the spring of discontent

googling how to freeze my eggs at the cusp of summer

When I moved to Montreal last July I couldn’t fully appreciate why everyone clung to the summer so fervently: barbecues all week long, parties on school nights. I get it now, after having made it through my first Canadian winter. I told my therapist recently that I can’t tell if I’m having a manic episode or if it’s just the seasonal depression leaving my body. Not that I was seasonally depressed; it was a mild winter, and my depression was the regular standard issue all-year-round kind. In June the city has fully thawed, everyone has shed and stashed the Kanuk puffers. All I want is to lay naked in Lafontaine 24/7. This year’s spring was so arid, it might as well have already been a new season in full swing. Gardens bloomed and died overnight.

I wrote about that first summer a year ago¹, how everyone was in love and thankful to be alive. It was the last thing I sent out on TinyLetter, where for almost a decade I stashed half-baked essays on thinking about death and people I thought I was in love with—the universal experience of ages 16 to 26. For a while I wrote a lot about TV (I was watching Friday Night Lights for the first time) and projected onto Lorde’s Melodrama (I was 20). The platform shut down unceremoniously at the end of February; I’d wanted to write one last thing, a Frankenstein's monster of a goodbye to a corner of the internet that meant a lot to me even if almost no one else read it. I never got around to it but serendipitously that last letter had it all: references to the end times, a breakdown of Peacock’s The Resort, me wondering if maybe I had never really been depressed in my life, I'd just never had sunlight like this, a feeling in 4K, the kind of ice-cold clarity you get from jumping off a cliff and into a freezing body of water. I could taste color. I held it in the palm of my hand.

In the weeks after I first moved I kept looking up and saying I can't believe this is my life now. Not that I never thought it would happen—I'm a very stubborn person, and when I decided a decade ago that I wanted to live abroad I always knew it would come—but I was surprised at the shape of it. Montreal had never been on my list; the ideal was NYC, maybe Amsterdam or Berlin as close seconds. I didn't think I'd be signing up for a new social security number in French. I biked across the city all summer, slowly collecting places I could call mine. My reading rock in the park. My neighborhood bar. My favorite boulangerie to get a Sunday pain au chocolat from. I fixated on potential; I had no expectations so it couldn’t disappoint me. Of course I fell in love.

A supercut of seasons: in the fall I found a job, taking the interview from a hotel room in the Lower East Side with my phone propped up against an ice bucket. I turned 27 on a delayed flight back to Montreal. In the winter I tried skiing and fell on my face. I scoured the internet for snow boots that didn’t look horrendous. It lasted forever; I asked myself why I left the best beaches in the world to slip on ice and trudge through -20C. My friends and I went dancing until the sun came up anyway. Then finally. Green peeping through the dull, dead patches of grass, poplar seeds blanketing the sidewalks in white. A palpable city-wide relief. On the first truly warm day we all rushed outside to watch the sun set after 5 pm. We’d made it, we were so back.

Except something in the air had me convinced I wasn't supposed to be here. Maybe it was the pollen. I chugged the Kool Aid a year ago, but the summer makes it so easy to believe. I had finally settled in and then it started feeling like I'd settled.

In Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022), a fresh graduate falls in love with an older woman as he figures out what to do with his life. At first Andrew's determined to follow his college ex to Barcelona (dumb) but when he meets Domino, a mysterious MHLF, he's convinced she's the love of his life (also dumb, but she's played by Dakota Johnson so I get it). She tells him he has so much more waiting for him than becoming entangled in her life. He insists she's his soulmate.

I ran away to New York again and again. Stepping off each return flight all I wanted was to hop on a plane right back to La Guardia. Why on earth would I stay in Montreal when just an hour away, I was where I was supposed to be? Here was perfect—I had health insurance and could afford rent—and yet it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to feel smart and funny and new. Sprint everywhere I went and pick fights in the street and do it in English. I didn't want to look at apartments for sale, I wanted to go to grad school. My thirties suddenly loomed large, and close. I googled how to freeze my eggs. 

I told my therapist this and she said, You’re allowed to say you want more. You don't have to apologize for that. I’d always thought of discontent as a chronic disease, but what if it wasn’t that I was feeling discontented, I just wanted more? What’s a half-step you can take towards that?

Cooper Raiff, who wrote, directed, and stars in CCRS, is almost a year younger than me. He has two perfect full length feature films out² and is releasing a third soon. I'm legitimately in love with him; he seems like the emotionally intelligent, tender goofball of my dreams but I'm also sick with envy at his fully formed creative vision and execution. He’s sure. He knows what he wants and how to get there. I have no notes for his body of work. 

Meanwhile my own portfolio consists of a children's book I've sworn for ten years I'm going to publish soon, a novel I insist I'm working on but that I haven't touched in a month, and scraps of online essays that don't even live on the internet anymore. Can I actually keep calling myself a writer when I've never seen a writing project all the way through? I don't know how I'm supposed to commit to finishing a 350-page novel when I can barely even commit to the city I uprooted my entire life for.

Spoiler, Andrew finally accepts Domino's right: they can't be together, he has to go live his 20s and figure out who he is, and she needs to commit to marrying her fiancé and being firmly planted in Adult World. She was so young when she became a mom; never went to college, never traveled. He doesn't need to find a babysitter or attend PTA meetings; he can point to a map and decide to just go. Is freedom of choice the dream or an illusion? Can it start as one and end as the other?

How scary, she tells him, but how amazing.

In astrology, a Saturn Return is the phenomenon of Saturn moving back into the sign it was in when you were born, marking a major change in your life's direction. It can start around the age of 27, peaks at 29, and lasts until about 30. You're allegedly, after the gut-wrenching roller coaster ride of your 20s, finally finding yourself, looking in the mirror and actually seeing, for the first time, who you are and what you want to be:

Saturn will have you realizing the ways you haven’t been living true to yourself, and you will want to break free from any self-imposed limitations. Saturn is a planet that is all about time and honoring your commitments, so anything or anyone who isn’t meant to be with you for the long haul may fall away during your Saturn Return. In addition, there is usually a lot of pressure on you to have your entire life figured out. There may be a feeling that time is running out, but also that everything is taking way too long to happen. There are no shortcuts with Saturn, so you’re often putting in a lot of extra effort, but not seeing the payoff until several years down the road.³

My timer reset when I moved to another continent. I'm in that weird space where half of my friends have multiple children and own property, and the other half are texting me to go out on a Tuesday (I'm texting them). Before the move I said I was going to put myself out there and say yes to everything because it was the only way to rebuild my life. Restart my career? Sign up for ballet? Solo karaoke? Saying yes has always come so easily to me. I say it again and again and again. I’m terrified that I can’t stop. Is pouring yourself another shot of baijiu a Saturn Return or a Saturn Regression?

I was born at the end of September, at sunset on a Thursday in Manila—a Libra sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I like to joke that the Libra in my chart is so strong it takes two Pisces placements to balance it out. We’re not known for our decision-making skills; I haven’t used my home office desk since I got it because I was obsessed with getting the wall decor placements right. If this photo goes here, it has to stay here. What if I get it wrong? I’d be forever cursed with regretting putting a faded movie ticket from 2017 where clearly a faded museum stub from 2021 should be.

I had my aura photographed in April. The woman who did it told me my heart chakra had been working overtime. Are you sleeping well? (I can’t remember my last full REM cycle.) Do you often try to make other people happy? (To a fault.) Something good is coming if you let it (I’m afraid of change but I know I need it.) I wanted to believe her, in this slice of a crystal store in a strip mall in Chinatown, even if it was transactional confirmation bias. I almost did.

In mid-June I spent a couple of days in LA to see family and photosynthesize in the West Coast sun. Why don’t you just move here? In the clear, gentle light it was tempting. No more thermal leggings. No more désolée j'ai pas compris. The ocean! Right there! It would fix me, I know it. I said, Part of me is afraid it would be too easy to move into a built-in life.

My life would probably be easier if I wanted less. I’m hard to kill but discontent might be the thing that finally does me in. Yearning is so dangerously easy to slip into, and I always want everything, especially when I’m told I can’t have it.

In the worst of winter, right before the spring, I reread Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, the special reissue with his handwritten reflections on the book twelve years later. He stands by a good chunk of his takes (I'd like to go back in time and punch this cocksucker) and humbly dials back on where he's been proved wrong (I have since learned that many of the best meals are in places with filthy bathrooms).

That was in 2012, six years before he died. When Bourdain wrote Kitchen Confidential in 2000 he’d already been a chef for nearly two decades. At the time of the reissue he spoke like a veteran, anticipating the slowdown of his career. Parts Unknown hadn’t even come out yet. He sounds hopeful in his notes. When I think of him now I go back to then: one divorce in, a new father, grateful for his life. He also makes a great point about being allowed to change your mind after sticking to your guns so fervently they basically give you an American passport. You can, apparently, evolve without apologizing for it. I keep falling asleep with the book by my pillow; maybe acceptance can be learned through osmosis.

I tend to mark time by summers: falling in love for real for the first time (summer 2015), almost moving to California (summer 2016), trying to die (summer 2019), trying not to die (summer 2020), crying across Europe (summer 2022), saying goodbye (summer 2023). Since moving I’ve had to explain, over and over, that the Philippines pretty much only ever has heatwaves and tropical storms. I’ve only ever lived through two springs; the first one was terrifying because I realized I knew what I wanted and how to get there, the second was terrifying because I had to ask, what if I got it wrong?

Unless—what if there is no wrong, there’s only where you are? And who says you have to stay? Seasons fold into each other, gardens bloom and die. They bloom again and again and again. The summer’s only just beginning. How scary, I tell myself, sitting in the park, face lifted to the sun, rounding out a year of change. But how amazing.

1. You can read the summer of belief here

2. I think Shithouse is to Cha Cha Real Smooth what Crashing is to Fleabag

3. Somehow it feels wrong to be quoting Vogue for this