I've been quiet here, mostly because I've been unsure what there is to say. My image making has taken a backseat to some other stuff – namely, travel and work – and a lot of my mental energy is going towards figuring out what the heck it is I'm doing exactly.
My trip to San Francisco was important on a number of levels. First and foremost, it was a business trip, because I'm working for Twitter again doing user support. I love this job, and I loved it even more given the chance to work out of Twitter HQ. I was completely beside myself at how much the company has grown and how many motivated, creative, awesome people are working there these days. The Support team is full of super smart, fun folks. It's really kind of a bummer to be working remotely from New Mexico.
My work with Twitter will be in addition to doing about ten massages a week. On top of that, I of course plan to continue making photographic work, though I'm finding my dissatisfaction with Santa Fe to be extremely distracting for my visual practice. But more on that in a minute.
San Francisco wooed me pretty hard, not just in looks (and my god is that city ever beautiful), but in people. There's a nerd for everything in San Francisco, and I say that in the most loving way possible. Pretty much everyone you meet is genuinely excited about something, if not several things. They are curious and they pursue their interests with a lot of creative energy. The smaller towns I've lived in over the past four years have had a major lack of this kind of motivation; mostly, people talk about things but never get around to doing them. I won't speculate on why this is right now, because my point is really that I've realized what a valuable thing it is to be able to crowdsource and be around people who are interested in the same things you are, with the same energy you are. And I want to be in a place where there's more of that.
Of course, I'm a much different person now than I was when I was living in San Francisco, and as much as it still feels like home to me in a lot of ways, I just don't know if it's where I belong anymore. I miss the West Coast on an almost instinctual level, and being back by the Pacific gave me a sense of calm. I don't know how to explain it other than saying I feel so much more like myself when I'm there. If we're going for full disclosure, I'll tell you that on a long Saturday walk along the waterfront, the Golden Gate Bridge came into view and I sat down and cried. Something about that sweeping view of the Bay represents so much to me that it's hard to verbalize; I guess it reminds me of the first time I was truly happy in my life. I want to be in a place where there's more of that feeling, too.
And so: happiness, contentment, fulfillment. I'd argue that these things are largely driven by choice. But the degree to which I'm struggling at the moment would have me amend that to say, I also believe that other choices you make (such as where you live, or how you live) dictate the degree to which you can be fulfilled. Which is just a way of saying that I've really tried, but Santa Fe is absolutely not the right place for me. Now I need to cut my losses and walk away.
People ask me often why Jason and I decided to move here. The answer, I guess, is that we really just needed a place to land after being out of the country for two and a half years. The day we landed in Albuquerque from New Zealand (via a brief stay in San Francisco) was the first time I'd ever been to New Mexico. We had a couple of months before the rest of our belongings would arrive on a container ship, so we had some time to kill and wanted to see how things might go for us in the desert. We were never sure we'd stay, but thought it was worth a look. Santa Fe, for as little as we knew about it, seemed from the outside to be a small but progressive community with a thriving art market and some interesting things going on. Now, having been here a year and a half I can say that in my personal experience of this place I've been mostly disappointed on all of those fronts, but I'm not going to spend energy bashing it in this post. A couple of things have kept us here up to this point, namely lease issues and a year of massage school, but also there has been a total uncertainty about where the hell we should go next.
As tempted as I was during the last couple of weeks to say it should be San Francisco, I'm not convinced – the biggest factor there is of course the cost. But the options are slowly coming into focus, and I'm feeling more optimistic and less grumpy than I was before this trip. We're heading to Portland over Thanksgiving to give it some serious consideration, and my fingers are crossed that we like what we find. Our lease is up at the end of March, and we'll be leaving then. I'm just not exactly sure where to.
Regardless, I'd like to take a minute to thank a handful of the many San Francisco people that helped make my time in California so completely awesome (even though only a few of them read this blog). To Crystal, Nuzz, Sarah, Niniane, Geoff, Tim, Aaron & Helena, Leah, Noah and the Twitter Support team: thank you.
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