New Attachments

Another “last day in Northern California” has rolled around—it’s the second time in two months that I’m leaving, from my friend’s family home in the Outer Sunset, with a heavy heart.

Both times, the common cause for my heartache is from an attachment I have developed to old friends—a pain that appears to exacerbate as our bonds deepen with age, to those I don’t see as often as I’d wishFor sake of my ego, I will presume that the sadness is mutual.—and a region of the country that was once my home. Despite America’s and my best efforts to forget that past, to no longer think of Northern California as home, we must both admit that it is impossible to do so. To change things you are not just deeply connected to, but that now live within you. California, to me, is like the family others talk about as wishing to separate from but cannot—you think you can detach from your past, start afresh.. but that is just not how it works.

There is probably more than a shred of truth in the consolation my friends and I offer each other, in these hours preceding separation, about the virtues of our geographical anti-proximity. Had we lived in the same city, we might have seen each other with increased frequency but the intensity and attentiveness we give each other would have been reduced. So, in many ways this dislocation is, in fact, ideal.

Of course, alongside the privilege of easier travel, I have tremendous gratitude for the technologies that allow us to bridge physical distance easily. Yet, there are far too many things in life that can only be completely experienced and felt with a person, in person—despite what an increasingly technologised world might wish us to believe. When departures beckon, travel or something far more permanent than that, I think that software only really eats the business world. Which brings me to the causes for separation pains this moment doesn’t share with the one from early September.

The corporeal part of my residency at InkhavenI got here a little over two weeks ago. ends two weeks earlier than it does for the rest of the first cohortAll of whom you can (and should) read here!.. While I was meeting the objective of posting every day in my first week there, I felt that I wasn’t really fitting in. I was identifying myself as someone distinct from the rationalist scene and somehow letting myself believe that this mattered. When I verablised this thought to a friend—in writing, to keep with the Inkhaven spirit, of course—I realised that I was the impediment to what I was feeling.

The week that followed this admission, I began to settle in a little more; and obviously this means new friendships happen, which opens the pathway to the separation pangs. I even got slightly baby-pilled, while at Inkhaven; I think I may have seen the happiest toddler I have ever seen and playing with her was also a much needed balm.

When I began blogging a little over a year ago, my objective was to post every day, to demonstrate that I can write publicly and effectively without any other adjacent expectation or benefit.

I never really did that until I showed up for Inkhaven.

I am worried, as I leave, that I will struggle to keep up with the daily five-hundred word posting. Meeting this objective does not require some superhuman effort; it merely needs me to stare at my laptop screen and pound away at the keyboard for a while. This is, of course, quite a miserable experience; but if misery loves company, then it is because company then removes misery. It’s largely how I have met the target.

Despite being a critic of rampantly digital human interactions coupled to the guilt of contributing to the internet’s noisiness via blogging, I cannot help but feel like something special happened at Lighthaven with this little experiment—and is continuing to happen.

I can only hope it continues to have multiple renditions and attracts more people weird enough to subject themselves to what would be a far more gruelling operation without a cohort and with no other Goodhartian expectations in pursuit of an audience or whatever. All that fades in comparison to just being accountable to oneself.

London is going to be cold when I get back; it will also start emptying for the holidays in the coming weeks. This, I suspect, is going to make the pain resurface and remind me that, despite all my issues with California—and America, more generally—it will remain one of my refuges alongside London. But, luckily, I have another refuge in India where I can see my biological family and reopen other blissful wounds while creating new memories while creating new memories.