Before I Land in San Francisco

When I was in high school, beginning to discover myself and do creative/professional work I was proud of for the first time, I often wondered if my life would ever change as quickly as it felt like it was then. But I can only look back on that as naïveté. It turned out to only be the start of an unending acceleration; every month of 2025 eclipses those months in magnitude.

I’m presently at a dividing point in my year, having graduated NYU, left NYC, and being on a flight to move to San Francisco as I write this. But I wanted to look back on what I’ve been up to this spring, since I’ve intentionally pulled back from the public internet.

I started my final year of undergrad, last fall, with a focus on friendships, and a goal to finally exploring NYC’s life & nightlife, instead of merely academic work. I spent just about every weekend at house parties & clubs, a dramatic departure from my earlier undergrad experience. This spring, I wanted to thread together that life with a creatively intense semester of building my thesis show, and live every day at higher intensity.

In January, I took my first trip back to Berlin since I studied there with my best friends from our semester. I got a new hairstyle, evolved my style, visited my favorite club & dozens of new shops & spots, experienced the German winter, and celebrated our time as friends. Since studying there, Berlin will always be incredibly special to me. Back in New York, I showed Toby around as the semester began.
In February I visited Matthew at Purdue for the last time, my sister in NJ, began building a new portfolio, and organized the 10th annual ITP Stupid Hackathon with my bestie Anshula. I re-met a friend for the first time since Windy City Hacks. I measured air quality in the subway, wrote my first art history paper, and 3D printed in my fabrication class.
In March I learned to CNC, spent time with so many NYC friends across picnics and algoraves, cooked with my roommate, and checked items off my NYC bucket list, like visiting the Transit Museum, Roosevelt Island, Astoria, Sunset Park, and LIC/MoMA PS1. I ran a mini hackathon for classmates called Hackstone. On the last day, I finally began my thesis project.
In April, my focus shifted to full-time thesis production, and many nights & weekends moved to the studio. I knew from the start I wanted my thesis to not (just) be a website, and to tell a personal story for the first time in my artistic practice. The project took shape, threading together my hometown, current politics, & technologies new to me, mapping toxic waste sites across the U.S. using LLMs to parse government archives. Halfway through, after already making this web tool, I enlarged the scope to trying to fill an art gallery with installations. I found an intersection of mediums & topics I’ve experimented with throughout my time at IMA: maps, AI, archives, physical fabrication techniques like laser cutting, icon design, AR, large-scale printing. I’ve never worked as intensely on one project before, but I felt like I owed it to myself to take advantage of art school and all my available tools to make something I’d be proud of. Throughout that time, I visited NYC’s wastewater treatment plant & water aquifers/aqueducts upstate, explored NYC Superfund sites, learned basic CAD & spray painting to 3D-print a Lachlan idea generating machine, celebrated a friend’s engagement, attended lavender graduation, met more new friends, saw art shows, and somehow coordinated my upcoming move.
In May, I modeled professionally for the first time, wrote my final papers & finished my last college classes, completed (enough of) my thesis project, gave a live presentation of it, then showed it to thousands of people at the ITP Spring Show, saw concerts by Allie X & Alice Longyu Gao & Crisps & Hannah Diamond, hosted Zane & Matthew & Theo & Jack, attended a flurry of graduations & goodbye parties, and packed/moved out of my NYC apartment.
I spent all of June with Matthew touring Europe: Porto, Lisbon, Bucharest + Brașov, Berlin, Paris, London, Copenhagen + Vejle + Aarhus. We’d long aspired to visit Europe after graduating, but had never taken such an ambitious trip together, and planned next to nothing before leaving. Many generous friends hosted us, we booked many next-day trains & flights, and we both got to see new countries and top our respective “best meal ever”s several times. I ended the month visiting my grandmother—94 years old—she wanted to try new apps with me, we survived a nearby tornado, and I got to swim in a Minneapolis lake.
July brings another month of travel: I started with a week visiting my parents in Pennsylvania and apartment-hunting on FaceTime with Matthew. I visited the toxic waste site my thesis focused on to photograph. I took trains across the Northeast: I helped my sister move states, saw family in CT, then two quick days to see friends in NYC. Next, I'm moving to San Francisco, to start my job leading design engineering at Watershed at the end of the month. Matthew & I just leased our first place together, in the Mission!

This year was bound to be full of excitement, between thesis, graduation, moving, traveling Europe, new job. But it’s gratifying to watch my slow building of how I want to live my life to maximize my favorite parts of myself. What I didn’t realize as I stepped into my own agency as a teenager was how much more agency I could later build (as obvious as it sounds as an adult!) through moving to the biggest city, making my own money, and surrounding myself with a wide network of friends who push me in magical ways. I’m so grateful for David, Anshula, Becky, Ahmed, Dylan, Dyllan, Poppy, Keya, Rachel, Kayla, & so many more.

The second half of the year is no less momentous but presents more challenges: transitioning from being an artist to startup work, nocturnal art school schedule to a 9-to-5 (ish), establishing a new function at the now-larger company, switching from New York to San Francisco, long distance relationship to living together. It’s many major changes, one flight away.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for around two years total, starting with summers in high school, working at Hack Club before college, then post-COVID-vaccine (what a magical invention), for long stints for Watershed through 2022, and summers since then. But I’ve never had a lease there; I floated from couches & spare friend bedrooms to Airbnbs & corporate housing. Whatever parts of my life/job/work were unsustainable, there was always an end date in sight, justifying marathon work sessions or non-ideal living circumstances. (My second stint as a teenager ended early, in a tearful post-all-nighter call to my mom I was too burned out to continue working there.) Since then, I’ve met so many more incredible friends and discovered parts of the city that bring me great joy. Yet in the last two years, living in Berlin then New York, I’ve grown into profoundly new identities, in my art-making, music-listening, out-going, and queerness. Returning to SF, I’m on the hunt for new spaces outside startup enclaves to keep growing personally and pushing myself creatively.

When I was in sixth grade, I would explore San Francisco on Google Street View to fantasize about eventually moving there. I dreamed of finding friends that cared about making things like I did. I got to visit for the first time in tenth grade. and began meeting Twitter friends & seeing it as a real place. As much as I have grown & changed in the last twelve years, the city has always been deeply intertwined with that growth. It’s remarkably full-circle to finally move there, to have found friends like that, and to build my next era in San Francisco. This time, not for weeks or months, but years.