Confusing Times, Confusing Thoughts

The alarm goes off. You hit the snooze button and doze off. The alarm goes off again. You make a grumpy noise and try to pull the blanket over your face. It’s sunny outside and the birds are chirping, a beautiful day. It’s October and you can see the green palm trees in your window. You are tired. There has been too much on your mind lately. It’s time to get up and run to the Caltrain because you are late to work again. You crawl out of bed, jump into your favorite red dress, put on sandals, and finally call an Uber that brings you to the train because of course you won’t run anywhere today.

In the train, you start waking up – with a coffee in your hand – and commence with your morning routine: checking important emails, sipping on the coffee, staring into the clouds, replying to messages on your dating apps, reading the latest news. By ‘reading news’ you mean scanning the Twitter feed and feeling your blood boiling because the insane orange said something incredibly stupid again. The orange is clearly losing his mind and the orange is here to stay. You scroll further down and stumble upon Kim Jong-Un’s face. You stare into the clouds and remind yourself that you wanted to practice more self-love and mindfulness. That’s what you told yourself at Burning Man when you were dancing under the LED-tree. You book a yoga class within the gym app for tonight. It makes you feel better.

At work you attend meetings with mostly engineers. It’s intimidating. You ask yourself how many months it would take you to learn to code or become a math genius, realistically speaking. Someone told you that at age 24 the brain starts to slow down. You are 29. You scrap the idea of learning how to code. Who said that other skills and common sense are not equally useful in Silicon Valley? Great teams have to be diverse in order to build products that can be used all over the world. You are proud to be the European voice at the company you work at and you are getting tired of Silicon Valley’s naive narrative and its absence of political responsibility. People sometimes call you an idealist. You don’t care. The world needs idealists.

Your mom messages you in the middle of the day and asks how you are. You want to reply: “To be honest, mom – I don’t know. Feeling numb lately and pretty uninspired. Could be the weather but could also be all that dystopian stuff going on right now. Also been sleeping poorly because I am not sure if government here will change the immigration laws anytime soon and I am afraid to lose my visa. I know, I know, you told me that I just need a strong shoulder to lean on. But dating in San Francisco is a freaking jungle. So yeah, intense times.” Instead you text back: “Everything alright, love you!”.

After work you decide to grab drinks with your friends. You walk to bar in Tenderloin, a neighborhood that connects homelessness, heroin needles, and bars with good-looking and well-dressed people. A self driving car is passing by a man sleeping on the sidewalk. The cognitive dissonance is in-your-face. At the bar you order the strongest drink on the menu and look around: lots of men staring at their phones; they could be swiping or checking their Twitter feeds. A friend of yours claimed that swiping is basically skipping an important evolutionary step. It’s not survival of the wittiest and most courageous anymore, but instead it’s survival of the ones who have the most dating apps installed. In the Uber Pool back home the driver asks you about the origin of your name. You say it’s Russian. Pause. The drivers starts smiling. “No, I am not a spy.” you say. Laughter. What a fun time to be a Russian-born in the United States.

You get home and start overthinking life. After 4 years living in San Francisco you feel even more lost than you were when you arrived in the city. Over the years you became used to emotional outbursts and existential fears at night, sudden homesickness in the morning, and the uncontrollable urge to flip tables and pack your bags. But you are also used to the constant craving for knowledge, craving for that fireworks in your brain when you meet people who inspire you to build a spaceship. You are like an addict, longing for adrenaline and an experiences-infused life. You wonder if you are crazy or just an immigrant in Trump’s America. Probably both. You are also a little bit dramatic but this is what got you here in the first place. Sometimes you accidentally come to dark places but then, minutes later, you are surrounded by the warm Californian light and Victorian buildings, and everything is bright again. The variety of emotions within 24 hours can be overwhelming. Over the last years you became a master in self-observation but you still fail to learn from your mistakes because there are just simply too many mistakes to be made in the huge landscape of possibilities. Sometimes your goals seem way too far away to be reached and you are convinced you are a failure. Your plans don’t always work out. But then you remind yourself that you went surfing with sharks once, unknowingly of course. You stop for a second and tell yourself: Hey girl, someone who is not afraid to surf with sharks will reach any goal eventually. Talking about surfing – you realize it’s time to go to bed because you have a surf date in the morning with a cute surfer at your favorite surf spot. Not too bad for an ordinary Saturday. The forecast looks promising. You can’t wait to hit the road and jump into the waves. You put your phone away and mumble to yourself: Bring it on, San Francisco.