When I first moved to San Francisco, I started to write Dots by Dot as a way to document the learnings that come with a move to a new city and the start of a new job. After a hiatus last year, I am writing again. I'm writing again because although many things have changed over the last year, I find myself bumping into familiar themes. Writing is a way for me to process those themes. A way for me to scoop out my insides and poke at them, to turn raw into tender, and to release what is boxed in.
It's now 2018, two years since I moved to SF, and it is interesting to see what's stayed the same and what has changed. Some of the things I struggle with are still there (big surprise, right?), but other things - my sense of belonging here in San Francisco for example - have changed dramatically. Last year I remember feeling so out of place in SF. I felt lost and directionless at work, I didn't feel like I had anything to show for my time here, and I felt I still lacked a solid friend base. There was nothing keeping me here, so I considered leaving.
I went to New York last fall with hopes of finding a new love; that spark you feel when a place calls out to be your new home. While in NYC, a city I've been to many times before and love dearly, I felt a pang, but to my surprise it was not for NYC. I missed San Francisco. I missed the people I had grown to care for here. People that were generous with their time and spirit. I missed the colors and topography. The rolling green hills, the mysterious and fickle dance between the sun and fog, the sparkling bay that is never too far out of sight. I missed the buzz and energy of the city; a city that is full to the brim with ambition and contradiction. And like the city with its contradictions, it took me going away in search of something else to feel a desire to come back. And I'm so glad I did. San Francisco will never replace my hometown, Toronto, but there is something here I have grown to love. A lot of that, I believe, came out of the adversity of last year. Of needing new direction at work, of getting to know someone that I could have built a very loving life with and of knowing at some point we also had to say good-bye, of losing that love, of feeling alone, but okay... it all kind of crumbled together and out of that mush a sinewy sense of belonging started to form.
In part I realized that community isn't something you find so much as something you build. And building is not a linear process. San Francisco is a hard place to live in some ways because it is so transient. I met lots of people over the last two years, many of whom I will never see again. I now see that part of the experience of moving is learning to appreciate even those fleeting interactions. And putting in the effort to grow the ones you care enough about to keep.
I've always prided myself on forming deep "authentic" connections with people and kind of looked down at lighter, more superficial connections. Part of my growth last year was revisiting this false dichotomy. Relationships did not need to fit into one of two buckets: real and meaningful, or light and fleeting. There was actually a thousand shades of relationships one could have and not any one of them had a monopoly on authenticity.
Another binary I've revisited is how I see myself when engaging with others. Recently I spent time with someone that dominated the conversation more than me and it brought out all my familiar insecurities. Why were they dominating the conversation? Was what I was saying not interesting or engaging enough? Am I boring them? I found myself holding back certain questions for fear of boring the other person. Never once did I consider other narratives that removed blame from me - or even better - didn't assign blame at all. Couldn't it be that we just didn't connect and that was okay? Or couldn't it be that it was a fine - perhaps not great - connection and that was okay too? Once again, I did not need to evaluate our interaction, and based on that interaction assign myself a label.
I'm happy to revisit these familiar themes and remember that my story is just that; it's mine to own, stretch, tweak, protect, and share as I wish. The world is big enough for all different types and I don't have to limit myself with labels about who I am. I can push past binaries and live life across the spectrum of radiant colors between black and white.
-Dot
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Want to revisit some old assumptions about yourself this year? I recommend reading "The Authenticity Paradox" by Herminia Ibarra for some fresh perspective.