who I am

 I'm reading Atomic Habits.  Not far in, but he's talking about identifying yourself as your goal to make the path to it.  LIke, thinking of yourself as an athlete to enable training.  As a scholar to enable studying.  Etc.  

Now I'm watching Borgen and I love seeing this woman bicycling to the capitol.  Her  ..not locking her bicycle is crazy to me, but the bicycling itself - that I am so into.

I need to remind myself that my identity includes being a bicyclist.  Not for sport, not even for fun, but for commuting.  It is a vehicle that I ride to go to where I need to go.  No nonsense, just swing on the saddle.  Though, truth be told the saddle on my bike is so super uncomfortable for some reason and I probably need to fix that.  I still don't want to bike when it's raining or otherwise inclement, but I am a bicycle commuter  I have the gear, I have the wish, it is me.

And I am a PhD student.  I really really really want to get into it and get finished.  Leave this behind.  I don't know that it will do anything for me but I'm quite close so why not finish.  

And then I can leave.

Today I swung by a friend's house for some things and I saw how shitty this city is.  It's not just the garbage everywhere, not just how horrible the streets are (EVERYONE is getting flat tires, even on brand new cars), not just how rundown everything is.  Not just how poor people are, struggling to exist.  Not just how much violent crime there is.  

New Orleans, I love you, but it is really nearing time for me to go.  

And I would like to stay in my jobIuntil that time.  Which means I need to keep my mouth shut sometimes.  I realize that I have intimidated the leadership, and I am fine with that because they are acting arrogantly tyrannical.  But this is just a job, it is not everything.  I am mentoring some young women, and others reached out today to be closer, and those relationships matter, but other things do not.  It's a job, with a paycheck.  It allows me to live my life.  Nothing more, nothing less.

I am a gardener and a vegetable eater, and I need to remind myself about that.  A friend invited me to a party on New Year's Day, but I think I'll just stop by to drop off harvest bounty then make my own hoppin' john and cabbage to ring in the new year.  

I will always carry New Orleans and southern cultural traditions with me.  I have loved this place so deeply, and I very rarely disparage the South.  There are wonderful things about life here, as first explained to me by Flannery O'Conner.  People here are wonderful.  Life is grand.  I have exactly zero regrets about my time here, and it has fundamentally shaped me into a completely different person than I was 15 years ago.  

But I am over muggy Decembers and hurricanes (not just the experience of the storm but paying over $4K/year for insurance on a house I bought for $140K because how else can they afford to insure us?).  I'm over breaking an axle trying to drive home and locking my car doors all the time while looking around (my truck really lacks value but most of the carjackings here aren't just for that - and we have SO MANY carjackings, with victims often murdered).  We're back to almost a murder a day, with so many juvenile perpetrators, and it's heartbreaking.  I can scream about lead poisoning and lack of trauma triage and so many other things leading to these problems, but nobody cares.  Little girls are shot by stray bullets when their moms drive them home and it's just so heartbreaking because it KEEPS HAPPENING.  

So yeah, I'm tapping out.  Jealous of my friends leaving before June.  It's time to go.  I've been a New Orleanian for a decade and a half, and now it's time for me to find another identity.

But first, the scholar in me needs to get in gear.