After a couple weeks in New York, I was anxious to get back to California, to my one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, my monolithic 30" monitor setup, and to continue doing the only thing I really knew how to do for income--play online poker. "And then," as the song goes, "Oh so suddenly, none of these things were mine. Then all that I had left was time, lots of time."
I remember that stunned feeling of helplessness and confusion as I heard the news on Friday, April 15th, wandering out into Central Park thinking, "this can't be life." Black Friday put an abrupt end to the universe I had inhabited full time since 2005. Or so I thought.
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Once the anguish and confusion had dissipated, dwelling on my fate for months, stressing the future, I eventually discovered that even extremely trying situations can be improved with a few simple adjustments. I can't say I am happier to be exiled in Mexico than I would have been back in Santa Monica, but I now appreciate how it took me out of my comfort zone and forced me to face a different reality. I think it's a lesson I will carry with me--when things seem smooth and lovely, be prepared to adapt if it all comes crashing down.
My father recently decided to start reading my blog, and here was his take on one recent entry:
"It is ironic that you feel dislocated in Mexico or Canada when you come from a family that has been dislocated and did well. Oma had no choice, your mother did. We live in a country of relocation. How many people actually started in Santa Monica? I wonder what it was like in NY after Berlin. Never asked."He's right. During the time I was lamenting my options in the after Black Friday, I would occasionally darkly joke, "my grandparents fled Nazi Germany, I really should not be so upset about moving to the Pacific Northwest."
One of my grandmothers ("Safta") hid out in a dank, underground basement in the Ukraine for years during WWII. I've seen the bunker. My other grandmother ("Oma") was a passenger on the MS St. Louis AKA the Voyage of the Damned. Even knowing the details, it's hard to comprehend what it must have been like to be a Jewish refugee during the Holocaust.
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| Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis |
I am reluctant to trivialize the struggle of my ancestors by comparing it to mine--the stakes they were playing for were no less than life and death, fleeing their homeland in order to preserve their lives and their history. I simply needed to find a new country to set up a computer and click buttons again.
But there is a parallel there, a common takeaway from both situations: When someone attacks your existence, your essence--that thing that makes you what you are--you find ways to fight it, to carry on, and to survive.