Originally published in June 2021
I never wanted to live here. It wasn’t on my list, I had zero Manolo Blahnik fantasies—just the opposite. This city was too expensive to make sense, too crowded to be comfortable, why would I live here? Then, like most imports, I got a job in New York that paid enough for a one-bedroom apartment and I figured what the hell. Now, eight years later, as I pack up my four sticks of furniture that will fill approximately half a room in my new New Orleans house, I wonder why I’m not upset. I’ve been asking myself why I don’t feel bad about leaving one of the greatest cities in the world. That’s what it is, kittens, and disagree with me in the comments all you want, especially if you’ve never been here—that’ll be fun.
My conclusion is this: I’m too busy to actually think about it—and this is to my great benefit. Right now I’m trying to pack up my life, put everything in place for a new one, get a giant professional project off the ground, earn a living, and say goodbye to everyone and everything I love. I don’t have time to give a shit about leaving New York. The more I think about this, the more it’s the right way to go. If I really took time to sit with this decision, I’d change my mind.
It’s wonderful here. It’s the only place where overpopulation and complete reclusively can exist in equal measure. You can be in a bustling bar scene one minute and on your couch with a pizza, curtains-drawn the next, all without leaving a city block. Some people might find endless possibility and constant change chaotic, but it’s stagnation that gives me the creeps. I thrive in a town like this, a suburb would wilt me. I’m never far away from a bagel and a park. New York has helped me develop my career and see options I’d never know about somewhere else. I can fly direct anywhere I want and escape to a fantasy forest vacation in about an hour. I can walk down any street in Manhattan and hear multiple languages being spoken at once. There’s an energy here, to deny that is to admit you’re a very young, disengaged soul.
Obviously there’s plenty to hate about living in New York, and there are enough people on Twitter to break the finer points down for you. But I think my least favorite thing about this place is something that isn’t real at all. My least favorite thing about New York is the ease with which people lie about it. Film after film, television program after television program love to whip up an NYC fantasy like they’re shaping it out of meringue. You’ll see humans in real life do this too, any time women walk down a sidewalk four-abreast (tourists) or take photos on a rooftop without disclosing that the drink they had to buy to be there cost them $30. That’s not their life, that’s an Instagram photo they paid for heavily.
The way New York is portrayed is always an extension of an awesome moment someone once had in this city stretched out into 90 minutes, often with a healthy scoop of what they wish would happen thrown in. They can be elitist, portraying New Yorkers in ways that make it seem like we constantly throw dinner parties (why would we do that with these restaurants?) and think we’re better than other people which in my experience isn’t actually true. Otherwise why do so many New Yorkers move to Rye? Arrogance is tough to maintain on the Metro North. They portray people saying dickhead things out of cab windows as part of New York’s “charm,” but what’s really happening is that actual New Yorkers aren’t the ones doing the yelling—we’re the one’s completely ignoring it and walking by undisturbed. Our perception of weird is askew. A man dressed as Tron walking down 34th street while singing the theme song to Happy Days is nothing. A grocery store where two carts fit down the aisle side-by-side is insane.
Here’s the thing about those movies: you can’t smell them. And they always have thoughtful, jazzy piano music playing instead of the actual city soundtrack which is more like Now That’s What I Call Torture. It’s not always fall or Christmas here, and I hate how movies lie about this. August happens in New York, and not all of us can escape to the fucking Hamptons. Nothing in New York is ever crowded in the movies and people spend way more time in art galleries than we do in real life. Someone is always in film school. No one in movies is staring down at their phones but absolutely everyone is in New York. You never see anyone freak out about the cleanliness of a park bench or a subway poll in fiction, but in reality we’re either avoiding these things or carrying sanitizing wipes. And this is pre March 2020, mind you.
Movies never tell the truth about how emotionally or physically hard it can be to live here, I used to have to walk up a total of 150 stairs just to come home at the end of the day. Or how many completely normal things you have to give up like an outgoing mailbox or a private place to kiss a date goodnight. Or how monotonous it can feel to take the same train to the same office with the same people and the same lunch options in a two-block radius every single day for years on end. That’s why there’s so much fun shit to do here, if we didn’t balance out the daily grind with perks, this place would be barren of humanity.
Good or bad, what’s more real than either is change. New York is an ever-evolving place. The city itself will keep changing, so will the people in it. And some of the people in it are the people you know and interact with all the time. Forward movement is inevitable, matching paths are not.
I’ve decided that to experience living in New York properly, you should either be 25 and poor, or 65 and rich. Anything else will be very unfulfilling for you. In earlier years, while everyone in my ether was establishing their careers and probably Scotch guarding their romantic relationships for long-term use, New York, for me at least, had a lot more going on. But living here becomes less of a good idea when you’re single in your 30s and 40s and everyone’s partnered, with a kid, and moving to the outer rings. Whether we’re just not doing that or we don’t want to, it doesn’t make much sense to stick around.
Yes, wild shit happens here. But my theory is that wild shit happens everywhere, there are just more people in New York to change the odds. In a city of 8,000 people you might not have a dude who roller skates naked through town while throwing glitter and Jolly Ranchers at pedestrians. But a city of eight million? That dude might live on your floor. Real New Yorkers aren’t bothered by him. Real New Yorkers miss him when we leave.
You will change, the things you care about will change, and sometimes those shifts in priorities will require you to get the fuck out of New York. I used to think it would be harder to leave than it’s turning out to be, but now I think this is by design. I’m worried that 2am fireworks in June and the scent of trash despite no trash being present are what New York is using to get me out the door. I’m worried I won’t not want to leave New York until I’m really gone, until someday a year from now when I’m all unpacked and settled and living a very comfortable life with a washer/dryer and back yard. Then all of a sudden it will hit me, I’ll miss her cool nights and transportation options and thoroughly endless diversity. I’ll miss how much I can do in so small a space, how unexpected and sometimes serendipitous she sets up life to be. But it will be too late, and by the time I don’t want to leave New York, I’ll already be gone. That sound exactly like something she’d do, to me.