on leaving
I left San Francisco one year ago today, boarded that 777 headed toward London. I didn’t arrive here until two days later, so in my mind the two events have some separation. Today’s been a mix of emotions thinking about leaving.
Neither “Are you glad you moved to South Africa?” nor “Are you glad you left San Francisco?” have a simple or definitive answer but the latter, in many ways, is the easier to answer.
San Francisco is good for many people. They love everything (or most things) about it. And that’s great. I was never one of those people. That’s not to say I didn’t get good things out of living there—more education and great work experience, good friends, fun times—but I never felt remotely at home there. (And to feel like an outsider in SF I suppose says something about me.) Furthermore I felt living there made me progressively less like the person I want to be. It comes as a relief that I left, a weight off my shoulders.
Still, it’s not without regret that I look back on this day a year ago. I left good friends and a girl I was crazy about. I left a job I enjoyed and mostly found rewarding. I left one of the longest running activities of my life in college radio. I left a roommate I’d lived with for longer than anyone but my family; it will be 2017 before I could live with someone that long again. I left certainty about what I was going to do next.
There’s no conclusion to this; there’s no neat wrap-up. But that’s life, right?
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Oh me oh my oh!
You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.