The face I make when I think a lot…
Life has a funny way of going full circle. After careful thought and consideration, I am moving back to the east coast. I’m moving to New Jersey to be specific and I’m looking forward to starting my new life in Fort Lee!
The Bay Area has been real. The Bay Area has been fun. But the Bay Area is no longer real fun if you know what I’m sayin’? The cost of living here is just too damn high and the financial pressure is starting to drip over into the way people treat each-other, which has not been nice. I don’t want to say anything more or less because I still have a lot of love in this place, it’s just changed a lot from how I remember and now it’s time to peace out and build a new life for me somewhere new.
I missed the Pacific Games this year in Samoa. There are multiple reasons for this. Some reasons I’ll talk about, others I’ll leave to dust. I did the Pacific Games in 2015 with great success, winning 3 championship titles, setting 2 meet records, and basically slaying the game. #PaintsNails — this was all unfinished business for the Pacific Games in 2011 where I missed out on that elusive Gold. My performance in 2015 more than redeemed my 2011 performance and made me feel at peace with the Pacific Games.
A big reason why I wanted to omit Pacific Games from my swim schedule was that the 50th anniversary of Stonewall Inn riots, which was the birth of the civil rights movement in the US, was being celebrated in New York City at around the same time in late June. This monumental moment in our fight for civil rights was celebrated in junction with the World Pride festival, which also happened to coincide with the International Gay Lesbian Aquatic Championships (IGLA) hosted in Flushing, Queens.
I could feel it in my bones that my Bay Area journey was nearing its end and I could feel myself being called back out east. I can’t really describe it. I guess it’s that “gut” instinct that Oprah keeps talking about. Anyway, I went to World Pride, and IGLA, and the commemoration of the Stonewall Inn riots birthing the gay civil rights movement, all the while meeting some really lovely people and establishing preliminary business connections.
I can’t talk too much about what my goals are and what I’m hoping to accomplish, because I don’t want to jinks them, but what I can say is that I’m excited about my life in a way that I haven’t been in a really long time, and that’s certainly something worth celebrating.
In 2019, with a comeback set on Oceania Championships in Fiji in 2020, my goals for swimming has shifted and changed. Inspired by the Stonewall Inn riots, I’m swimming for the hopes of progressing civil rights for the LGBTQ communities in the pacific part of the world, where I’m from. I want to swim for equality but what I’m really swimming for is hope, and swimming for change. This is why I went to New York instead of Apia, because I’m trying to see how I can reconnect with my sport and give it a sense of purpose that is different from before.
A bunch of serendipitous moments happened while I was in NYC. Not because I was looking for them but because the moments found me. I found peace, I got clarity, and now it has became evidently clear that I needed to be back on the east coast if I wanted to accomplish the things I still want to accomplish.
This is the start of another amazing journey and I look forward to every part of it. All the highs, all the lows, and everything in between. I hope you can join me on the journey through this blog or any of my given social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook).