Boston

Currently booking my travels for the next two months, and I realized I can count the number of weeks I have left in Boston on one hand. Even though there might have been some things I wished I got more out of during the past 3 years, overall I would say I don't have any regrets with how I spent my time here given the experiences I was able to have.

I honestly didn't think I would miss Boston at all, especially given my lack of community here. The closest thing I had to a community here was CG, but honestly I would be more fair to say that I went to Coolidge CG rather than say I was a part of Coolidge CG. Maybe it's just semantics, but I would say that most people there would view my participation in it similarly. From my POV, I consistently went when I was actually in Boston, but from other people's POV I objectively wasn't there a lot. Even when I felt more of a part of the community, I wasn't even included in the list of people that they split into separate CGs, and it's been accentuated now that the CG split and the make-up of it is almost entirely different from what it was a year ago.

Despite the lack of community, I do feel that I've built strong friendships during my time here, not just with the people actually in Boston, but also with people that I was able to grow closer to because I was in Boston (e.g. Alvina, who I wouldn't have reconnected with and gotten close to if Jiani hadn't visited and I now consider as one of my closer friends; Harsh, who I had known before but was able to really get close with once he moved here for his MBA program, and plenty others). But because I'm used to having close friends who are in different cities, my the close friends that I've made in Boston don't really tie me to the city like community possibly would have. Realistically, outside of 5-6 of my closer friends here, I'm not sure that most people would even notice that I moved. And it's not unfair given how much time I've spent away from the city while I've been based here. 

Regardless, I've been pretty checked out of getting to know any new people already, which probably isn't the best way to draw my time here to a close. If I think about one of the closer friends that I made here, Alex Wu, we didn't really get to know each other until the weeks before he was moving away from Boston, and he had already been here for 10 years and had a solid community here.

Another note I'd like to touch on, but one thing I learned while here was how fickle adult friendships can be. At different points, Chao and Jenny/Ruth were amongst my closer friends in the city, but for various reasons we fell apart. Especially with the Jenny/Ruth situation, it might be a bit presumptuous to say that I think I had been a good friend to them, but they showed very little grace to me as a friend for something that from my perspective really wasn't that big of a deal. The friendship with Chao was always a ticking time bomb, and honestly I was the one who ended up setting that off. But at the end of the day, things are what they are, and nobody is obligated to commit time to being friends with anybody.

While I don't feel too sad about leaving behind Boston at this point in time, I will say that I'll look back on this time fondly. Maybe when it gets closer to when my time here is up, I'll feel more sentimental about what I'm leaving behind, but also I'm probably too good at repressing negative emotions still, which is something I'm still working on acknowledging. I'm glad to have made the friendships that I did, and who knows if we'll end up crossing paths again.