I can't express how liberating that is. The other side of the casualness, however, was what felt to me like an elusive, noncommittal attitude toward making plans. I sometimes felt like I was standing on quicksand when I wanted to get to know someone better socially. Overall, though, it was a lack of roots to anchor me that brought me back east. San Francisco was a good place to explore the nonprofit world, which is what I did for my first year and a half out there, and, of course, many of my peers were benefiting quite beefily from the tech explosion in and around Silicon Valley.
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