September Reflection - Coming Home & the Nomadic Experiment

I wrote this all in one go to avoid overthinking.

I’m sitting at the airport at Charles de Gaulle, two hours left before my flight back to LA. It’s the first time I’ve been back to LA without an ticket back out. To New York. To Boston.

No longer is there a return back East. I’m heading West, and at least for the foreseeable future, staying there.

Some Life Reflections:

In Europe, I feel I’ve lived several lives. I left New York on September 3 with a one way ticket to Sevilla and a return ticket from Paris. In between, I had little planned. Segments. Themes maybe. But nothing that felt like a proper itinerary.

Over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about what comes after New York. It’s been home for the last three years and rounds out my decade on the East Coast. It actually has been a decade. I ventured out to college in Swarthmore in 2015 and here we are 10 years later.

Then, my family had been shepherding me off to orientation. I couldn’t have known that I would’ve stayed for that long. That I’d live in 4 cities and 6 apartments, move every few years, in what felt like an endless endeavor to find the next place I would call home.

But in the back of my mind, home - that place that I had actually grown up in - beckoned to me. First like faraway idea - the place that someday I’d go to. Maybe in a few years. Maybe after I turn 30. A moving timeline that kept receding. Then, more concretely like a oncoming train that I could actually board. It hasn’t struck me yet that that day is today. That someday has come calling.

I’ve always been discomforted by liminal spaces. Airports. Train stations. Somewhere between departure and arrival, and not being able to fully inhabit either. Most of my last few months have felt this way. An expiring lease with tickets to places that I could try to romanticize about but did not truly see myself being in. I’ve already done that once. With a year in Taipei when I was 22. Then, it was easy to romanticize my life. The adventure of learning a language abroad, of living in a new continent. The call of adventure felt compelling. The call of home feels inevitable.

It is not lost to me that the main reason I’m going back now, when I am, is to take my parents back. We left for Europe to attend my sister’s graduation in London, and made a trip of it. She took them there. I take them back.

I had grown up dreaming about being able to take my parents on vacation. It’s the kind of thing that when you grow up poor, is a milestone, much like graduating from college or getting a job. Let me treat my parents. Show them the world. Make their sacrifices seem worthwhile. We had taken two vacations by the time I was 18 - once to the East Coast, and once to China. Travel was a luxury - still is - but one that only happened ever few years.

A diploma, two jobs and a few wrinkles later, I can now travel whenever I want to. Socioeconomic mobility has brought be geographical mobility.

And that brings me here. At an airport in Paris, 5 cities removed from where I first started on September 3 in New York.

My trip was split into two parts - a Spanish segment on my own and then a Western European tour with my family.

• Sevilla with a friend. A celebration of his birthday. A graduation of sorts for me into the next chapter of life. We spent time with his friends, his family. A borrowed home for my first 10 days.

• Barcelona by myself. Digital nomading for a week. Going to meet-ups, meeting new friends and scratching the itch of being a DM. I worked at coffee shops, walked around and met people. Played beach volleyball. But I felt off.. Despite the generosity and kindness I felt from the people I met, I could not see myself there. Or really, anywhere where my primary identity was nomadic. Chiang Mai. Tokyo. Taipei. I had been telling people for months that that’s what I’d do next. But a week alone was enough to know that I crave grounding more than adventure. A familiar place to return to sounds nicer than a novel place to explore. That was a big unraveling for me.

• With family, we sightsaw. London Eye. Venice canals. Eifel tower. It can be painfully frustrating to travel with parents - there’s so much self-regulation and restraint involved. Things that remind me I am both child and adult. Caretaker and, still, deeply, needing care too. But there is joy too. Warmth. Love. Determining the relationship I want with my parents and learning to coexist with them on agreeable - if ever imperfect terms - will be work. I am not sure of their capacity to change, nor am I of mine. But to learn how seems like work worth doing.

• It will likely be some time before we travel together again. Kim is staying in London. I in LA. And both of us, I think, need time to settle and find shape to this next length of life.

Some Work Reflections:

• Despite leaving my full-time job 6 months ago, I don’t think I’ve ever really turned off. It’s a cliche, and one I am struggling to break away from, for the anxious overachiever to feel like they can’t stop chasing productivity. This for me, has been painfully true. But it’s not been so bad. I do like working. I crave the satisfaction of something clicking after you’ve spent some time thinking it through. I love the feeling of nailing a scene and really feeling connected with your scene partner. I love love love how much I learn when I’m fixated on something that feels real and purposeful. I’m always learning. It’s my default. I may as well spend my time learning things I naturally am drawn towards instead of fighting against it.

• The challenge though, is disentangling what comes from anxiety and what comes from curiosity. The should vs. could problem. Am I doing this because I feel I should do it or because I could do it? If there’s a single sentence to encapsulate this chapter of my life, that’s it. And the more I ask it, the more I actually listen to the answer, the more secure I’ll feel, I hope, in where my feet are set and where my time is spent.

• I think I’m scared of actually succeeding. This is a new realization for me. With school and steady jobs, success was well defined with grades, promotions, and annual reviews. With my own work now, it’s much harder. I am wary of chasing conventional metrics and calling that success - things like # of followers, how much money I make. But more accurately, I think I’m scared of actually trying and, possibly, failing. To put my best effort forward and still have that not be enough. I keep tip toeing. With acting. With content. With coaching. I have enough data to know that I could keep going. But I’m afraid to commit. With coaching this is especially obvious. I charge by the hour. It’s as explicit as it gets. And I ask myself - am I actually worth that much? The math is undeniable - I literally 200X’d my first client’s investment on me - yet I doubt myself.

• I remind myself, that action despite doubt is no small thing. It is the cost of attempting something meaningful and hard. And I think I know what my next really hard thing to face is.

Some Stuff I’ve Really Enjoyed Lately:

• Stranger Things Season 1 + 2 (I’m very late)

• Culinary Class Wars (rewatched, and hot take, I actually think Napoli Mafia deserved to win. His final dish was holistically, less creative yes, but more complete. He specializes in pasta. It was a finale about his life and his name. He made pasta. I don’t blame him.)

• Paul Millerd’s essay on travel and feeling and what that brings out in him. It’s a great reflection on what happens when you release the need to solve for forever and enjoy what emerges in each destination, place, and moment.

• Ava’s essay on affinity and what it means to actually love something. My favorite part, “The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.”