Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who used to live in Los Angeles but is currently traveling around. If you love the notes, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
We’re now well over half way through 2022. So tell me: What life-changing decisions have you made so far this year?
Because dramatic decisions seem to have become the norm. In May alone, 4.3 million more Americans joined The Great Resignation. Others got married — or finally left their marriages. And yet others, not willing to live in a place where abortion had suddenly become illegal, decided to move across or even out of the country.
What about you? Have you swapped out careers, lovers, cities?
Or just as importantly, what life-changing decisions have you chosen not to make?
What’s made you leave, and what’s made you stay?
Leaving gets the attention, but staying shapes your life dramatically too. That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately as a new resident of Mexico City, where I’ve committed to staying at least ten weeks. Yes, I realize ten weeks isn’t a terrible long time to live in a place — but it’s longer than I’ve stayed anywhere in the last two years. Which means it’s long enough to start bringing up a lot of existential questions.
Namely: What am I doing here?
Which leads to: Why am I here?
Which leads to: What is the purpose of my existence?
This isn’t, of course, the first time such questions have come up for me — and I’m guessing they come up for you too from time to time, with varying degrees of urgency.
Two years ago, when I decided to leave Los Angeles, I’d come to the conclusion that why I’d stayed in L.A. so long was largely due to habit — and decided that wasn’t enough of a reason to justify continuing to stay. So I up and left, with the vague goal to figure out if there was a place I might like better. But as I traveled, that goal shifted, morphed, warped. Soon I found myself traveling just for the sake of traveling, exploring new places without regard to whether or not I had any interest in living there long term.
My questions changed. Where do I want to settle down became what is the purpose of settling down? Is this a good place to live became why would I live anywhere when I can keep traveling elsewhere?
Now, fourteen countries and dozens of cities into nomad life, my desires have shifted again. I’ve hit what many fellow wanderers call travel fatigue — when the possibility of new cities, new attractions, and new once-in-a-lifetime things no longer inspire the same awe and excitement that they used to. It’s a sign to stay put until the desire to wander returns — or doesn’t, as the case may be.
So here I am, staying put in Mexico City, asking the very same questions I started out with.
What am I doing here?
Why am I here?
What is the purpose of my existence?
A couple weeks ago I had a long chat with a friend, a fellow solo traveler. She and I are in one of the most privileged — and most first-world anxiety-provoking — of situations. On the one hand, we have the freedom to live wherever we want to live. Bali, Barcelona, Boston — if we wanted to be there, there’s no reason we couldn’t fly there next month. On the other hand, we have no compelling reason to be anywhere. No one and nothing needs us to be in a certain place. Our jobs are remote, our friends and families scattered across the globe, our social responsibilities as single, childfree women untied to any particular location.
In the best moments, this way of living feels liberating, thrilling, exhilarating. In the worst, scary, vacuous, purposeless.
How do you choose to be somewhere, when there’s nowhere you have to be?
What does it mean to live in one place?
Of course, you don’t have to have lived peripatetically to experience moments that feel scary, vacuous, and purposeless. I felt those emotions from time to time before I ever left L.A. Maybe what I’m feeling, what we’re all feeling, is just life — navigating the push-pull between the freedom to do what we want and the desire to feel we’re needed.
And maybe it matters less than we think, where we live. We agonize over these so-called big life choices, trying to make the right selection, weighing pros and cons, squinting hard into the future to visualize our possibilities. Yet when it comes down to it, perhaps the place we choose to live is simply that — a place we choose to live. No magic will come of choosing the right spot, which in any case, doesn’t exist.
Wherever we go, there we’ll be — and whatever happens, however we change, will probably be strangely different from what we imagined.
Love,
Siel
Three links you might like:
Lupita Limón Corrales makes the case for staying in Los Angeles — though she notes that “for many, L.A. stopped being worth the price and trouble when social lives and careers were put on pause against an apocalyptic backdrop of illness and wildfires.”
Dave Eggers went to investigate why his novel got banned in South Dakota. “in Rapid City, young people aged 16, 17 and 18 can legally have sex, and can legally be married (an arrangement that often includes sex), but they’re not supposed to read about sex in books.”
Mexico City, earthquakes, and deep time sickness. ”In Mexico, people who are “tocado” — “touched” — reveal that geological time can emerge through fissures in the land to alter the way we relate to our homes, cities and even ourselves.”