The Californian’s Dilemma
This week in The Bold Italic, we are publishing The Californian’s Dilemma, a series that goes beyond the headlines about the “California Exodus,” featuring essays from San Franciscans about why they’re choosing to stay or leave. Check back daily for new essays.
My upstairs neighbors were the first to leave. San Francisco Mayor London Breed had called for a city-wide lockdown just days after my boyfriend and I moved into our new place in the Presidio. We’d hardly gotten a chance to introduce ourselves to the people upstairs or work out a schedule for our shared washer/dryer when we learned that they’d already booked it out of here.
Co-workers trickled out next, their Zoom backgrounds morphing from the whitewashed walls of millennial apartments to the lived-in cabinetry of their parents’ houses in upstate New York or Burbank or Phoenix. Moving trucks lined the streets of the city, and Craigslist was awash with whole homes worth of furniture as people uprooted their lives to resume them or start over entirely somewhere new.
The city felt lonely, in stark contrast to the version of SF I’d been confronted with when I moved here from Chicago only a few months prior. As I navigated frigid winters and Midwestern values in Chicago, I felt, at times, like an anthropologist: I watched and I learned, but I didn’t quite fit in. Moving back to my native Bay Area was supposed to be a relief. I’d be a bridge away from my family in Marin, hiking trails on weekends that I knew from childhood, eating at restaurants I’d frequented with old friends and family during my holiday trips back home.
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And it was a relief. Everything was familiar. But the familiar activities were so frequent and so concentrated — I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of social activities people my age seemed to fit into a week. Hiking Mount Sutro, drinking at Dolores Park, meeting for salads at Souvla, meeting for gyros at Souvla, meeting for brunch at Souvla. My co-workers and acquaintances seemed to supercharge the two or three years they spent here with quintessential San Francisco fun, buzzing with social momentum and energy.
I kept up for a little while, because I liked these things, too. I posted pictures of sunrises and Greek food with the best of them, rushing from work to activity to work while my wallet thinned and my sleep hours dwindled. It was fun. But I planned on staying here for the long haul, and this hectic version of life was just not sustainable.
As the pandemic mounted, I mourned the state of the world. Tens, then hundreds of thousands of people died. The distracting hubbub of fun, age-appropriate activities characteristic of San Francisco living not only felt inappropriate in this kind of world, but also became objectively unsafe.
Those of us who remained in the city hunkered down in our apartments to start Instagram accounts dedicated to our newfound creative pursuits. I stopped mourning the version of San Francisco I was missing out on and started settling into the one I could now embrace. This new experience came with activities like breaking out my sewing machine and cooking vegetarian meals and watching time pass. Activities that had nothing to do with San Francisco itself. And I found myself more appreciative of my surroundings than ever before.
Suddenly, I had more time for the things that had always felt like me: walking through my neighborhood and appreciating a house covered in purple ivy. Working on my novel, then walking to the ocean. Putting on a mask to collect old fabric scraps from neighbors, then turning the fabric scraps into new masks. Talking on the phone to friends in different places. I formed a pod with a (very) small group of friends who’d also decided to stay in the city: people who liked going for walks and eating sandwiches from the corner store and didn’t talk about Che Fico. The kinds of friends who don’t mind coming over to sit on the couch and look at their phones while you scrub the bathroom or don’t make eye contact because you’re busy embroidering. These friendships are uneventful in all the right ways: they’re consistent and energizing and I don’t for a second have to pretend I know more about wine than that it comes in red, white, and pink.
It feels almost wrong to express gratitude for these day-to-day occurrences. I’d sacrifice the activities that make me feel whole for the health and safety of the world, if I could. And, of course, I recognize the incredible privilege inherent in being healthy and for the most part happy during a global pandemic.
And also — it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the world had to all but stop for me to slow down and get to know my version of San Francisco. To feel okay with doing the things that already feel like me. To connect with a city through the day-to-day process of simply noticing.
