Life Lately: An Update

I decided to step away from social media in early 2025 in hopes of quieting my mind and realigning myself. As so many others can relate, I felt as though the little spare time that I had was being drained through these apps that did not have any of my best intentions at heart. I was craving the feeling of autonomy over my own time, and I do think that stepping away has helped greatly. I also did not want to give any more of my time to the hoarders of our attention, aka large conglomerates such as Meta and the like, especially in such chaotic times as these. I hope this place can be an alternative to still connect with you.

Through this time away, I found that I have tended to attempt to remain a mystery, through my own fruition, for much of my life. I hope to share more about true myself through this newfound avenue. Below is an update to where I’ve been these last couple of years and what I’ve been up to in an effort to combat this silly tendency.

Times of Transition

Over the past two years I’ve been in a perpetual state of transition - I married in 2023 and moved to Pensacola, Florida. Before that I had been living and working for three years in West Sacramento, California with my cat Boo whilst maintaining a long distance relationship with my now spouse. I was a stone’s throw away from my parents in Napa at the time, which was missed greatly considering I had been living in Orange County, California for six years prior to that.

Though I’m used to moving as I’ve lived in now seven states over my lifetime, I still considered it a great adjustment because I had never lived in a different state from my parents prior to this. Napa, California is the place that I would call my main home and found it difficult to leave.

Nonetheless, I was also extremely excited to start this chapter with my significant other and Boo in a completely culturally and geographically foreign place to me. I found Pensacola to be a place of great contradiction, where it was bursting at the seams with natural beauty with its white, soft sands and emerald blue waters but where there was also great infrastructural decay and disconnection from its people to the land.

Gazing into the Gulf near sunset at Johnson Beach National Seashore.

In the same breadth, I began my three year online Master’s program through UCLA in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This first year focused heavily on programming and figuring out who we were as GIS students and professionals. I had no programming experience prior to this and found the first year to be quite a challenge. I also felt the classic imposter’s syndrome that many feel in the first year, and sometimes (or often) questioned if I could actually do the program in the first place. I am now about to begin my third and final year of the program and am looking forward to beginning my capstone, which will ideally be in something related to urban/environmental psychology.

For those curious in GIS, I see it as the foundation for so much of our world and life, though many do not know it. We rely heavily on maps and our orientation (through things like data) within the world. It is a way of understanding ourselves as individuals and humanity as a whole by looking at how things relate to other things geographically. I greatly love the earth and find that GIS is a good way of expressing that.

I also was, and still am, quite fortunate to have maintained my remote part time job working within the GIS realm from when I was in California.

A year after our move to Pensacola, we packed our things again and headed up to Maryland, which is where we’ve been for the last year. We are hoping to stay here for much longer. It may be one of my favorite places I’ve ever lived with its lush forests, four seasons, and maritime culture. I aim to get more involved in its communities, though I’ve struggled to find my footing after so much moving.

Looking ahead, I imagine that this year will be another moment of digging deep. I’ve found graduate school to be extremely rewarding but very time consuming along with working. The world right now also seems to be in a particularly fragile state of extreme change and tumult. My aim for this year is to maintain a space of clarity and peace without retreating too far inward while navigating these times. I hope to become more involved with my community around me, ideally through volunteer work. I also hope to find a better life balance with my school and work, and connect more deeply with others and the world. I’ll let you know how it’s going through these posts, if you’re curious about it.

Thank you for being here.

Walking through golden fields in the Isle of Man.