I Live Here: SF ... a look back at a 15 year old project and what feels true and not true for me in San Francisco today

Deep in the archives, a project that was so special to me to become a part of, a lens into how I've changed and stayed in the same

All photos taken by Julie for the I Live Here: SF project, 2009

Back in 2006, I moved to San Francisco for no other reason that I had known since I was 18 that this was my soulmate city. I began blogging and started my journey as a writer while learning this city from walks and talks, from reading books in cozy nooks. Life happened …

I started writing music reviews which was really kind of ridiculous because I don’t love music the way many people love music (I love lyrics and stories and dancing but I don’t KNOW music) and then someone I reviewed had moved to Argentina but then she needed to move back and she was considering subletting her place and I thought about trying to live there which never happened but in the process of considering it I started learning about tango (which I never got particularly good at) and I found a blog called tangobaby by a local creative and soon I learned she was starting a project called I Live Here: SF.

My best friend moved to San Francisco with me and we shared a North Beach apartment that we couldn’t really afford and I loved the French doors separating our two bedrooms that we would sometimes leave open as we talked through the night. After he moved out, I decorated them with these pinup pictures. I rented out a room through AirBnb when that was a brand new idea and I remember worrying that a family with two kids was going to be offended by this art. They weren’t.

Basically, she had this idea about photographing people who were living here in San Francisco at that time and having them each share their stories. I wanted to be a part of it. So she came to my apartment and did my makeup and we took photos and she asked me to take her to some of the places nearby that I loved and we went to Macondray Lane which is the real life “Barbary Lane” from the Tales of the City books and we walked down to Hyde Street Pier and we took photos and we became friends.

I shared my story for her project, circa 2009. And her project grew and grew. It had an opening at SOMArts and I met others who had participated. Some of the images hung inside of City Hall. She started an online group of women supporting women. Some of us are still friends with one another.

We lived at the corner of Lombard and Taylor and that bay window sometimes looked out at a line of people snaking down from Cobb’s Comedy Club. I loved those boots and wore them again a decade later to Sundance Saloon.

When we met, her name was Julie, and we both thought, I think, that we would never leave this city. But life happened. A sudden illness, a new love, a family, she moved across the bay, we tried to stay in touch, we did so sporadically, and then we didn’t. Last I heard, she’s got a different name and is living across the world now. Many of the people who participated in the project aren’t here in San Francisco anymore, but many of us are. San Francisco is a city that changes. We can not expect our soulmates to remain the same. I still love mine.

Today, I wanted to give you a look back … to share what I had written for my participation in this project 15 years ago and to let you know what I would change if I were to write this today.

I was one of the first people to participate in the I Live Here: SF project. Julie was just learning about editing photos and she took so many pictures and then she edited them in a variety of ways. This one was shared with me in four versions - different colors, different blurring. I remember a conversation we had back then about how hard it was to choose the right pictures for the project … and then a year later another conversation in which I learned about how her process had changed and it wasn’t so hard anymore.

Here’s the original, from my 29-ish year old self, seen in all of the photos here as taken then by Julie for the project:

They say that when you find “the one”, you just know it. Until it happens to you, this sounds absurd. But then it happens and you enter this entire new world of human experience with this feeling that can not be described in any other way than “you just know”. For those people who haven’t found the geographical equivalent of “the one”, my story may sound silly because I have fallen head over heels in love with San Francisco. I knew it from the very first moment that I felt the chill of fog hit my desert-born skin. I first came here when I was eighteen on a spontaneous trip and there is no other way to describe it than “I just knew” … this was meant to be my home.

The thing about “the one” is that you do have that initial period of infatuation when everything seems magical and you don’t believe that you can ever dislike anything about the one that you love. But that happens with all kinds of lust and passion. With the one, it’s different because eventually, you start to see the negatives in anything that you love. And what’s different with the one is that, despite any negatives that you may find, you still feel head-over-heels passionately in love. The glamour and wonder of that initial infatuation never fade even when reality sets in.

This was at Macondray Lane, which I certainly romanticized because I was in love with the Tales of the City books and pictured Anna Madrigal in there somewhere. Also I loved that shirt in part because I thought the repeated image looked like me.

I can see the negatives in San Francisco. I don’t love the weather here. I balk a little at the exorbitant rent that I pay each month to live here. I see the problems with homeless people and crazy people and confused people. I see that small venues aren’t always the best place for events and that we aren’t as diverse as we claim to be here and that our gentrification has positives and negatives. I see that sometimes we are so city-centric that we forget about how things are in the rest of the world. And you know what? I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because the beautiful sheen of this city has never left my eyes and every time I leave its boundaries my heart leaps out of my chest and stays behind. Because I can walk past a homeless person yelling crazy things at me and immediately see ten thousand beautiful sights that make me fall in love again and again every single day.

I feel my best when I am in San Francisco. They say that creativity and sexuality come from the same place – the urge to create and the passion we feel for the act of creation. And I think that’s true. Because I am always at my most creative when I am in San Francisco and I always feel my sexiest amidst the energy of this city.

What you might want to know about me is that I’m a freelance writer and blogger who moved here in 2006. But all that you really need to know about me is that I love every moment that I’ve ever spent with San Francisco. I love the random walks down Macondray Lane and up the staircases to Coit Tower. I love the sudden striking views and the hidden mural-filled alleys. I love the museums and the galleries and the boutique stores. I love the uniquely creative people you meet here in cafes and bookstores and bars, at open mic poetry readings and burlesque shows and tech conferences, online and through others who are here. I love the moments when I look at something and suddenly just feel gripped by the hope that I will have this love forever. I love that almost everyone who I know here feels that same way about San Francisco. And if you don’t feel that way about San Francisco, I really hope that you find “the one” city that is right for you. Trust me, you’ll know it when you do.

The funny thing is that I don’t think I went to Macondray Lane all that many times. It was near me and I would take people there when they would visit and I was touring them around the whole neighborhood but it’s not as though I just walked it myself often. I quickly learned to find the flatter streets for walking :)

And now, here, today, from my almost 44-years-old perspective, here’s what’s not true at all:

• I wouldn’t use the terms “homeless” or “crazy” now for all of the reasons that I think should be obvious. At the time, I had a lot of ideas about what society should be doing to help the unhoused and people with mental health challenges, but I didn’t have a lot of experience really understanding these individuals. In the intervening years, I got a Masters degree in psychology that exposed me to deeper, more nuanced ideas, I volunteered doing pet therapy in some of the shelters and temporary housing and recovery places here, I visited Glide to listen to people tell their stories in their own words. I don’t have answers to this complicated aspect of the city, but I would phrase my questions differently these days.

• In lighter things, I love the weather here now and had kind of forgotten that wasn’t always true. Coming from Arizona, I was so cold here those first two years. Then I learned about layers. I got used to fog. And now I struggle to travel anywhere else in the world unless it’s October which is when it’s too hot here and nice most other places.

• I actually have no idea what I might have meant by “small venues aren’t always the best place for events.” I wish I could recall the context of that thought. I love small venues and I think I always did and I don’t remember ever enjoying big events so this puzzles me. In the intervening years, some of my favorite events in the city have been at The Lost Church, The Great Star Theatre, Brick and Mortar, City Lights, Oasis … inside of bookstores and bars and private homes.

And yet, it was magical then and it’s magical now. My partner and I walked through there during long COVID walks. We delighted in finding a garden of plants planted inside of jeans.

Things that are both true and not true

Many of the things I thought or said or believed or wrote back then are still true but perhaps I just have a different perspective because the city has changed and the world has changed and I have changed.

For example, do I still feel my sexiest in this city? Sometimes. But back then I was trying to launch a blog called “San Francisco is Sexy” and I was in my twenties and trying to figure myself out and sexiness was something I was really focused on. These days it’s a facet of life but not a focus. And aging into my forties means reckoning with a body that is changing. But this is still a sexy city. I still feel San Francisco’s sexiness in the air at times.

And this part about how everyone I know here feels the same way about this city as I do … true and not true and I wonder if it was ever really as true as I thought it was. I am aware that I romanticize this city at times, as one does with their soulmates. It’s hard for me to understand when people don’t see it the same way. And so perhaps at times I dismissed those close to me who didn’t feel this way, the friends who have long since left this city to find some other love. And yet, there is a love that many of us have for San Francisco that is deep and abiding and you find reference to it in literature and film and song and we understand that it’s complicated and that maybe we’re romanticizing a bit of it but we do so with eyes as open as our hearts.

And maybe that relates to being city-centric too … I am still this way. I focus my attention more on local politics and art and issues than nationwide or global ones. During the pandemic, I was glad I was here and not “there” meaning pretty much anywhere else. I can get stuck in this bubble sometimes in ways that aren’t necessarily good. But I don’t know if that’s really true of others here in the way I think I thought it was then.

Oh, and the exorbitant rent … still true although after paying it every month for eighteen years I’ve stopped thinking about it much. It just is what it is.

We walked down to Hyde Street Pier. For the project, Julie chose a main image and put our stories into categories by neighborhood. She chose this photo and so I’m the only one in the “San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park” neighborhood. I remember it disappointed me because I lived in North Beach and wanted to be associated with that. And although I liked the photo, it wasn’t my favorite back then. I treasure this memory today.

Still definitely true for me:

• I feel my best when I am in San Francisco. Really, as much value as I find in travel, I always feel happiest when I am home. Because still true: “the beautiful sheen of this city has never left my eyes and every time I leave its boundaries my heart leaps out of my chest and stays behind.”

• The glamour and wonder of that initial infatuation never fade even when reality sets in. Sometimes you get in a rut with your lover and forget how much you treasure them and the one day you look over at the sun sparkling against their goofy smile or big orange bridge and you fall in love again.

• The “ten thousand beautiful sights that make me fall in love again and again every single day” still rings true for me. One of my favorite things about San Francisco is that no matter how long I’ve lived here, I regularly find new things to explore and experience. Sometimes they are things new to the city itself. Often, they have been here forever and I’ve only just learned about them. It’s magical every time. And I’ll probably never tired of cresting a hill and seeing the view of the water.

The reason we had walked down by the water in the first place was because I wanted to go to Musee Mecanique which is still one of my favorite places in the city. But Julie didn’t end up liking any of the photos she took here and only saved two, including this one, which I actually quite love.

I wonder …

Who I would be as a writer, artist, human if I hadn’t made that decision to move to San Francisco in my twenties. My deep work is in researching and writing about the complex relationship between art and mental health and I suspect that it is the city’s complicated, nuanced history with both of those things that really led me to finding that work. I came to it through lived experience of my own depression as a writer who healed in part through crochet … I honed it through academic research that perhaps I could have done anywhere although it was the unique program here at CIIS that shaped many of my views … but ultimately I think our paths are not just internal to what’s true for us or external to what we are taught but all commingled with the everyday experiences we have which are shaped by the city and all of the things that have in turn shaped it. I don’t think I would be even remotely the same me if I weren’t here in San Francisco. After all, would you be the same person you are if you had never met the love of your life?

The original I Live Here: SF project can be found via the Wayback machine.

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