Happy wife, happy life

On cities, geographic claustrophobia, belonging, anonymity, and searching for something outside yourself.

Aug 2, 2022

I am not someone who can be happy anywhere. I know this about myself. Though once upon a time I aspired to be, I’m not someone who gasps for air like a dying fish or Fran Lebowitz when more than 100 miles from New York. The last eight years have taught me that I can exist—even thrive—outside of New York. But as much as I have tried to embrace the notion that enthusiasm is an internal headspace and well-being a product of routine that one is just as likely to attain in Des Moines, Iowa as in London, experience has revealed that I am only able to outrun depression where certain atmospheric prerequisites are satisfied. This realization is somewhat concerning when I contemplate rising home prices, wildfires, distance from family, and other factors that make settling in California a somewhat impractical goal. Where else could we go? Where else could we be happy? Where can we afford to raise a family that won’t also stifle my soul? That won’t stifle Ben’s? When we discuss over dinner, this conversation all too often trails to a hopeless stop, the kind where you fixate on picking up remaining pieces of orzo with your fork until your partner initiates clearing the table. Why are there so few places we would consider living in this huge world? Of course there are the practical constraints—professional opportunity, affordability, proximity to community and family. But even taking those factors into consideration, the list grows shorter when I consider where I would actually want to live.

It is hard to pinpoint what gives a place the requisite amount of energy to satisfy my hunger. The city doesn’t need to be big, but it needs to engender a certain sense of possibility—professional, social, at one point, romantic. I need to feel like the place has something to offer me, something that will be revealed and expand my life. Perhaps this is what has distinguished Santa Fe from Chicago (places I have visited frequently) and Berkeley from Cambridge (cities where I have lived) for me. Whereas I have always had the sense that Santa Fe and Berkeley have something to offer me, Chicago and Cambridge have always felt like places I am just waiting to leave.

The city needs to be set up in such a way to allow me to encounter that energy, to mix with it. What I once believed was a necessary condition for geographic contentment—the ability to walk everywhere—I decided in Cambridge is not sufficient if there is nowhere I want to walk to and, as in San Francisco, no energy on the streets (or, as is the case in certain parts of SF, the wrong kind of energy on the streets). And to my surprise, what LA lacks in pedestrian-friendliness, it makes up for in places to go, and a pulsing heartbeat that draws me out into the city. I’ve learned I feed on sidewalks and restaurants and public transit being filled with people who want to see and be seen—a high flaneur quotient. What fills me up is being surrounded by people who have moved to a place not just for a job, but for a dream, people who want to belong to a place and attract what it has to offer.

It perhaps goes without saying that San Francisco, for the most part, does not scratch this itch. San Francisco is a city of people who do not make eye contact, a city whose economic development is fueled by the invention of technologies that seek to eliminate the need for eye contact in daily interactions. It is also a city deeply divided, divided between the housed and the unhoused, the uber-rich and the desperate, and the former’s palpable fear of the latter has certainly contributed to the further erosion of any sense of urban camaraderie while walking down the street. I have heard it has not always been this way, but in 2022, the fortunate wear their Allbirds and nano-puffs and Airpods like armor, staring, if not at their phones, blankly ahead as if Google has already installed a virtual windshield in their brains. (In their defense, it is hard to fully embrace flaneur energy when one is also dodging needles and feces, as is sadly the case in a few (but not all) parts of the city.) Regretfully, I am now also someone who wears sneakers and a light puff in San Francisco—often the weather just demands it—and so I don’t really want or expect anyone to look at me.

In her book Flâneuse, the writer Lauren Elkin helped me understand the freedom that I feel in other cities that I don’t always feel here in the Bay Area. “A culture that doesn’t walk is bad for women.” There are only so many places I can walk to from my house in Oakland. Rockridge, like the suburbs, “reinforces [my] boundaries: the neat grid, the nearby shopping center, the endless loops of parkways.” Unlike my neighborhood and most of San Francisco, a woman-friendly city “turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging. The city is ‘life itself.’” Here in the Bay, it feels there is always a limit to my wandering—an overpass, an encampment, the fringe of gentrification—that prevents me from feeling like I can wander safely for hours on end. Los Angeles, though a non-city in the traditional sense, did get me going, moving, thinking, wanting, and engaging. It was a city that pulled me out of the house, whether on foot or by car. I figured out happiness in LA once I figured out how to walk there, a process that usually involves knowing where to drive to, where to park, and only then, where to strut.

The ideal city makes one feel both seen and invisible at the same time. The thrill of the urban experience is being invisible with the possibility of being recognized at any moment. A city in which no one ever looks at you is lonely. If no one looks at you, there is no possibility of being recognized. But increasingly I notice the once-common small moments of being recognized by a stranger—of one’s regular order being known by a barista at a coffeeshop—slowly disappearing. What percentage of my time spent ordering coffee is now spent looking at an iPad instead of the barista from whom I am ordering, a barista who is already taking the next person’s order as I click through the now ubiquitous Square transaction. No one asks for my name, since Square automatically strips my name from my credit card and prints it on the ticket, so that when my name is called out a few minutes later by a different barista, there is no association between my name and my face and my drink.

This is a weird transition, but Ezra Klein, whom I frequently reference here, recently had a fascinating conversation with the historian Anne Applebaum revisiting Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Their conversation touched on Arendt’s recognition that an epidemic of loneliness can be a precondition for totalitarianism. Arendt’s definition of loneliness resonates: “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

The experience of not belonging to the world at all. This phrase struck me, as it seems to speak to the same question that I’m wrestling with here—why is it that we feel like we belong to some places, but not others? Why have I never felt any sense of belonging to the town in Connecticut where my parents live and where I spent my adolescence and to which I return every year? Even though familiar faces are everywhere, why do I always feel a persistent sense of disconnection and adolescent angst, like depression will drag me down if I stay one day too long in the one place that I am entitled to actually call mine?

The language of “enviromental risk factors” is common in mental health. Stress, air pollution, and noise, for example, can all impact mental health. But at first I couldn’t find any research on the connection between certain places and depression in otherwise healthy people (how many times have I googled “Boston + depression”?), except for one study suggesting that geographic region may play a role in racial and ethnic disparities and outcomes in late-life depression. It’s commonly reported that cities are associated with higher rates of mental health problems compared to rural areas. My layperson’s assumption would attribute this to those aforementioned environmental risk factors, and, if I were ignoring my own experiences, weaker social ties.

But when I look to my own experiences, the strength of my attachment to a place and my sense of well-being exist irrespective of my connection to a social group there. When I’m wandering or running errands alone, some cities feel energizing to me and some do not. Indeed, some of the places where I have felt an immediate sense of belonging have been places where I was anonymous and knew no one: Milan, Santa Fe, the first time I visited Berkeley. And one of the places where I have been most miserable—my small college town during my senior year of college—was a place where I was deeply attached to a community and had intimate relationships, but where I felt there were no more unknowns for me to uncover. New York felt like my place long before I really knew anyone who lived in the city, when I would spend days off from school wandering farther and farther from my father’s office during my teens. And the more alone that one is, the more powerful mundane interactions are in creating a sense of belonging. Running into a friend on the sidewalk or recognizing the 7 am crew at a local coffeeshop (even if one is not yet recognized) create a sense of belonging to a place that can be a powerful antidote to loneliness in a new place. Indeed, more recent research suggests that big cities can actually help depression because they increase opportunities for varied forms of social interaction.

While I’ve never exactly existed on the fringe of society, my loneliest years corroborate Arendt’s definition of loneliness. And that loneliness — which differed from the delicious solitude I have felt during my time living in other cities — spurred depression, if not a predilection for totalitarian forms of government. While in law school in Cambridge, I felt I did not belong to the institution in which I spent most of my time at all, but because it demanded so much of me, I couldn’t find a way to connect to the city in which I was living, though it was filled with people my age who were not in law school. With the exception of the all-women’s gym in Porter Square and its denizens of grey-haired Cantabridgians with a penchant for low-impact aerobics, in those two years I felt invisible and detached from any community—a sensation that made me feel disconnected from the story of my own life. Unhappy in law school and detached from my peers, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing there. As Klein points out, Arendt can be understood to be “speaking in an almost metaphysical way, of belonging to a shared sense of meaning. Belonging to a story, feeling a place for yourself, whether that place is literal as in a church, or just conceptual, as in part of the narrative of your own country and the time in which you live.” Even in my loneliest days in New York, I had derived a sense of satisfaction from dressing up, getting on the subway, browsing in a bookstore, and seeing and being seen—I had felt like I was surrounded by so many people doing the same, that there was a kinship in our loneliness, that we shared the same values, and that at any moment my life could intersect with someone else’s and spark a connection.

During those years and after, Los Angeles provided a foil and an antidote to Cambridge’s isolation. It is a city that attracts dreamers and healers, people who feel their feelings hard, people with reckless ambition (see, e.g., “Hopped off the plane at LAX, with a dream and a cardigan.”) Native Angelinos are intensely proud of their city, open-minded, and casually sophisticated from having grown up in a place that is home to so many cultures. Compared to law school (where the bar is admittedly low), it felt like everyone was cool. And just being in LA made me feel like a cool kid, a sensation that I am always chasing as a former nerd. LA, I learned, is a town where friends and bands are always passing through, where movies premiere early, where trends are made, and life can look like Instagram. The city has a reputation for being superficial and for putting too much of a premium on beauty, but even as I have developed a deeper and more complicated relationship with LA, I think this critique is unfair. LA has a natural beauty, a beauty that shines through despite the monstrosity of its human sprawl, and it is this constant juxtaposition that creates its melancolic allure. Perhaps that is why I feel so tender towards the place, because it’s a place that I developed real friendships and a real, grounded life, though it is disdained for its frivolity. It’s a place where I felt the narrative of my life progressing. I still haven’t grown tired of the beauty of its sunsets or its plant-filled restaurants, the peaks of the San Gabriel mountains peaking out behind downtown. And it was a city where I felt comfortable being alone.

It’s ironic that I felt in some ways more assured of my own existence when I lived in New York and LA, even though those were more solitary years of my life in which I spent copious amount of times wandering alone. Perhaps reinforcing my own visibility to strangers was a way of making up for the fact that I wasn’t guaranteed access to intimate relationships on a daily basis. Now of course I am seen deeply on a daily basis, with makeup and without, dressed up and in ill-fitting shorts from 2006 on the couch at night. However, there are many days when I am not seen by anyone else, and I feel I have lost an identity that exists in the world, having lost access to a commute and an office. I have very few casual social interactions these days—no morning banter with the doorman at my office, no sheepishness about ordering the same cookie multiple days in a row from the same barista, no eye contact on public transit. I socialize primarily with friends that either my husband or I have known for years. And so while I belong to a community, once again, I find myself feeling like I do not belong to this place—where my daily routine of remote work, YouTube workouts, and dinner with Ben could most days be easily replicated on Mars.

Yet, I’m happy. Perhaps happier than I have ever been, though the happiness takes a different form than the extreme highs of my twenties (a text back from a crush!) that were so often cancelled out by extreme lows. A large part of my thirties, which have coincidentally coincided with a global pandemic, has been about relinquishing the need to be seen by others in order to know who I am

—to feel just as certain in who I am when I am sitting on the couch writing with a dog at my feet as I do when I am strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk on my way to meet friends for dinner. Am I ready to move to Des Moines? No. Am I actively trying to figure out how to find a way to belong to the Bay Area, and to find more opportunities for casual social interactions? Yes. Is the search for a place where one can be happy a valid one? As much as I want to believe happiness is a state of mind, or happiness is a home with Ben, if our lived experience suggests that some places make us come alive, why would we live anywhere else?

I’m curious to hear where you have felt alive and what places have made you feel spiritually dead inside. Comment below and if you enjoy reading Turtleneck Season, please share with a friend!