectations for them. But lately, after this summer, I decided to take my artistic pursuits more seriously. I want to accomplish something. I want to receive external validation, and this is how I get there.

I registered for the SF marathon recently. Today, I ran past a restaurant near the waterfront. There were a lot of people there, eating and talking. I realized that these things were unimportant to me. Besides this trip to NY two weeks ago, I haven’t really gotten dinner with that many people in my time in SF I don’t really enjoy dinner. I like conversations, so I usually ask people for drinks, which is funner and less commitment, in my head. For food, I prefer the same meal prep I eat every day: ground chicken and frozen veggies with lentils. I haven’t really met anyone I would like to get dinner with, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

I asked my friend in Iceland if she would be comfortable living in one of the small Icelandic towns we visited. She said no. I said that I would be okay in a small Icelandic town. What I actually want is routine. What I have is an existential pressure to do things. I would like to live in a small town and do the same thing every day. But, for some reason, I feel like I would wasting my youth and the opportunities I have been given to live in a HCOL city with so many resources, so I choose not to live in a small town and live a simple life. If I did live in a small town, I think I would be a lot happier, but I’ve never thought the point of life is to be happy. The purpose of life is to live a life with purpose, and usually purpose is found in HCOL cities with a lot of cultural and financial capital.

Feeling ugly is a part of growth. Probably why being pretty at a young age is a curse. I feel ugly right now, so I know I am growing. I was too content before anyways.