Vacationing to the Past

The compulsive need to revisit the routines of my former self.

When my boss asked if I wanted to spend a week in LA for work, my body tensed. The last time I was in LA I was essentially having an emotional breakdown. It was fall of 2020 and I was chasing a man who lived there but didn’t want to do long distance (I live in New York), which he claimed was the only reason we weren’t together. I’m not sure why I felt an all-consuming need to call him on this bluff—the utter lack of control that accompanied the pandemic, how rare it felt to meet someone I actually connected with, a willful disbelief that this man might just be making excuses to avoid commitment like so many others—but I felt an urgent need to be in LA to try and make it work.

There was another thing about LA, too. The kind of plot twist that is too exact for fiction, but sometimes happens in real life. My ex-boyfriend from college, who I’d dated for four years and hooked up on and off with for about twelve more—a person who knows me at my core, has shaped that core—was diagnosed with cancer. He lived about 3 miles from the first LA guy. We’d been out of touch for reasons I honestly forget now, our 20 year relationship has so many little potholes of not speaking it’s mostly a blur, but when he called to tell me his diagnosis, we began talking almost every day. When Chemo didn’t work and he was gearing up for an intensive hospital stay (which thankfully did work), I knew I had to see him. A normal person in normal times would have purchased a plane ticket. But neither I, nor the times, were normal.

Instead, in September of 2020 I decided the west was calling and drove across the country with anything that mattered to me in the back of my old Saab and essentially (without giving up my rent-stabilized Brooklyn apartment; I’m not that crazy), moved to LA. I was there, on and off, for about 8 months. And, without getting into too many details, I was morbidly depressed—chasing guy #1 who basically avoided me upon arrival, while comforting (and sleeping with) guy #2 who had long been accustomed to a kind of overt selfishness when it came to our relationship, now telling myself that was okay because cancer, while trying to keep my startup afloat through Covid, confined by pre-vaccine life and the anxiety of the 2020 election. I had no steadiness to hold onto—no real job, no real home, only the mirage of relationships—so I relapsed into the age-old drug of proving my worth via the chasing of unavailable men.

The thing that saved me (aside from close friends and family, twice-a-week therapy and 10mg of Prozac) were my routines. I created little trellises of repetitive habits to get through that period, pockets of joy that I nestled into. I went on the same run nearly every day, and the same walk on the days I didn’t run. I ate the same burrito and got the same breakfast, listened to the same playlist all the while.

And after I let my jaw loosen at the thought of going back to the city where I more or less lost my mind, this is what got me excited. The chance to live, once again, in those old routines.

I fucking love routines. Often, I’ll travel just to force myself into creating new ones because once I have them in a city (and you better believe I have them in Brooklyn in spades), they’re nearly impossible to break. I’ll rent a place for a week somewhere and immediately figure out what comfort looks like to me. By the end of the week, if I’m lucky, my days will be set—the grocery store I like, my favorite jog, the best place for a coffee, the spot where I like to write. Often, I’ll vacation to the same place I’ve been dozens of times before. I don’t like the process of figuring a place out as much as I like the feeling of being comforted by its familiarity, visiting a slightly different version of familiar than my usual day-to-day.

The other twist in this story which, again, is too weird for fiction but true to life, is that I met my now-partner, Ben, on Tinder in November of 2020 (that same fall), in LA, less than a month before I was scheduled to move back to New York. He was going through his own emotional upheaval at the time (a divorce) and was also moving back to Brooklyn, where he used to live. Though at least one in five people in LA or NY are probably on the verge of moving between LA and NY at any given moment, this coincidence, to me, felt like an undeniable intervention from the gods. Of course I also suspected this was a relationship of circumstance, helpful at the time, then we’d break up when we both got our bearings. But in-line with the unpredictable nature of this story, we’re still happily together three years later. It’s the most serious relationship I’ve ever had.

So I go out to LA and I’m on the phone with Ben, wondering aloud which hike I should do that day, although I knew in my heart and soul I just wanted to do the same hike everyday. “Why don’t you try <new hike name; I wasn’t listening>?” he asks. “It’s a beautiful trail. You’ll love it.”

“Yeah…no.” His suggestion felt like an affront. “I’m not here to try new things. I’m just here to do my old things.”

It was bitchy, but it also crystalized what I wanted from the trip. The guilt of not “seeing new things” had been mounting as the reality of the trip was before me, but the firmness of my response to Ben gave me permission to throw that shit away.

The run I did that day was the same run I had done the day before (the same hike / run I did most days when I lived out there). To a bystander this might feel boring. Maybe even lame. Very possibly, it’s disordered. But the experience of revisiting a former self by way of past routines is, to me, nothing short of exhilarating. Each day felt different, because it was bringing me closer to the mundanity of my life when I lived there. The first day I did the run, it was new and shiny—those mountains! the weather! It was exactly the way I’d idealized it back in New York these past years. But the second time, I noticed the horse poop everywhere, the dryness of landscape, I found myself missing the lushness of Prospect Park. I could re-live, a little more, the day-to-day awe I’d felt when I’d lived there, and the misery, too. And that felt wonderful.

There are specific moments on that path that have been seared into my mind—almost all of them disappointing. Desperately waiting for a text message and never receiving it, or receiving one and realizing it’s a stone cold rejection veiled in the illusion of kindness. Running to specific songs to remind myself I’m okay on my own, skipping to others to sink me deeper into the feeling that I’m not. I was an emotional rollercoaster back then and I wouldn’t go back to it for anything, but in the same way a rollercoaster is fun by way of controlled, time-boxed self-torture, it was kind of a blast to hop back in for a bit. Having that to-the-bone emotional energy slink back up, the kind of energy that, in doses, makes writing feel urgent and essential, but can obliterate writing entirely when you find yourself drowning in it.

In the three years since I’d been back, a lot has changed. I’ve made huge strides in my writing (which felt impossible to sustain during that time), I met someone I love who actually loves me back, and I’ve stabilized into a life that feels pretty okay. As I was running downhill on my last day, my old playlist blasting in my ears, I got a text from my sister. She had finished the novel that I had just—weeks before—sold to a major publisher. She said the ending made her cry. This was not the kind of text I was used to getting on this run. I immediately started crying, too, my trusted playlist carrying me down the hill, and a very new emotion on my old, emotional run.

The consistency of the routine in the backdrop of the trip—the coffee I got in the morning, the burrito I’d indulge in at night, the run that capped my days, the views that left me breathless then and now—allowed me to see more clearly how much I’d changed, not just the events in my life, but how I related to them. My obsessive tendencies and need for validation, for example, not gone by any means, but a bit more visible and directed at new things. Some, like writing, which bring me closer to myself. Others that throw me into familiar spirals, the repetition in new form making the pattern a little easier to spot and step away from. It was an introduction, in a way, of my current self to my past self, and a chance to observe the relationship between the two.

It might seem, given my style of travel, as if I’m experiencing the same things over and over, but, like most things that draw me in, the most interesting stuff is not shiny or even observable physically. For some of us, “seeing new things” can be much easier to notice against the backdrop of sameness.