stumbling drunk

33 and get off at valencia, the street with the pretty lights, to walk home. 49 to head north, fast, on the red express lanes; 14r to go northeast, to downtown and my favorite park. 24 to get directly from work to “cerebral valley”, where apparently everyone lives. by now i have twenty of sf’s bus routes memorized, little threads i stitch together to go wherever i need to, pulling the entire city into a tight net

this past week i’ve been waking up at 6am and walking to the office at sunrise. my neighborhood the mission, usually chaotic and litter-filled, is serene. by golden hour we usually mean the hour before sunset but the morning is just as golden, and if i time things well this is what my walk to work looks like every day:

i feel irrationally, unjustifiably happy, walking around in my morning and evening commutes, knowing these paths like the back of my hand even if i make an unusual stop or detour, even if i have not taken this exact route before. every block is a little character to become acquainted with and i have made many friends. people sometimes make fun of my walking map, of how much i insist on my feet and on public transit over ubers, but this is the point - to have half the city stored in my mind, to tread so thoroughly and be so familiar with where i am going that i am always at peace. all this work is paying off at last, after months of getting to places slower than i could’ve

i have finally decided that sf is the right city for me to be living in right now. of course i still think about new york sometimes; it would’ve been better in some ways, worse in others. but here is what i have realized: i love plenty of people in both cities, but the friends of my friends in sf make me happy in a way that i don’t think the friends of my friends in ny would, and that is a tension i am glad to not have to deal with

some days i feel like a force of nature, my veins flooding with ideas for things to learn and projects to build and problems to solve. other days i feel pathetic, and i go to sleep indifferent about whether i wake up or not. it’s a bit embarrassing how high the highs are and how low the lows are, and how close together they are. of course the flaw of enneagram 4’s is that they take their emotions too seriously, and these days i understand that neither the highs nor the lows are truth, they are just feelings and nothing more

i was reflecting on how turbulent 2023 was, how i spent the entire second half of the year operating at what felt like 20%-30% capacity because i was always dealing with anxiety and interpersonal problems and the like. part of me is still jealous and rails at the perceived injustice, that some people i know have never experienced stress as a physical impediment constantly running in the background, or have never had much trouble with love and attachment because they were raised more securely, or so on. and another part of me accepts that we are running our own races, that the journey i have been on has been good even if it has been roundabout and slow, that all the little wins in improving my health and relationships with other people have been very rewarding even if some people have been able to skip them. truly, i would not wish for things to happen any other way

i am thinking about this passage from circe: “I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath.... It will be alright, he says... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”