I come across a video of emma chamberlain explaining on a popular podcast why she no longer follows people on social media. I find it a sensible take until I scroll to the comments and see that someone has commented “LA brain.”
The video loops and the second time around it doesn’t sound quite as logical. Muting someones story. Following people back. Cultivating a following. It makes less sense the more you remove yourself from your day to day life. I imagine showing this video to my mother. To my grandmother. Widen the aperture outside of american culture, the internet, our generation and it becomes gibberish.
I start to wonder what constitutes as la brain vs new york brain vs sf brain. I scroll through an ig carousel with mood boards for different types of city girls. New york is high rises, yellow taxis and bottega veneta. Paris is red nails and celine loafers. LA is sunshine, erwhon and balenciaga. Different fonts of the same disorder.
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I return from a week-long trip to hawaii. I didn’t realize it until I landed on the big island how long it had been since I left new york city.
There’s something extremely disorienting about being bundled up in an early morning uber half asleep on the way to an airport, sitting in the same position in a tin can hurdling through the sky, and then 8 hours later being enveloped in the warm ocean. Nothing feels real when you’re plucked from everyday life and dropped in a completely different ecosystem.
In hawaii I’m a different version of myself. In the mornings before work, I sit on the table in the back porch drinking hot coffee. It’s a luxury to stare out into the ocean and see nothing but grass, mountains, trees and water in every direction. It feels like I can finally unclench my body, unfurl my mind and sit for awhile.
I once heard someone say that in order to live in new york city, you have to leave the city every 3 months. At the time I found it incredibly glib and privileged, but I’m starting to think there’s truth to the madness.
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New york brain is hyperfixation. I receive an unexpected and somewhat embarrassing email. In new york, it would have derailed my entire day. But in hawaii, it’s harder to spiral when just beyond the aperture of your computer screen is endless sky and ocean and mountain.
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A few months ago, I felt like everything was going right. I was feeling creatively fulfilled, work was going well, my life was full of love and meaning and I remember waking up one day thinking wow, it feels like it’s just a matter of time before something bad happens.
And as if i had manifested it, things started to unravel — nothing that anyone from the outside could discern, but slowly I started to wrack up little setbacks and misfires that translated to nights where I couldn’t fall asleep because I was wracked with fear of the future and uncertainty in myself.
I text M that I’m in my flop era, which seems counterintuitive to say out loud. But I’ve found the biggest source of tension in my life is when I try to fight something that is natural.
New york brain is the continuous grind for progress. I expect everything to be good all the time — I hit the right paces on my runs, my work is found to be valuable and flawless, my creative endeavors are met with acclaim.
But because I’ve set this implicit standard, it leaves something to be desired. An expectation rather than fulfillment. Successes aren’t as sweet because I’ve already baked them into my expectations. But disappointments, on the other hand, are always crushing.
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Two more videos comes across my timeline. The first one from one of my internet friends, stefanie. She’s talking about an unfortunate series of events when she is locked out of her apartment by accident. She ends it by saying how a few years ago that would’ve ruined her whole day and resulted in hysteria. Now it’s just a reminder that there’s a solution for most things and life can be so silly.
The second is an interview of rick owens:
I like the idea of reminding myself how insignificant I am by being in the middle of nature, by being in the middle of an ocean, or being at sea. There’s something very reassuring to remind yourself every once in a while that you need to take yourself outside of your own trivial little problems and consider yourself as a speck
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One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in my pre-school class at story time. As I sat there I realized that if I stared at one spot for long enough, my vision would start to blur and I could tune out my entire surroundings. And then if I blinked again everything would come back into focus. It was a fun little game I played with myself, zooming in and zooming out during story time to entertain myself.
When I’m in new york I’m zoomed in to new/york/brain, focused so intensely on executing the task at hand that I can’t see anything else outside of the finish line. Every day is a slog to clear the inbox, finish my duolingo, declutter my apartment, do the dishes. My senses are muted, my thoughts are jumbled. Everything is just action and reaction.
I am reminded that every once in awhile I need to zoom out. Look at the sky and feel the expansiveness of my surroundings. Realize that the world is so big and we are little and life is so silly.
had a very rough day at work and this made me look outside the window, breathe, and calm down my sf brain.
loved this so much! put my thoughts lately into very articulate words