feeling disconnected
but in Montreal!! heh
bonjouuuuuur!!!!! i write from a brick-walled, cozy corner cafe in mile end, montreal, where i am “locking in to grind” as my dear college friend CK reads eat, pray, love (as a favor to her friend). i packed my backpack yesterday (friday) morning and went straight to newark after work, landed amidst a flurry of powdery snow, and now i have a hot chocolate in hand. how delightful!
being here already activates high speed jet swirls in my mind, thinking about the affordability of this city, the walkability of this neighborhood, and how CK has built a beautiful life for herself. i haven’t had a non-routine trip in a whileeeee, and i’m reminded why i love 1) slipping into the lives of people i love 2) seeing the world and 3) seeing the world through people i love.
(the last many trips i’ve done have basically all been to places i’m already pretty familiar with. in order going back from present: japan, new england, new england, sedona, new england, greece, and japan. i went to taiwan for the first time last may, which was aweeeesome, and that must’ve been the last new place i went. i’ve even been to montreal before, but under different circumstances, so this feels like a new experience.)
even though we’ve only lived ~6 years since graduating college, it’s really cool to see all the ways people have lived and built different lives around the world since then. the last time i saw CK was at our college reunion last june, but the time before that was in paris, when i was visiting JA and when CK was living there! she had a whole life in paris, and now she has a whole life in montreal, both so beautiful, dynamic, and full of love. my life, on the other hand, has more or less stayed the same in its broad strokes: i was then living in nyc and had just moved into the apartment i’m still living in. more or less, my friends and hobbies have stayed the same in the last 2 years. i look upon others’ varied lives with much awe, and have perhaps equal and opposite awe for the ways my life is consistent.
why am i here? after a season of being and feeling deeply grounded in nyc, a few months ago i felt like it was finally time to do something different. montreal is so close, and i am so well taken care of by CK, that i knew it would be an easy breezy weekend situation. plus, i had a lot of air canada points that would expire at the end of the year, so why the heck not come hang.
i wrote most of this blog below earlier in the week, when i was not feeling great. being here, a mere 90 minute flight from nyc, has brought me back into the world in a very necessary way. meeting new people, being around very gay people, and being reminded at how big the world is is so nice <3
please just pray for me that my flight back home to nyc tomorrow night isn’t meaningfully disrupted by the snow nyc is going to get… eep!
(not) belonging to community
i’ve been so confused lately about how people do all that they do. the last time i remember feeling really “how can i do it all?!?!,” it was because i was trying as hard as i could but obviously could not “do it all.” i remember being in seattle in october 2022 and truly wishing i could make clones of myself so that all of them could collectively do everything i wanted to do: spend quality time with friends, travel, attend events, etc. these days, i arrive at this same question because, despite having plans and generally still doing things most days of the week, i feel shockingly disconnected from people and community. :(
even though this time last year was objectively horrible bc of my then job, i was suuuper in community: i had my weekly master composting course, weekly social office hours, and bi-weekly writing nights. i was accustomed to being places where i belonged, and where i would be missed if i didn’t attend. these days, i only have one (1) weekly cadence activity/hobby, and i wouldn’t be particularly missed if i weren’t there. i’m thinking that only one weekly community activity is not enough. or maybe that after months of basically no weekly community activities, i’m feeling the affects of not belonging. so what’s the solution here? i automatically think that it’s to re-join activities, communities, and regular events. but then i have to ask, with what time?
carving out an evening each week for my ONE current hobby already feels like quite the commitment, and i don’t at all feel like i have an abundance of free time. i haven’t seen many of my close friends in somehow weeks, and i have no idea how the days are slipping by like this
i’ve come to loathe scheduling time with people a week+ in advance, in favor of a spontaneous casual hang, but i feel like if i don’t, i’m literally never going to see people??? i’m dumbfounded at how i arrived at this particular time/social life dynamic…?
i’ve also noticed how i’ve totally dropped off from going to any events. i used to, each month, make a calendar of events for myself, using the instagram/website/newsletters of all of the orgs/shops i like. it’s impossible to attend even a quarter of them all, but i knew what was happening, and i went with friends, and i met new people, and i was part of the pulse of what was happening in my corners of literature / asian / queer / environmental universes. it’s surely a combo of it being winter and my pivoting away from advance planning, but i don’t do that at alllll anymore. i have no idea what events are ever happening, and i feel like i totally do not belong to those spheres anymore. i know that they’re available for me whenever i want back in, but again, with what time?! (since writing this, i did actually go to a lecture on environment x architecture x art, and it was awesome. so cool to be in an academic setting where people love learning and creating things!)
with literature, i’m excited to be facilitating a writing night next month, and also to have been selected to be a reader for a book award that the center for fiction runs each year :) with being asian (lol), i have j dinner, but i feel far from what events orgs are hosting. with being queer, i’ve never felt more straight than in these last ~1-2 years lmao. that’s not necessarily a BIG PROBLEM but it is just true for now. and with environmental stuff, farming will return soon enough, and i’m staying in touch with my horticulture co-interns <3, but i also don’t know what’s up in those worlds anymore :( the more i live, the more i accumulate befriending awesome people and have chapters of belonging to various communities. but because it’s inherently impossible to keep up with everything equally indefinitely, the more i live, the more people and spaces there are to miss, and to have to let go of. :(
work life severance
also, it feels worth noticing that i probably feel this disconnection because i am so connected to my job. by this i mean that for 8 WHOLE hours a day, my thoughts and actions and conversations and interactions are all in service of my job. i obviously had a demanding work situation at my last full time job, but being fully WFH, it wasn’t physically fully immersive. i absolutely called friends during the work day and could wash my face after my daily 7am meeting. my friends could still come to my home to wfh with me. my dear roommate EH knew allll of the d*n and c*lina drama, and she’d physically see me working early or late. in many ways, because of all of the ridiculousness that was that job, anyone who spoke to me for more than 5 minutes knew something about my job or my bosses lmao. i was overflowing with shenanigans to share for anyone who would listen.
with my current job, though, i’m experiencing what it’s like for my friends to not really know the details of my work life. after 6 months, i haven’t really mentioned any of my coworkers by name except for the one person i manage. because there’s less to vent/rant about, my friends don’t know much about my coworkers, those dynamics, or specifics of what i do. when i leave work feeling tired and worn out at 4pm, there’s nothing all that interesting or noteworthy to report to anyone, so i don’t feel compelled to share beyond expressing in some surface level ways how busy i might have been. so i feel like this part of my life that’s pretty huge for me is one that my people don’t know anything about, and that absolutely contributes to my feeling disconnected. as such, i made an org chart of the key players i work most closely with, and i distributed it amongst my friends lmao. i want my friends to know more about my work, so i’m gonna start referring to people by name!
JG said it’s “probably a good thing there’s nice separation,” and i probably agree on the whole. it is better this way — for me and the kind of life i want to live — to have work be contained to work and not seep and stain its way into every conversation. but i would love to somehow feel more like the people around me GET my life and are living it with me. i used to feel sooooo connected to friends and felt so happy to be really living life with them. i’ve felt fairly solitary lately :/
i also did just have my living partner wife AN leave for 2 months, and so i am now living with a brand new stranger….! so we can add that to the list of reasons why i’m like DOES ANYONE EVEN KNOW ME RIGHT NOW?? i certainly don’t feel like i know what’s up in people’s lives lately, and that is also devastating <////3 i just wanna know people and be known!
teenage carelessness
with the above as the backdrop to how i’ve ~been doing~, i feel like i’ve been leaning into teenager behavior: procrastinating things far beyond what’s good for me (like going to sleep, cleaning my room, homework), going to sleep very late, and eating cake for breakfast/dinner. i definitely ate and was fed very well in my teenage years, so that’s a new one lol, but i just can’t resist the urge to be a little messy in these ways right now.
beef clogging my spirits
this past week, it really hit me that i have unpleasant beef/baggage with 4 people, and all relatively freshly. three of these people i wrote about a few months ago, when i was full of rage at how each of those relationships ended, and one is just someone i’d just rather not interact with lmao. i’ve never really been one to have dynamics like this, so it was a new challenge for me to have to be at an intimate gathering with one of these people earlier this week. and i’ll have to do that again with someone else in a few weekends.
for my college reunion, i was riddled with fear and anxiety around running into my two ex best friends, but at no point was i going to have to meaningfully interact with them. we were in rooms of dozens/hundreds of people, so it was pretty easy to not be in eyeshot of each other, and even though it felt big and scary to me, nothing there was recent or fresh.
for these 4 i’m referencing now, things are pretty recent. one of them is a lot more lighthearted than the other so it’s mostly the 3 i have in mind, and of those 3, one of them is actually not at all in my life, so it’s really just 2 who i actually do need to share spaces with in the near or forseeable future. this week, i’m feeling weighed down by it all. i feel like i shouldn’t have weird/bad lingering dynamics with anyone, much less this many people, but the way things transpired really did affect me negatively, and i don’t like to be reminded of it.
completely unrelated to any of those scenarios, it came up this week that MZ thought i had lingering beef with a dear old friend. i definitely did, back when she flat out betrayed me in 2016, but we’ve been totally chilling as friends for the last few years, including recently. that was a good reminder that everything is changing, and that life is longgggg. relationships basically exist for as long as we exist, even if there are periods of dormancy here and there. but for relationships that have expired, MZ reminds me of the serena kerrigan quote: “putting spoiled milk back in the fridge doesn’t make it better.”
and, in the end, i felt pretty empowered coming out of this week’s beef-run-in-gathering, because the person in question and i didn’t interact at all! it was so chill and comforting to be on the same page about how much of strangers we are to each other now. and to think i almost didn’t go because they would be in attendance! but i knew that missing out on fun out of fear is loser behavior, especially bc this beef is 95% one-sided, meaning only felt on my end lmao. i doubt they think of me ever.
do you have lingering/current beef with anyone?? someone you’d rather not see, or would go out of your way to avoid? ti would loooove to know how you navigate that.
having to confront people whom i have baggage around, and being now strangers with people i was once close with, definitely compounds by aforementioned feelings of disconnection with people in general. i think someone knowing my day to day, and my knowing their day to day, is really imporant to me for my general orientation/philosophy on relationship closeness. i loooove and want people i love knowing everything about me, and conversely, i take steps towards ensuring that people i have expired relationships with know nothing about me. so it’s weird and sad for people i actually do love dearly to not know me very well right now, or at least for me to feel like they don’t know me right now, because i’ve been so socially MIA.
lastly, i wonder: how do you make new friends while keeping the old?!? stay true to things/communities you love through various other interests and life chapters??? all while doing laundry and always having food at home and keeping a clean room?? will i ever stop asking these questions??
very best from montreal, sue <3