I have destroyed my life + a reading in Northridge

Dear friends —

I have destroyed my life.

My life as it was, I mean. I have a new life now, and it’s practically unrecognizable.

In the last month, I quit my plodding old job at USC and got a new one at a tech company in Burbank that’s in the middle of a hypergrowth phase. I moved out of my old apartment in the noisy heart of Sawtelle and into a snazzy modern one in suburban Burbank. I got rid of my PC and upgraded to a new Mac. I even got lasik surgery — so I’m literally looking at the world with new eyes.

All of the above actually happened within a single week in April. It was an exhilarating time, even in those moments when I gleefully wondered about my sanity (“Could I be having a manic episode?”) due to the utter abandon and speed with which I smashed up all the comfortable details of my life as it was and leapt recklessly into the unknown.

I realize Burbank isn’t exactly the unknown, and quitting one job to start another isn’t exactly reckless. Still, the day-to-day contours of my life are now radically different. I wake in a different room, go to different places, and do different things all day with different people.

If you remember, late last year I wrote you a note saying I wanted to destroy everything. Back at that time, a whole bunch of you wrote back saying you too wanted to destroy your lives. You were a restaurant manager who’d come to the realization you kind of hated your career. You had a day job in marketing but were thinking of getting an MFA in photography. You were striving for minimalism in the hopes of gaining financial independence and saying goodbye to the nine-to-five. You said you wanted to clean things out, and purge objects and routines and modes of thinking, and generally burn your lives down to the ground then rise from the ashes.

So have you done it?

What have you destroyed in 2019?

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Let me ask that question another way: How many times have you destroyed your life?

I’ve lost count. It’s hard to keep tally if you start young, like I did.

When you’re a child, your life is destroyed for you. Your parents decide to move and suddenly your life as you know it is over, no matter what tiny plans and hopes and dreams you may have pinned on it in your little child heart. My parents dragged my sister and me through three different continents and a dozen or so different cities and towns as we grew up—different languages, different school systems, different customs, different expectations, and of course, very different people.

For a number of those years, I was mostly in an American boarding school in Kenya, where the majority of my fellow students also came from peripatetic families like mine. They were born in one country, raised in another, jettisoned off to a third on vacations and leaves and furloughs. Every year, a whole bunch of students would leave, many never to return, and a gaggle of brand new ones would arrive, to stay around who knew how long. Our unrootedness was what we had in common.

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There’s more to this essay and it’ll continue next week for paid subscribers. Not yet a paid subscriber? You can become one now:

No pressure though — You’ll still hear from me once a month, free 💝 Drop me a note and tell me about what you’ve been destroying.

Lastly: This is short notice but tomorrow, Thursday, March 2, I’m the featured poet at Poetry Palooza, an annual event organized by the Northridge Creative Writing Circle, a student group at Cal State Northridge. I’ll read at 5 pm in Jerome Richfield Hall, room 201 (driving directions here). Hope to see you!

Love,

Siel

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you put Cake Time on your reading list -- or if you've already read it, wrote a review on Goodreads or Amazon.