But I Still Love You, New York

It's amazing how New York can get you down and make you crazy. It's a high maintenance city, always in your face, never leaving you any time for yourself. If San Francisco is your hippie lover, NYC is your stereotypical fishwife. Too haughty to love you, but too self obsessed to let you alone.

It is surprisingly easy, when you live in a dynamic city, to find your personality slowly shifting. I have found, in the last couple of months, myself fighting to keep my free flowing energy that I developed in the city of flowers. I am becoming aggressive, self involved, difficult. In my interactions with friends and lovers, I demand constant attention - I make noise, I invade privacy, I need constant affirmation and activity. It's distracting - I'm distracting - and even my sleep is fitful and active; invaded by light and sound, how could I sleep when there's still so much to do? Get up! Get up!

I find this frustrating. Endlessly, pointlessly frustrating. And the most horrifying part is that still the city won't let me alone. It is the only place I know where you can be surrounded by people and still find yourself hopelessly alone. There's no space to breath and yet no one to turn to. And the judgment, everywhere, from without and within, which comes along with living around people who won't take anything but the best from themselves or anyone else. It can be overwhelming and overstimulating and ultimately terrifying as you stare into the abyss of what you are and wonder "when will I ever be enough?"

Privacy is a precious commodity here. So is real contact. For every stranger I share a moment with, I thank my lucky stars. For every horn that breaks my concentration, I feel like screaming. Fucking horns. Fucking people. Leave me alone! Love me!

And so I become New York.

This little rant, me spewing my New York bile, does not, of course, take into account all the wonderful things that come along with being New York. Like a backbone, a spine. Like the ability to stand up and say "Enough with this passive aggressive bullshit, I don't deserve to be treated this way!" Like the honesty that comes with high maintenance, and the loyalty and the clarity. Like the constant reminder that I have to be the best and most important being in my own life, even when I don't live up to my own expectations, and if I have to yell my way into that spot, then so be it.

So be it. And so it bes. Every noisy second of it.

An Interlude

Being in love with a place is like being in love with a person: you are always the best version of yourself.

When you feel loved, you can do no wrong. You wake up every morning and no matter how shitty the day is, ultimately you find yourself charming, kind, smart, beautiful - nothing brings you down. When in love, you glow.

I knew no one in San Francisco, and yet I was totally at ease. I was calm, but still quirky; smart, but not elitist; savvy, but kind. I had removed all pressure - I wasn't performing. It didn't matter what anyone else thought of me because it was just me and my city, and I was content enough with that. There you have it: best version of myself.

I struggle occasionally in New York with a kind of regurgitated version of SF Lillian. She speaks the same words, but they no longer sound alive. I feel almost robotic - repeating phrases I picked up on the West Coast, which suddenly feel like cotton in my mouth. "I mean, I don't know, I feel lucky to have been there and now I'm excited to be here" to which my brain promptly responds "Shut up you stupid hippy." I will talk, but my mind is somewhere else (with the sun over the Pacific, maybe?).

I always become withdrawn after I lose love. I forget the person I was when I was in love, and I auto-pilot my way through daily interactions. It is difficult, I think, because I am so eternally shaped by my affairs that in the aftermath of the break up, or departure in this case, I have to relearn how to exist in my own body.

The New Yorker in me says "Fuck that. Let's go let's go let's go! Stay busy, start exploring, DO SOMETHING. Fake it til you make it, baby. Now MOVE."

The San Franciscan says "Be here now. There's nothing else you can do. It's all part of the journey."

And strangely enough, this is all the same advice.

The benefit of break ups, of heart ache, of home sickness, is that through that broken confusion, you find something better.

It just takes time. And patience. And plenty of alcohol.