Past selves

Last month I had the chance to travel to two places I previously lived. In early March, I went to London for a work trip, and a couple of weekends ago I went to Chicago for a friend’s milestone birthday. It was a strange feeling to revisit these two cities where I’d lived and existed before but in the distant past, long enough ago that it felt like I was a different person.

Quick background:

• In 2012, I moved to the UK for a year-long research fellowship that was part of my surgery training. How I ended up there from Brooklyn is a longer story for another day, but the short version is that an opportunity presented itself and I didn’t think that hard about it before saying, “eh, why not?” which is essentially the way I made all major career and life decisions in my 20s. (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach, and I have slightly more intentional decision making heuristics these days, but having the luxury of hindsight, I can say that it at least made for some fun stories.)
• I was in Chicago from 2006-2010, for medical school. It was my first time being an adult (kind of) in a big(ish) city. I had grown up in suburbia, so I had spent time in the city before, but mostly on day trips, like family trips to the Korean grocery store.

There’s something about returning to a location after having been separated from it in place and time, both generally (the city or town) and specific places.

My prevailing memory about my time in London is of general penny pinching given that I was on a resident salary and living in an expensive city with a lot more free time than I was used to. Obviously, I was living on a resident salary at home, too, but I was working 100 hours a week (some weeks), 80 at minimum (most weeks), so at least my spending potential was timeboxed. In my research year, I was working less than half of that¹, so I had a LOT more free time to faff around. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because I also remember being pretty depressed. I think the root causes (not that depression needs to have a root cause other than itself, but in my case it did) were (1) having been operating² at 110% for the two years prior and living the epitome of “work hard play hard,” and then all of a sudden having to put the brakes on, or the air taken out, or whatever physical analogy best indicates an abrupt and rapid change, and also (2) the beginnings of questioning my career path but not consciously, and just feeling the discomfort of starting to acknowledge that I might not be suited for life as a surgeon, and (3) isolation from the community of people I had just started building up back home, which felt especially tough because it had taken me the better part of two years to even start to feel like I belonged somewhere.

Most of what I remember about my time in Chicago, other than medical school which obviously took up a lot of time and energy, is going out and (sometimes) being rowdy. I went out with my classmates, but I also had core friendships and a community outside of school. I also had a lot of formative experiences for my queer identity (which felt “late in life” at 22–26 years old at the time but now my perspective is that the value of learning things about yourself doesn’t have to be judged by its timeline), the beginnings of dissatisfaction with my career choice, and also just generally going through the sort of chaos that can happen in early to mid 20s. And also somehow building the foundations to be a physician — all I can say about that dichotomy is that this was also the time in my life when I was the most expert at compartmentalizing. My time in Chicago was also when I started to develop my interest in riding single speed and track bikes. Even though I had a car, I used it mainly just to get to school in the winter, and to rotations that were outside of the city. For everything else I rode my bike.

Being back in both of these places was like going to visit a past self that didn’t exist anymore but whose memories I had downloaded into my brain with a location tracker so whenever I passed by a place that they knew, or did something knew that they weren’t able to do, something inside my brain would buzz and a memory or feeling would be pulled up.

In London, I had limited leisure time since I was there on a work trip and was mostly confined to central London, but I did intentionally try to revisit some of the areas I remembered from my time there, and do some of the things I felt I couldn’t over a decade ago. Some highlights:

• Taking a black cab for the first time ever, which I’d never done when I lived there because it felt prohibitively expensive
• Walking through Liverpool Station and remembering the leg of my work commute that used to start there
• Walking across the London Bridge on a sunny day, remembering biking across when it was cold and gray
• Walking near Oxford Street and remembering a random memory of riding my bike in the dark in very early morning one time and seeing a fox cross the street and thinking I was hallucinating
• Going to a West End play for the first time ever, which I’d never done when I lived there because it felt prohibitively expensive
• Taking lots of selfies because I realized that I don’t have any pictures of me in London because I was so depressed when I lived there, which made me both sad (about how isolated and lost my past self had felt) and proud/grateful (about how she clawed her way out of that to give me the life I have now)

In Chicago, I was only there for a short time (Friday plus a weekend) but similarly tried to make the most of it and kinda did the same exercise I did in London taking a tour with my past self:

• Riding a bikeshare bike down Milwaukee, remembering the hundreds or possibly thousands of times I had done that ride
• Getting a four wings dinner, salt and pepper on it, sauce on the side, from Harold’s Chicken Shack (a meal I also probably had dozens of times in my life)
• Walking by the river down to Lake Michigan, grabbing a bikeshare bike and riding down toward the planetarium and soaking in that view of downtown plus the lake
• Taking the Blue line to Logan Square and marveling at the tap-to-pay and train time estimates like a country mouse lol
• Grabbing a beer at the Gingerman (the only bar I’d go to in Wrigleyville) with the only person I’d be there with (my good buddy who used to work next door), but instead of binge drinking and getting rowdy we each had one drink and lots of water and he cried telling me how much he loves raising his young son and that he forgives his parents because they were just doing the best they could

The other thing that felt palpable in both places was the absence of something, which was the anxiety of youth³, needing to feel cool and not wanting to be noticed for anything uncool, including being or appearing to be a tourist (god forbid!). I think I fully embraced being a visitor, and it was kind of fun knowing that I was carrying these memories that no one else knew I had. I took a tourist selfie next to Cloud Gate and in my head was like “hehe no one knows I was here when they were installing this thing.” (Coincidentally, there is another bean sculpture by the same artist that was installed on the block I lived on in lower Manhattan during the initial Covid outbreak, so I also have many pandemic memories of walking by half of a giant bean with its gaping insides exposed.)

• Past Selves
• Personal Reflection