Shortly before moving to San Francisco, I was telling a girlfriend about my plans. She insisted I was moving to be closer to The Musician, but I swore up and down that wasn’t it. We weren’t in a relationship—I knew that. Nonetheless, I hoped he would be excited when I told him I was moving nearby. Instead, he got distant, which, for the most part, he remained.
The reason I gave for moving to San Francisco was that I was turning thirty, I loved the City, and I wanted to change my life. Seattle felt too passive and repressed for me. I wanted to live someplace stylish and sprawling, on the ocean, with diversity and culture and verve. Perhaps I also wanted some distance from the life I had made for myself in Seattle, which was more consistent with my security-seeking than my freedom-loving self.
I thought I’d come up with the perfect plan, which was to teach yoga and try and scale the hobby jewelry business I’d started years before into something that could sustain me. In the meantime, I needed a paycheck, so I found a position as a family assistant in Pacific Heights. The dad was a hedge fund manager with an MBA from Harvard who drank Diet 7-Up compulsively, forbade his children to touch his BMW 7 series, and seemed to harbor a phobia of avocados…I think it was the fat. The mom, also a Harvard MBA, stayed at home with the kids, volunteered on auction committees, ran long distances, and lived on dry roasted almonds, red wine, and little stashes of M&Ms she shoved in random places like a squirrel.
It didn’t occur to me that based on our respective positions, and dispositions, this was not a good match, because I was too excited about the new life I was making. Desperation does a good job of obscuring a bad fit.
I’d been there ten weeks when the mom came to the door of my apartment one day and told me her husband didn’t “get” me.
“The yoga, the tattoos, the organic food,” she explained. “I think he just misses our last assistant. She coddled him.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
“He just doesn’t get you,” she repeated. “I guess I didn’t realize you were so crunchy; I should have known that wouldn’t work for him.”
“Crunchy?” I asked, gradually realizing the implication: I was being fired.
“Yeah…” she said, like I was in on the joke. “You know, like granola. Hippie.”
“But we have a contract,” I said, realizing we had agreed to a year via email but never signed anything.
I looked out the window and watched as two spectacularly thin women walked by on the sidewalk in virtually matching outfits—tidy tennis skirts and stark white shoes. I recognized one of them from the dinner party my employers hosted the week before, which I had catered and served for them. It had been a peek into the world of the 1%. All night they spoke as if I wasn’t there. No one made eye contact or said thank you. My employers acted like they’d never seen me before, unless they wanted something. I’d resolved that night not to work there a day longer than I had committed to.
She was still talking. I hadn’t heard a word.
“…not a fit. I’m sorry.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Well, you don’t have to move out right away. Maybe by the end of the month?”
It was 2009, the peak of the Recession, and I had gotten rid of nearly everything I owned when I moved. Now I had two weeks to find another job, a bed to sleep on, and a place to put it.
It was a stretch, but somehow things fell into place. Since I had been fired, I qualified for unemployment. And when I told my friend Alyssa what had happened, she asked if I wanted to get a place together—I didn’t know she had been thinking of moving to the Bay Area, too. We found a two bedroom in Berkeley and moved in the following month. I got a mattress from IKEA that I pushed into the corner on the floor of my room, then added a bankers box that I called a bedside table. I was home.
No one was more riveted by the turn of events than Jack. We kept in close touch, sending one another long, involved emails that read more like creative nonfiction—or love letters—than basic greetings.
I always had lots of updates for him. In spite of my job not working out, I was thrilled. Life in the Bay Area was—as I had hoped—ecstatic and expansive, and I felt closer to my authentic, fearless self than I ever had. I was living a life by my own design, albeit on unemployment.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tender Human to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
