I had amid-life crisis, prematurely. Mid-life crises have been popularised by middle-aged men held hostage by their lives in suburbia with an itching desire to Wife Swap their college sweethearts and 2.5 kids for a Harley-Davidson and tickets to Burning Man. I wasn't middle-aged but I was in crisis.
At 23, after a number of years battling with depression, a second family I knew nothing about, a divorce I had seen coming since I had training wheels on my bicycle but never thought would happen, and a few weeks in a mental health hospital left me desperately searching for answers in what felt like an exam room. It was like being lost and Google Maps was down, slowly losing your mind but knowing it’s on your person and leaving the big city to see the stars and still being blind to sight above you.
Many people are lucky and others are chronically, having a bad day, every day, for the rest of their lives. I was somewhere in between. Some people stumble upon the answers to life without much of a hassle and then there are those who have to summit Everest for a fraction of a clue.
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve asked myself why bad things seemed to be attracted to me. Heartache and pain just seemed to swipe right on my proverbial Tinder profile. Somewhere along the way, I began to find some solace in being a recluse.
I began to exist less and less in spaces I once frequented regularly, and became more and more convinced of the world that had existed only in my mind.
I’ve always been a master escapist. Running away is what I do best- a skill I mastered before I learned how to walk. I’m good at running and starting over. I leave spaces I once inhabited with little reminders of the person who was once there. Start a new life and adopt new passions and tastes. In the midst of the darkness that had consumed my mind and skewed my reality, I started to itch for a new landscape that hadn’t been consumed by my sadness.
Leaving had always been part of the plan. I hadn’t envisioned much of a life in South Africa as many of my peers had. I had no ambitions of getting a job, a mortgage, then settling down with someone who was agreeable enough and had good credit and then finally having a child. A child who distant relatives would be eager to welcome but unwilling to support financially. The book detailing how happy life was supposed to look like is as old as the Karma Sutra.
Many lives have been modelled after the passages of this book however I’ve never really taken to these teachings. I’ve always been inclined to do things differently and take a less conventional route.
More than anything, my life started to look like the lives of the women around me. Formulaic and lacking a sense of adventure and spontaneity. There was a lot of uniformity, a mass-produced life that everyone had and I, even in the midst of my mental depreciation, knew I didn’t want one. I didn’t want the lives of the people I was trying to run from so I ventured as far West as I could. I suppose, in search of something different- a different live. The kind of lives that have been documented on reality shows and Bloomberg Business. Lives of excitement, adventure and spontaneity. A life outside Johannesburg.
I had travelled internationally before but this was the first time I did everything by myself and was completely alone. From visas, buying plane tickets, walking through Terminal A and finding my boarding gate. My best friend wasn't seated next to me like she was a couple of years ago when we travelled to Europe. I'd get lost all by myself, spend $17 on a burrito I could have ordered in Cape Town for a fraction of the price. I’d buy a hard-copy of the New York Times instead of leaving the tab open on my browser and refreshing it every so often. I’d do it all and then come back to tell the tale.
It still hadn't sunk in that I was leaving.
I had left many times before, caught many flights to foreign lands and changed time zones more times than I cared to count, all from the confines of my mind and midnight reveries.
However, this time I was wide awake in a pressurised cabin and looking out of a circular window at the boarding gate I had just departed from. At 19:10pm, the engines and the wind began to play symphonies and an engineered orchestra took flight from the wings of the aircraft.
In the midst of the mechanical staccatos and crescendos, the Airbus took off and left my city... Johannesburg.
I landed in San Francisco and knew immediately that I wasn't in the Southern Hemisphere. It reminded me of Cape Town, where I had studied and lived for years, however it was different.
The geography was more exaggerated from what I could deduce from the Lyft ride from the airport to my hotel. I was used to seeing motorists manoeuvring into impossibly small and inconvenient parking spaces but the parking jobs I had seen in San Francisco, in terms of the skill required, were second to none.
One of things that threw me a little were the ads and how quickly my YouTube seemed to get the memo. As a computer science student now, I’m less enamoured with this but at the time it served as a confirmation that I’d actually taken a leap. So much so that American corporations wanted to sell me products that I didn’t need and services I didn’t know existed because I was in their demographics.
Ads for medication listing every symptoms under the sun, political ads for politicians I didn't recognise, urging me to vote for this and that- in all fairness it was during the mid-terms, and streets and cafés I could navigate my way through and around.
I didn’t have time to be sad and wallow in my thoughts, fears and lingering depression which was still jetlagged and so insignificant in its efforts. My past was behind me and I had become convinced that in America, there was no pain or crushing anxiety. People made billions of dollars here, they called themselves New Yorkers and conquered the Concrete Jungle and others won awards for music that had been on repeat on my iPod for years. There could only be prosperity here.
There’s something about America that makes you feel like you’ve conquered some great feat before you’ve actually done anything. There’s an energy in cities like New York City which, I have convinced myself after listening to Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind, exists there and only there.
But for now, I was in San Francisco and my quest to happen upon a billion dollars as I explored Mountain View and Menlo Park became a permanent opening line on FaceTime calls with friends and family who were curious about my adventures.