October 8, 2019
One of my first Instagram posts is of a young Carly (from 2015) licking a salted caramel shake with the caption “Ghirardelli Square was sooo good, hmu if ur tryna move w me to san fran”. Truly art. Although this caption wasn’t super deep, it also wasn’t a super great translation of my super strong love for the city and how super serious I was about living there. And now I find myself living in my dream city-alone. Not exactly what 14 year old carly had in mind but close enough!
When deciding to take a year off from school before jumping into college, I didn’t care how or where I was going to live as long as it was somewhere new and different, preferably a city or somewhere with a beach. What I can’t understand is how I ended up with a place that offers both! It’s weird how life tends to just work out. Like it always seems that somehow, without much effort from me, things always end up good! Or better than expected! Which has caused me to often expect it. It’s been a pattern I’ve taken advantage of my whole life. For example, all those high school dance dresses ordered online from risky websites or foreign countries always made it on time and were amazing. Even being super late to class just to find one of my closest friends’ mom was the substitute that day and wasn’t planning on marking me tardy or absent. All the hardest days and weeks of my life have always clearly benefited me not long down the road. Including but not limited to not making a junior high basketball team that lead me to rule out basketball and eventually join my high school drill team (my favorite decision so far.) Or a boy I really wanted to go to a dance with being 5 minutes too late to my porch, (not saying that was a hard trial) allowing the opportunity to have the best night ever with the boy I’m now dating two years down the road. None of the original plans would have been bad at all and seemed like what I wanted in those moments. However, I’m really grateful things went how they did. It’s really cool how those smallest moments so drastically effected my path. Life quite literally always pulls through for me. So this decision should turn out the same, right?
I decided to become a nanny, and somehow life allowed me to be chosen by an amazing family in my favorite city. I love everything about it! I really am so happy to be here, but I’m only 3 months in and already counting down to the end of my year contract. What I can’t understand is why?? Why am I wishing away my experience that I wanted so badly? This is my dream! It’s because for the first 2 months, my only friend here was Georgia, the car the family provided (not even my car, I miss Sherm.) I named her after John Mayers song, “Why Georgia.” My friends and I have always loved his songs, and it seems for every important chapter of my life there is always a John Mayer song to be paired. Whether it be applied more abstractly, or in this case very literally. I specifically appreciated the line “everybody’s just a stranger but that’s the danger of going my own way.”
At the end of month two, a corgi named Snickerdoodle was introduced into my life and added on to my list of friends. I may only have 2 full time best friends, but I’ve also met a lot of people and walked up to a lot of strangers and gone out on my own every single day, even if it’s to window shop. I always think I’m going to save and then I get bored and shopping is the easiest and most rewarding way to get out of the house. So I’ve barely made a profit on the amount I came here with. The city really is so amazing, and it’s almost home. Almost. I just don’t have my people here yet-big emphasis on yet. Not from lack of trying!
With a desperate need for socializing, on the second weekend here I decided to take my first uber ever to an 18+ dance club by myself in hopes of meeting some fun party girl friends. Instead, I left after 30 minutes because the host of the night was a pirate themed strip club, and the only party girls there were on stage. I’ve met so many kind people, and I can’t even count how many strange girls numbers are now in my phone because “we should do something some time.” The kindest and most impactful and genuine person I’ve met here is a girl from my singles ward who told me about her experience moving to San Francisco.
Her first 6 months here were brutal. She left her family and friends, many of whom were on their own adventures in New York for new jobs. Here on her own, she felt she had made a mistake in her choice of cities. Often feeling unseen, isolated, and lost, she allowed herself to hate everything about San Francisco. She hated the way the Muni wasn’t the subway, she hated the way fog hung in the air every morning, and she especially hated herself for choosing to go off on her own with no connections or major plans. She realized that the hate she was forcing was only causing her experience to be miserable and she decided that no matter where she wanted to be, she was here, and she wasn’t going to throw away the opportunity of living in the city. She began fixing the way she viewed the city until it became a genuine love. There is no nowhere else she would rather live, the bay became home. It felt so good to hear that she had all the same feelings I do, but learned to see it optimistically and really make her time here worth it. My nannying contract is a year, and already a fourth of the way over. I don’t plan on wasting the rest of my time here wallowing in lonely.
Still, sometimes when I pass the teenage worker girl with a beanie at target, or a group of friends, or a pug in the park I get homesick for my people. Before I came my Judy told me that it was going to be so hard and I’m going to love it. It will suck when I see something so pretty or so funny and have nobody to tell it to, and it will suck when I’ve had the worst day ever and just need someone to yell to or hug. But it’s also going to be marvelous, and she was right. In these last 3 months I’ve learned more about myself and stretched my perspective bigger than I ever have or could have ever done at home. I’ve had lots of time to learn about my music taste, my choice of podcast, and that both of those things have become essential in my survival on the days I have little meaningful conversation with people. I’ve learned what I want to go to school for after this year. I’ve learned how to use apple maps like it’s the Liahona. I’ve learned that I’m good at understanding accents and broken English. I’ve realized how important it is to reach out to people, and when I’m feeling lonely it’s my job to get in touch with those I’m missing. I also learned I made the right decision choosing to live here. It’s a lot of time in my own head, but I like how my thoughts are starting to look. They are being reshaped and redefined and so am I. So for now I’m just going to stick to crying in Georgia in the target parking lot, make friends with the old ladies at parks, forcing snickerdoodle to pose in pictures with me, and keep telling strangers their outfits are really cute. And I’m going to embrace this year and this city and see what else I can learn.