things aren’t rolling off my back like they used to

when the honeymoon period ends

Love notes from Siel is a monthly-ish 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 —

It’s strange, how drastically your sense of a place can change. 

Sometimes a city grows on you. A place that initially felt forbidding and austere opens up, pulls you in — until you come to believe it’s actually welcoming, expansive, full of possibility, it took you a while, but now, you recognize its true beauty.

Or a city you once loved suddenly turns troubling, dark, even menacing. Where you once saw potential you now sense closed doors, cold shoulders. The quirky charm recedes and the unkempt disorder comes into focus. You’re a stranger again — faces look ugly, streets are uneven, no one remembers your name —

Whichever way the metamorphosis goes, the change elicits confusion, existential angst. Is it the place that has transformed, or is it you yourself who’s morphed? Are you finally seeing things as they really are, or are you simply projecting out your dark inner state?

I’m currently in Mexico City. It’s my fourth time here, and for some reason I’m not loving the place like I did in the past. Instead, I feel constriction and a closed-off-ness, an ominous undercurrent of anxiety.

Likely, what’s changed is me. Nothing bad has happened, after all — not to me, anyway. I live in a bit of a bubble, spending most of my time in the cosmopolitan, bohemian atmosphere of the Condesa and Roma Norte neighborhoods. Parks are pretty and plentiful, restaurants vibrant, streets charming. I have friends I love, hobbies I enjoy, things I like to do.

Yet the place just feels different. I notice more homeless people on the streets, more pollution, more noise. Even the panhandlers seem more insistent, more desperate. Of course, this may be how things have always been, the only change being that I myself, things aren’t rolling off my back like they used to. 

Is it that my long honeymoon period with Mexico City is ending? Am I seeing this place the way it really is — just another metropolis with its many pluses and minuses, its beauties and its blights? 

Or am I getting depressed again? 

Having spent so much time in Mexico the last couple years, I’ve tried to learn more about the place — both its history and its current politics. But becoming better informed, I fear, has not been great for my mental health. The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador or AMLO for short, is apparently an autocrat who’s put liberal democracy in Mexico under assault, as The Atlantic puts it. The police are corrupt and prone to squeezing tourists for bribes, the military powerful and prone to killing innocent people and illegally spying on its citizens. Drug cartels too are powerful and violent, creating “a culture of impunity” in the country. The New Yorker reports that since 2000, “more than a hundred members of the Mexican media have been murdered or have disappeared,” many after investigating and reporting on narcopolitics. Journalist or not, get murdered in Mexico and your killer will likely never be brought to justice. Mexico has triple the murder rate of the United States, and “of those homicides, only about 2 percent are effectively prosecuted.”

Still, it was easy to think of these troubles as happening far, far away — until last week, when Vice reported a guy had been shot and killed in broad daylight at a mall in Polanco, a tony neighborhood of Mexico City just a couple miles away from me.

Granted, the victim was tied to a drug cartel, and no one else was hurt. There may be a lot of murders in Mexico, but the killings generally seem less random than in the U.S. where people might get shot just for going to a birthday party, or knocking on the wrong door, or going up the wrong driveway.

All three of those shootings I learned about via a single daily email digest from the New York Times. Which is to say — the U.S. is no safe haven either. 

Perhaps the way I feel has nothing to do with Mexico City or even Mexico at large. Perhaps I’d be experiencing the world as troubling, dark, and menacing wherever I happened to be. Perhaps it’s only normal to feel the places we live in are dangerous and inhospitable, given the state of things at the moment.

I don’t know what the solution is here. I’ve already placed hard limits on the amount of news I consume, but to stop paying attention to it entirely seems irresponsible and somewhat reckless.

Is it time to move to a European or Asian country — the kind with tight gun control and no so-called war on drugs? Will my low mood lift then? 

How do you cope with the unrelenting violence of the world around you?

Love,

Siel

with Leche, my friend Lydia’s pup, in Condesa, CDMX

Three links you might love — a few bittersweet movies set in Mexico City I recommend:

1. Gueros. This one’s a freewheeling story about two college guys and one of their younger brothers who collectively take a random road trip through Mexico City during the university student protests in 1999. It’s fun, it’s meta, and it features a moody young Tenoch Huerta.

2. Camino a Marte. Two young girls — one sick with cancer — escape from Mexico City to go on a freewheeling road trip to the beach. On the way they pick up a random dude who says he’s an extraterrestrial and that earth is about to be destroyed. But other than that he seems cool? Meanwhile the sick girl’s coughing up blood, the well girl’s blithely hooking up with dangerous-seeming guys, and hurricane warnings are getting increasingly urgent —

3. Duck Season. Two young teenage boys are home alone killing time, playing video games and drinking Coca-Cola — when the power goes out, as it tends to do in Mexico City. What to do then? A spunky 16-year old neighbor comes over to use the oven, a pizza delivery guy refuses to leave, and fun ensues —

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