In Defense of Leaving San Francisco

I’m sorry my regular posting schedule was completely out-of-sync this week. This personal essay explains why. At first, I thought of tying it to Natalie Barney’s “Woman Lovers, or the Third Women”, but the book deserves its own review rather than being shoe-horned into this. Also, it mentions rape-after-the-fact.

San Francisco isn’t just a place. It’s a mindset, a set of values, deep blue skies over Victorian houses, glass-walled buildings from which emerge the most modern technologies. When I see photos of it, I recognize it by the almost unnatural blue of the sky. It’s brighter than the sky in other cities. I know it so well because I’ve lived here my whole life. I used to tell people that I planned to stay here my whole life. Is your family here, they’d ask. Yes, but I wouldn’t call them that. I have no family. I’m a vagabond, no ties holding me down.

Tolstoy claimed that unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. No, because my family is unhappy in the way of so many families. Alcoholism and mental illness. My grandmother would stop them when the-people-who-gave-birth-to-me tried to beat me with a belt. They would scream at me for wearing a baggy flannel shirt because it was too masculine, but they’d call me a slut when I wore a feminine long-sleeved shirt that wasn’t quite low enough to reveal cleavage. I’d never even been kissed. They took away all my books, hiding them in the attic. They torn my drawings, of flowers and feminine faces, from inside my closet walls and I rescued them from their bathroom trash, trying to undo the tears and crumpling and knowing to hide them. Why did I need to study, asked the male, as he physically dragged and threw me to a car. He had to take a crying teenaged me to his brother’s house, where his brother’s children bullied and mocked me. Well, what else could you do to a child with disordered eating but force and control her? If I didn’t start eating like a normal person, he said, he would leave me at the hospital. Disown me, orphan me. I started eating, and studying more because I needed to get out. And I did. But then, I was raped. And those birth givers said they needed to retire, and couldn’t help. Oh, and also, I should make sure no one ever found out that I was raped. It’s so shameful, people would look down on me for it. Isn’t that strange? I think the only people who really do are them. Then they sold one of their two houses, to retire. You see, they’d not traveled enough and needed to do so, which is why they retired in their fifties. So I slept on couches, then worked remotely at a startup so that I could leave the country. Still traumatized, still with nightmares every night, made worse by the lack of a stable living situation. When I was stable enough to work, I did not share my address with them, but would get lunch with them. The male threatened me by saying he was dying because they couldn’t see me. I fell for it. He gave his wife a black eye in front of her sisters after an American football game. I cannot recall a day of my childhood when he did not tell his wife that she was stupid, usually many times every evening. It’s no surprise that she’s stayed. Then they sold the house they lived in, because they’d given birth to two girls. That second girl needed to buy a house on an island. Now they are selling their smaller house, because that second girl cannot qualify for a mortgage because she doesn’t have a full-time job, so they will give that girl cash to buy a house. She’s in a heterosexual marriage, and she needs a house because she’s pregnant with twins, by a man who’s broken up with her a few times and tells her she’s stupid in front of her parents. I’m a bitch, because I know I have the better education and qualifications. I used to clean their house top to bottom, while studying hard and also managing a part-time when I was fifteen and sixteen. I’m not sure why I’ve never been loved. Because those birth-givers have never said “I love you”. For them, their scant money is a form of a love. Families have the most appalling fights, usually about money. It makes sense, because money is the currency of love for those who lack depth of feeling. So when I hear about the repeated house sales to give a second girl a house, while forsaking me after I’d been assaulted and threatening to do so in light of an eating disorder, I email them: “Thank you. For setting me free. You will NEVER hear from me again. I hope you rot in hell.” That email was a long, long time coming. It felt so good to say rot in hell, finally, the thought I’d carried since I was that disordered-eating fifteen year old threatened with abandonment.

It’s not all bad, I’m grateful it’s done. I feel like I heavy burden was taken from my shoulders. If you think about it, the reason I probably have the best education in that family is that lesson that I learned when I was fifteen: that I only had myself to rely on. So I worked hard than that second child they gave birth to, and one day, I hope that work will pay off. And I love books. If you’re not allowed to read, you appreciate it so much more when you have the money to buy books, and the freedom to know no one is going to steal them from you. I can draw whenever I want, or wear a baggy flannel shirt without being threatened now, and I don’t have to spend time with people who are mean to me. I don’t have to visit the birth-givers when they’re old and sick, I think the deal is that the girl they’re buying house for will do that. Best of all, I’m free. Which means I can leave San Francisco if I want to.

The only time I’d left San Francisco was February 2017, and that was for three months. I went to Berlin, which is cheaper than San Francisco. Also, there was no (my) rapist nor any of his or my mutual friends there. Over the flight, I’d receive six (!!) messages from people asking me about the rape. I wish people would realize that they’re not all entitled to hearing a rape victim’s story personally, and that demanding it of her is forces her to relive it. So when I got to Berlin, I was so scared that I crawled under the tiny twin bed in my room. Then I thought fuck this shit, deleted and blocked at least 60 phone numbers, and started to get over it. Berlin was like me: a tragic past, scarred, broken, but it was alive. I walked for miles and miles a day. I bought a aeropress, but I never used it because I drank multiple coffees a day on those long walks. I’ve never smoked, but I’d light a cigarette when I was walking around at 2 am, hoping it would make me look more tough.

Not that I needed to. I felt far safer walking around at 2 am in Berlin than I do to this day in San Francisco, a city I’ve known all my life, at any point after dark. Here in San Francisco, the income disparity, the contrast between the homeless and the one-in-every-ten-thousand-people-is-a-tech-billionaire¹ make it feel a bit scary. Even if the sky is the brightest blue, watching that clean-cut tech worker wrinkle his nose (it’s almost always a he) as he walks through some alley that looks like an open-air market of things hauled out of a trash can is pretty dark. I’ve tracked a high number of tech people who regularly rape and abuse women². Some of those rapists are founders and/or CEOs of companies that my so-called friends work for. Not that those so-called friends care, because they all keep working at those companies even if and after they find out their boss’s boss’s boss is a serial rapist. It’s one of the most expensive cities in the world, yet it has less than a million people and smells like urine. The stench is literal and figurative. I have a set of outside clothes, and I take off my shoes at the entrance and also change into my inside clothes once I’m in my apartment. It’s getting to the point where it’s not enough.

Not a coincidence that that the first time I left also followed a certain American president’s inauguration. That that president was elected again says something about my fellow Americans, and what it says makes me want to leave. I’ve been daydreaming of leaving since November 2024, and this past week, it’s become more clear. Still, I have lived here all my life, I’ve had an emotionally taxing week, and I won’t do anything hasty. As well, I’m building a practice/consultancy, so I’ll give myself a year, two tops, check out a few cities, and then make careful plans to leave once I know where I’m going. It feels good to say this. As good as saying rot in hell did. I feel better than I have in weeks.

1. This was a number that was famously shared often at the start of the pandemic. It’s probably a bit lower now since I think some of those tech billionaires have started moving.

2. No one knows these names but me; the friends finding out is from other sources.