A Manifesto on Self-Actualization

A week ago, I was flying to the Bay again.

We took off northbound, and even through the golden evening light and smoky wildfire haze, I got to see my wonderful home, my apartment, my park, my lakes and Elliot Bay and my Sound, little currents and shimmering surfaces, cut apart by boats into differently reflective textures. We were two hours late for some reason I don’t remember now, an hour left of sunlight, but it didn’t matter much since the air was too milky for me to see Mt Rainier anyway, even though I got a seat on the left side of the airplane (just in case we got a southbound departure that took us really close on ascent). I like airplanes.

I feel so much more myself arriving in Oakland¹ than I did three weeks ago when visiting Vancouver. For some reason, I approached that trip from the wrong emotional context. A three-hour delay on Amtrak which pushed my customs clearance past 1am didn’t help. I’ve been having a weird year.

SF, a symbol.

San Francisco is a place I love, and I missed getting to be all alone in it. I want to be left to wander, to explore and be lost, in awe of the world. Some of my favorite experiences have been that way, my best photographs taken in an empty subway station thousands of miles from home in the dead of night. Despite being so relatively close to Seattle, San Francisco has always been a similar experience, a far away feeling. I guess I still view it as I did when I was a small girl stuck in the south, unsure if she’d ever get to see anything like it again. It’s funny how deeply that nihilism infects you when you’re struggling with gender.

It’s nice to know when something is attractive but you don’t want it. I love SF, but I don’t want to live there. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in my whole life. It’s one of the most frustrating.

I’m fine to flirt with SF, to spin my little comet around it often enough to get a close look, to touch it, and then split back apart to continue my journey elsewhere. To love and have it not take everything from me.

California

I hate California. I’m an urbanist who doesn’t like to talk about policy because I’m bad at reading (that’s what I hope the photos are for) and there are plenty more qualified than I to speak than me. California, even San Francisco, is an absolute nightmare.

The South Bay is an uninhabitable wasteland, even if CalTrain did buy very nice Stadler KISS units which I flew down to ride on the first full-day of revenue service. (More on that in a future newsletter).

East Bay is home to oil refineries as far as the eye can see and bus schedules that are loose suggestions at best. Yosemite is such a hike to get to that even Ansel Adams doesn’t convince me its scenic views quite make up for the hassle.

Don’t get me started on Los Angeles; I’m saving that for a future newsletter where I can really let myself be upset about the state of our world.

I hate California. There’s a tweet I can no longer find that goes like…

San Francisco is home to some the worst people on earth, and if you say it to any of their faces, they will agree with you, because they think you’re talking about homeless people.

I’ve got a little mini-series going of the out-of-touch tech company billboards which appear all over the city, especially on busses, a sign of a rotting urban core, ripping of the social fabric. Somewhere in my archives I have a photo of a cybertruck pulling down Lombard St which makes me gag.

Still, I can’t shake my love for San Francisco. If you really want to hear my heart sing, ask me how I feel about waking up to an earthquake in the middle of the night and clinging to a girl who is my sister, listening to a two-level freeway hum us softly back to sleep, safe and sound.

Stories about feelings.

SF has a romantic attraction to me. There is an innocent thing I carry with me about it, a place where impossibly, I wouldn’t have to feel wrong somehow. I’ve spent a lot of time in SF now, seeing all parts of the city. I’ve seen naked gay men waving a pride flag in front of a Bank of America in the Castro where the next day, someone yelled slurs at me. I’ve been harassed on the platforms of BART in ways that left lasting fear every time I enter a subway station. Even finding out that idealistic view of the city was naïve, it refuses to die, no matter how much my trust is violated.

Arriving in SF, I feel whole, independent, and confident. I like looking out at the hills of Oakland glimmering in the dark. I like watching ships sitting quietly in the Bay, waiting their turn.

I like getting off a bus in an entirely different weather pattern than I boarded it, and zipping up the jacket I had rolled up in my bag.

Ask me about watching the sunset at Sutro Baths alone before flying back home, ritualistically touching of the Pacific Ocean, and taking the last MUNI bus back.

Stand atop Twin Peaks and kiss your girlfriend. It’s worth asking your Uber driver to race the sunset, and all the pain from the gravel it will cause her because she’s a femme and wears flats for a hike. It’s worth every bug-bite you’ll get on the surprisingly long way down to Forest Hills.

Grab a burrito at El Farrolito on your way to your hotel, with all your luggage, straight from the airport. Everyone will look at you weird.

Ride a tour bus across the Golden Gate and underexpose your photos. Stare up at those orange legs and marvel at the thing, it’s incredible.

Don’t be afraid of your own life.

San Francisco helps me relearn this, over and over again. I don’t know why it’s that place, but it is.

Beauty is real, and it’s evaporated salt water in the air which scatters the setting sun into perfect rays across your ferry, the cleansing feeling of light like you haven’t felt in months.

Inner peace is hanging out in a punk dive made of containers, getting a bit too drunk and drooling over a red Ducati 916. Spend the night disassembling your camera trying to get the motor-drive to work after 7 hours of inclement weather flight delays, you’ll feel great, I promise. Somehow you won’t even remember how scared you once were as you stumble your way to Castro Station from sunburning yourself in Mission Dolores and then go watch a rainbow laserbeam target an ACT UP triangle emblazoned on a hillside above the city. Feel the wind in your hair and laugh and ride a cable car with a surprising amount of German tourists who really like your outfit.

Look at an Art Deco color-theory ceiling inside the Maritime Museum. Dream. Be a tourist, be a local, just have fun. Do something. Don’t worry about it. Cry. Weep for hours.

Visit one of those awful East Bay oil refineries with a beautiful girl, and she’ll climb trees and kicks her legs as if it was made to be her swingset.

San Francisco reminds me that I am alive. I’m not 19 anymore, I’m not going to die stranded alone in the wrong body. I’ve lived this long and momentum is quite the advantage in that direction, I’m going to fight, and I don’t need to cling to every fleeting experience. I can ease off the gas a little bit and have the feeling find me.

Did you know we’re allowed to feel good?

They can’t take it away from me.

If I want something bad enough, I can work hard and take it. I can get on a plane and make sure my bag doesn’t have any liquids over 3.4 ounces and ask for my film to be hand-checked. I can charge my phone and let it die and read a map to get back. I can take up space and ask to crash at someone’s place and get a stick-and-poke tattoo. Feel your feelings fully, you only get to feel them once in your life. Get on a bus. See the city. Look at birds. Look at cars. Look at people.

Live your fucking life, whatever you do. Don’t get stuck, that isn’t real. Keep going, ever forward. The whole world is a show, just for you. Be kind. Flirt with your bartender and tip well. Read the room. Go home. Hang onto the feeling. Say thank you. Say “I love you.”

In college (thankfully a long time ago now) I expensed a $100 Uber to Facebook, who flew me across the country to Menlo Park for an interview, just so I could climb Coit Tower before it closed for the day.

The view was unimaginably beautiful to me, I couldn’t believe the air I felt flowing through my hair, the speed with which fog was splitting around buildings and dissolving within a block, pastel Victorian townhomes, and later imitation apartment buildings as far as the eye can see.

I’d fly back to my University thinking surely I could die now. My flight was delayed 6 hours in Houston and I almost missed my connection in Houston. They rejected me. I didn’t care at all.

The first time I ever rode the Market Street Railway I had no idea how to pay, just a kid walking down the staircase from Telegraph Hill to Embarcadero, barely catching the last CalTrain back to my terrible hotel and be cast home, to what I surely thought would be my doom. I asked the conductor. She replied “How long are you in town?” and I said “I’m leaving tomorrow.” She told me “Don’t worry about it,” I said thank you, and sat down right up front, listening to the heavy thing trundle along.

Impossibly, I got to stay with a friend who lived in Walnut Creek the next year. Her parents bought me a plane ticket and we just barely made our connection in Newark. I asked her mom to drop us off at the Walnut Creek BART, and I went to weep at Ellsworth Kelly in SFMOMA. I saw The Visitors and thought I was ruined forever, utterly transfixed, my pain shown so clearly I could finally let go. I told my friend I was going to the Castro and that she didn’t have to come with me, because truly? I was embarrassed. I just wanted to see the flag.

XOXO, ClaireViolet