[Original Newsletter Published on October 31, 2021]

Issue #004: Zen in the Art of Fighting

Welcome to the fourth edition of this newsletter from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I’m glad you’re here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous issues, you can check out Issue #001, Issue #002, andIssue #003. Just follow the links.

Props to New Patreon Pals

Shoutout to Meryam for joining the Patreon fam in the past month. For those supporting with your dollars in addition to your hearts and minds, I hope you enjoyed the bonus writing behind the paywall this month. ❤️

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Diving in with a Disclaimer

This newsletter is going to be a change in style compared to previous issues. I’d initially drafted a whole bit about the drive out from Oklahoma City to San Diego but decided to table it in favor of something a little less polished and more reflective of how the last few weeks in California have actually felt.

Why? Because if you ask me how things are going over text or DM, I’m likely to tell you, “Great!” because it’s too long to get into the nuance. This is where I tell you it’s, “Not bad, but not great,” and provide some of the nuance. Without further ado...

Disillusionment, Debunking the California Dream, and Drinking from "The Cup of Life"

As I begin to write this, I’m sitting on a barstool with the glass-paneled, garage-style window opened wide to welcome in a gentle breeze and the sunshine of a mild, 68-degree day. House sparrows chirp at my feet and hop around to peck at crumbs of overpriced toasts spread with either avocado, almond butter, or cream cheese. Leashed huskies and pugs sit docilely at the feet of their owners, whose phones are out, showing off pictures from their respective Saturday nights on the town. Meanwhile, I’m no holier than the rest of the bunch, with my MacBook Pro open and a Nitro Oat Milk Draft Latte in hand that burned a seven-dollar hole in my wallet. If I can bang out this newsletter without another backspace or moment of hesitation, that expense is worth it.

The coffee shop where I’m working is called Copa Vida and makes me think of the similarly-titled Ricky Martin song from the late 90s, which should put a smile on my face but doesn’t. It’s a joyful concept, “the cup of life,” even if it’s only referring to a cup of coffee. Melancholic, I’m struck with the irony of where I am working and how I am feeling. I should be drinking deeply from the “cup of life,” if not choking on it out of sheer indulgence. Instead, I feel like I’ve got throatful of sand.

The worst thing about Southern California is being struck by a bad mood in Southern California. Living here, I suffer from the incongruity of the illusion I always had ahead of who I could be if I lived here: that suddenly I’d have a tan on my body, a smile plastered on my face, and an overwhelming sense of zen or gratitude (#blessed) while wearing Lululemon and walking a well-behaved dog to a local farmers’ market full of organic produce and novelties like “local vegan cheese.” I’d rise early, meditating by the ocean, nourishing myself with fresh, home-cooked meals, reading and writing and moving my body, replete with serenity and productivity.

The first time I lived in California for any meaningful stretch of time (for ten weeks in the summer of 2015, for my MBA internship in San Francisco), I thought living in California would solve all my life problems. How could I be unhappy with a Philz Coffee across the street from my apartment, a job at Sephora, the company of my childhood dreams, and the long, lovely stretch of the Embarcadero a mere five-minute walk away?

I wrote about it at the time, and, in hindsight, I was unhappy because I was adrift and in transition. There was a lot going on that summer. I was twenty-five and trying to kill it at my internship while trying to figure out what I wanted to do after graduation (no clue). I was living with five other people in an Airbnb that was branded as a “hacker house” but was really a duplex with three sets of bunkbeds that would likely be illegal for hosting in 2021. Most of my MIT classmates were working for heavy-hitting tech companies and were able to shell out for entertainment and leisure across the Bay Area. I was being paid, but more so in makeup than in money, and while I did join some classmate-coordinated trips to Big Sur and Lake Tahoe, I don’t recall having a particularly great time.

One of the few silver linings from my summer in San Francisco: my fellow MBA interns at Sephora. They were awesome.

Still, I didn’t give up on the rest of the California illusion—sure, short of a jaunt to Napa Valley, Northern California had disappointed me in those ten weeks, but I’d taken an awesome trip to Los Angeles for a few days that summer that had me convinced that Southern California was where I’d really be happy and hit my stride. Southern California, even if similarly stricken with homelessness, wasn’t plagued with the tech industry chauvinism. At least people in Los Angeles, when posing and preening and making themselves up, were doing so with self-awareness or for the sake of a media or entertainment job. There was none of the Bay Area startup posturing, politics, or self-righteousness around “bettering the world.” Los Angeles was unapologetic but purposeful in its use of filters and pursuit of fame, sex, and selfish advancement.

I had started planning a move to Los Angeles at the end of 2018. I was over Boston and over my job at SAP. I subscribed to the “Built in LA” newsletter and started pinging my grad school network for informational interviews about retail tech and software jobs in the LA Metro Area. Those jobs would only be a holdover anyway—one of my best friends lived in Santa Monica and I told myself I’d wanted to be around there if I ever wanted to cofound something with her. I could see us getting together on weekends for brunch and brainstorming along the beach. It seemed paradisiacal.

A picture from a trip to Big Sur in 2015. This vertical drop here was one of the few things that scared me more than my lack of a clue for what to do after graduating from MIT.

Though our relationship was still new, Bug was down for the potential ride, having scoped out the cost of apartments, the ease of getting a motorcycle license, and the gym where we’d have planned to train. Fortunately, he also raised a very important point as he enthusiastically did all this research. He said something to the effect of, “If you move to Los Angeles and you get another Product Management job, if you don’t know what you’d rather be doing, you’ll still be miserable. The only difference is you’ll be miserable in LA instead of Boston.”

He was right. So I spent the next few months searching for a different role but sticking around in Boston. By the end of that process, I’d landed a new job at ASICS that, at the time, was perfect for me. It stayed perfect for about three months, got stressful for the following six, and was tolerable for about another year before I felt the same kind of itchiness of wanting to be doing something else. Except this time I knew what I’d rather be doing: training jiu-jitsu and writing a book.

Flash forward to 2021. Three years since seriously considering a move to Southern California, I am living in San Diego, a city better suited to my own temperament, interests, and tolerance for traffic relative to Los Angeles. Still, I am in the middle of reckoning with disillusionment that what was true for Northern California is also true for Southern California: California can’t solve my problems for me. I have to solve them for myself. Being in San Diego is not a birthright or inheritance to becoming some instantly-better, more perfected version of yourself.

The most painful thing about my current situation is knowing I’m living my dream and doing the things I wanted to do—and possibly things many other people I know, and many more that I don’t also want to do—and I have yet to nail down more than a temporary moment of happiness. Is happiness the thing that “zen in the art of fighting” is fighting for? Or is it more peace, patience, and contentment? Is it something else?

I’m not sure, but I would take any of the above. Things feel very hard right now even though I feel like it should all be fun and levity and gratitude. I’m in the heart of downtown with no shortage of fun places to walk and things to do. I’ve got a partner footing the rent expenses, cooking for the two of us, and putting up with all of my mercurial nonsense. I’m a short drive away from the beach, and after almost ten years of Boston winters, I get to spend the next six months in San Diego sunshine.

So why so melancholic?

I’m getting obliterated six days a week in the hardest training room I’ve ever been in, progress in both writing and jiu-jitsu feel like they’ve slowed to a crawl, and even though I’ve got an army of people who are supportive of what I’m doing and who I could call on at any given moment for support, I feel very lonely and isolated.

I took this photograph somewhere in San Francisco in 2015. It holds water for my time in San Diego now.

From experience in previous destinations on this trip, I know that the first month anywhere is hard. It takes time for me to let my guard down and my demeanor to go from cactus spines to peach fuzz. I wonder why I feel so uncomfortable in my own skin and lacking confidence in my own abilities—both athletic and creative—and then I remember that moving, professional changes, and divorce are the top three most stressful experiences that anyone can have, and, while setting new routines, I’m experiencing (versions of) all three of these routinely: I’m moving every two months. I’m three months into untethering myself from academic and corporate achievement as a North Stars for my own life and forms of professional purpose. If I consider leaving behind any new relationships and new roots I’ve put down in new cities as a form of divorce, I’m "getting divorced" every two to six months. Those stresses don’t even include the physical stress of jiu-jitsu or the mental stress of trying to lay literary golden eggs on a keyboard.

Closing Out

I couldn’t tell you what the goal or objective of this newsletter issue is short of being fully candid about this experience, in addition to anything else I said on the podcast or two that came out in the last month.

While acknowledging all the privilege and fortune I have to be where I am, and to be doing what I am doing, if I am being honest, I am feeling far from golden in the Golden State. No dream comes without a cost in blood, sweat, tears, and time. No great adventure and self-actualizing journey comes without some measure of frustration, discontent, and discomfort—at least not one worth reading about. I have no interest of sugar coating or gold plating the bitter or rougher pieces of this experience. While I'm confident that this pain and mood will pass, it's where I am today and what I felt compelled to write about this month.

Taken on the San Francisco Metro in 2015. Today, this picture makes me think that you can only reallyappreciate the pretty palm trees and sunsets after you've been struck with a few arrows (figuratively speaking).

By the end of this journey, my intention is to have lived a story and written a book that will inspire and encourage people to go after the thing that’s calling them—whatever that is—and to do so with no regrets. But to do that book “right,” I owe it to people—above all, to myself—to lay bare the unglamorous, unhappier, struggle-stricken moments alongside the moments of joy.

If nothing else, Issue #004 is true to the eventual intention of the book and, today, to what it might really mean to drink from “the cup of life.”

Until next time,

Erica

PS: If you've made it this far and you've got a hot second, reply back with a note to say hi, tell me what you dressed up as for Halloween, or say how you've been doing since "decorative gourd season" began.