Rivver // Am I Ok (feat. Milk & Bone)
I’ve been living in a hotel in San Diego for the past week, and will continue to live in it through the rest of this week.
The week before, I was in San Francisco. Next week, I’ll be in LA. The week after that, San Francisco. Then Vegas. Then Portland. Then back to LA. Then NYC. And then it will be early June.
And I’m ok. I’ve acclimated to this life lived out of a suitcase, and I’ve learned how to love it, how to be grateful for it, how to feel centered in the midst of constant movement and travel.
I’m writing again, reading again, working out and going to yoga regularly again, and as a result, I feel like I’ve been able to rediscover my sense of self. I’m breathing more deeply, walking more confidently, venturing out alone without experiencing a crippling fear of the unexpected - a feeling that punctuated my first few months living in LA when I didn’t know the city and didn’t know myself inside of it.
I think too often we forget about our malleability, of the way we evolve over time. More recently I’ve been reminded of how I hated my first year living in San Francisco. I could barely afford to live in the city, I worked at a job that I didn’t believe in, and my relationship was in a precarious position. It’s funny to think of how much I pined for LA then, how I thought switching geographies would cure all my self-doubt and general dissatisfaction.
Then I got a new job and (perhaps subconsciously) dedicated the first year of my long-distance relationship to myself. I started going to yoga, changed my entire wardrobe, and made a conscious effort to spend dedicated time alone and with friends. 2012, despite being a really shitty, challenging, lonely year, was also a transformative one. I made a lot of mistakes and said and did things I, in retrospect, shouldn’t have said nor done, but I still sometimes think wistfully to it, to what that year represented in the timeline of my life.
I came out of 2012 with a staggering overconfidence. I thought that I had learned everything there was to learn about myself and became complacent. LA forced me to confront the reality that I’d outgrown that identity, that it was time to cultivate a new one. I was clinging to a life that no longer existed, and holding on to a version of myself that didn’t fit into this new life.
I think perhaps our lives are marked with these periods of transition and transformation, where we shed our past selves like an old skin and come out refreshed on the other side.
I can feel it now like I felt it before. And it feels ok.
