Strange to think that waking up and writing Hot and Disabled while I drank my morning coffee used to be my somewhat-weekly routine. Now, I can’t imagine waking up and pouring whatever is in my head out to an eager (don’t let me put words in your mouth, but) reading public as a matter of course. Not because I have fewer thoughts or a less pathological need for attention — on the contrary! But because I simply don’t have that kind of time, and it’s becoming nearly impossible to remember that I once did.
Accidental hours got slashed into my schedule by the onset of a seasonal cold. It started to take over on Thursday evening, but roared to a boil on Friday. My body is continuing to fight it off, but I’m feeling much better now: yesterday, Ian helped me fulfill my urgent brothy needs with a bowl of spicy Korean ramen packed with mackerel, nori, kimchi, and, most system-restoringly, fresh garlic. This morning, a hot cup of Throat Coat. (Followed later by a light Darjeeling tea to stave off my caffeine withdrawal before it wreaked havoc on my head.)
Now, I’m doing what every sensible person does every weekend which is start unreasonable arguments over reasonable statements in order to bring to the fore just how many issues I’ve got and how much work I haven’t yet done to eradicate them. Working through issues is no kinda fun while escapism is a fucking blast, and this well-adjusted motto has carried me through some memorably pleasurable experiences while halting my life in every other respect.
And so, movement. Part of that necessary motion is determining how many of my so-called OPINIONS have been impacted by trauma and, before I got on Welbutrin and found the right therapist, depression. I have lived in a total of 15 cities in every region of America, and I have very strong feelings about every single one. I’ve also been depressed, though, in several of them. With your support, I would like to assess these cities as objectively as possible to find out how much of my related growling was due to my state at the time and how much I can attribute to genuine municipal suckage:
Seattle. This city contains my favorite library and public reading venue in America, the Seattle Central Library. I have never lived anywhere since Seattle with a library that compared. (I found Boston’s to be too grandiose.) Seattle Central is the Plutonic ideal of a combination between cozy-let’s-read and oooh-windows-let’s-think-big-things. It is a dream come true. It’s also, arguably, where I became a writer for real, even though my publishing publicity photos taken in those years rather embarrass me now. But I owe more than I know how to sum up to Hugo House, and specifically the weekly reading series Works-in-Progress.
Sounds ideal, right? Especially given that the coffee is incomprable and can be given to you everywhere, including said library and several clothing stores? Paradise.
Except it tore at my soul. It’s a city of aggressively self-identified introverts who make you feel like an attacker if you say hi, and my New Orleanian self basically died there. Though I didn’t actually die (that would happen years later in San Francisco with a similar population), but I did start to understand myself as a New Orleanian only after I’d lived there. See, when I actually lived in New Orleans, I was too formed by my New Mexico hippie roots to fit into the party culture. I didn’t think I belong at all. In Seattle, I saw myself through a different lens, their lens: loud, brash, sexually open, generally open, flirtatious in a way that so tripped people out I couldn’t tell if strangers actually thought I was professing my undying love to them or what. Flirting is just talking in New Orleans. If you want it to lead to action, you act. Anyway, I was profoundly isolated in Seattle. And it got dark far, far too early in the fall and winter.
Boston. City of high achievers, maximum efficiency, and head-spinning class stratification. I had never lived anywhere that was defined by any of these things and, several highlights of life not withstanding, I spent most of my Boston era feeling like a useless blob while Ian got his Masters in History. None of the friends I made in Boston were American, which says something about my relationship to the culture though I’m still determining what. Shoutout to Japan, Turkey, and Argentina, the countries who gave me a social life during an extraordinarily lonely time. (I know, I know, I just said I was profoundly isolated in Seattle. I was, but I never felt like an underachiever there. Nobody in Boston gave a fuck where I had published: It wasn’t The New Yorker and I’d never won a prize. In Seattle, I had published a Feature article in the then-revered The Stranger and was treated like a local celebrity.)
Berkeley. You know what? I can’t even go here. Not yet. When I finally write my memoir-based book about regional cultures, Berkeley will get a hefty chapter. All you need to know for now about my relationship with Berkeley is that while yes I was depressed in the two aforementioned cities, Berkeley was the only place that compelled me to check into a mental hospital for it.
San Francisco. I’m skipping several places I’ve lived in Northern California: Sacramento, Ukiah, Salinas, and Placerville. I’m skipping Sac and Salinas because, as essentially boring as those cities are, I kinda love them. (And when the time is right I’ll talk about why.) I’m skipping Ukiah because I’m still piecing together how precisely to talk about that loveably crazy little place, and I’m skipping the Libertarian don’t-ask-what-goes-down-in-the-Sierras town of Placerville because frankly it scares the shit out of me to think about it. And that, I assure you, is not depression talking.
The first time I went to San Francisco, back when Ian and I first got together 11 years ago, I couldn’t believe it was real, it seemed too perfect. The food was perfect. The scenery was perfect. The architecure and the Golden Gate Bridge and the airport and the people were perfect. The weather was perfect.
It’s probably unfair to ask any city to live up to what San Francisco promises to be when you never have to contend with living there. But these days? It’s even harder. Cost-of-living has skyrocketed to such heights that, when I tell landlords in Milledgeville what Ian and I were paying for a partially-subsidized one-bedroom apartment, they look at me like I can’t possibly know what a number is. The combination of anxiety and greed that rules the atmosphere now is not good for anyone’s mental health, which definitely shows, especially on public transit, though it’s in the highway road rage as well.
We happened to live, by necessity, in the neighborhood that one of Ian’s coworker’s dubbed The Seasonal Depression Zone. San Francisco is a city of microclimates: you’re likely to have to take off your jacket when travelling from one part of town to another. Our neighborhood was the one that was the most consistantly cold, consistantly damp, consistantly shrouded in fog. If you’re required to be at work before 9am and have to give yourself time to take transit, winter mornings on the bus can slay your spirit. I remember tweeting “This is some serious Wuthering Heights type shit” on way to work to amuse myself and garner much-needed strength and energy from my Twitter followers. Seattle’s rain made me write. San Francisco’s fog did not.
But was it the fog, or was it my job? And was it my job and its impossible demands, or was it my anxiety about the future? And was it the fog and my job and my anxiety, or was it just clinical depression? I can’t parce out the ratios for what factored into what, but I know this:
I came back to life in January 2023 when I finally went back to New Orleans. Here, I realized, with a deep exhale, I can be myself. Here, people understand me. I can talk all I want about how complicated the subject of home is, but there is no fucking question where I’m from.
I’m not sure what I expect you to take away from all this. Nothing specific. I’m always interested in hearing about how place impacts who people are, so if you wanted to tell me about it, I’d be all ears. I suppose part of what moved me to write about this now is that I still consider myself to be writing from a new place. I’d have bet money I’d been in Milledgeville at least half a year, but if we’re going with that whole linear calendar form of “measurement,” it’s only been a little over two months.
I don’t really know, ultimately, what defines this place, or who it’s transforming me into. My MFA program is a 3-year endeavor so I’ll be here at least that long.
I’ll keep you posted. Obviously.