new york city has been enough
surviving in a city requires you to rank your shit sandwiches before you puke
When I read my past post about Los Angeles being enough, even though I myself literally wrote it — I inhabit the spirit of someone who wondered to themselves, what happened after I wrote that? Six months passed. When I arrived in New York, what fate was waiting me? Did I find what I was looking for?
It’s so funny, because whether or not someone wanted to know the answer for real, I realized I needed to write out my answer. It felt long overdue.
Well, I’m happy to say that somehow I did. It was not easy, but before I got here, I gave myself a pep talk. I told myself: Life is fucking hard, and this is the shit sandwich — Mark Manson’s favorite term — that you choose to eat.
Before I got here, I would visualize daily the hardship that my choice would entail. I would close my eyes and picture the pee smell in the subway, walking around lonely and sad at night, hate-stalking every new writer acquaintance I met at Brooklyn poetry readings, watching dinner bills rack up even though I’d traded gas prices for lower transportation costs, missing my car, hating the winter cold, and not knowing where my routine would be.
In the fantasy, the flash-forward, I’d ask myself, Is this going to still feel worth it?
And every day, the person in the fantasy said, fuck yes. It’s worth it.
Because the fantasy would zoom out, and after I stopped quaking at the annoying pee smell, I’d scan my eyes over the people in the subway and get excited over the snapshots of lives I saw. I’d picture gritting my teeth and asking the acquaintance about their writing practice, in the hopes of learning. I’d fold each receipt up in my purse and quietly remember I’m investing in experiences, and savor how good the food felt on my tongue or how important it was that I met up with someone who mattered.
I’d remember fondly the times I drove but remind myself that that time is over because I don’t need to prove my own competency to myself anymore. I’d press “pay” on hundreds — maybe even thousands — of dollars on the jackets and boots and scarves I needed, then breathe a sigh while remembering how I’d missed the seasonal changes when in forever sunny LA. And while walking down the street, I’d look up at the city lights and feel in sync with every other lonely person who’d been here and understand that loneliness is what makes you savor the connection when you do have it.
And I’d hold this in my heart daily, until I made it to New York.
For the first month or so, it did feel like it matched. The fantasy I had did come true. I did feel little stabs of pain, like needles here and there, after friends I’d hoped would see me when I was here didn’t show up, after the train kept coming in late, after I felt my inferiority complex about being a writer light up again and again.
But I’d feel this thrill too — this idea that, I had prepared my heart for these aches, and it was okay.
Then one day, like the snow flurries that would drift down during this holiday season but never piled up to properly stay… the pain just never came back.
So yeah. I love New York. So much, I tremble with tears in my eyes when I think about it. Because it’s a departure from what I expected I deserved, what I thought I could have.
How cheesy, right! And yet, this feeling organically brings so much emotion through me it feels impossible for it to not burst out of my chest. It’s been so light and happy that I’m hardly able to process it.
I decided to lead this piece with all the shit that’s been hard to navigate, but not impossible. Now on to the brighter things:
A snapshot of my life: With the first week, I found an ideal place in the location I’d hoped for at the border of Brooklyn and Queens with ideal roommates that cook for me and vice versa.
By the end of the first month, I was hosting meetups with a whole ensemble of new friends, many from Twitter, that I reliably feel like I can hit up, and getting the hang of it with reconnections with the old ones. My social calendar felt so full, in that even if I didn’t do anything, things were always happening. And I also met a guy I like dating, Chinese like me, who I didn’t feel like I had to force to talk to me.
By the middle of the first month, clients flooded in, including one I’d eyed from afar for a long time. By the second month, people were saying that it seemed like I’d lived here for far longer. By the third month, I was writing on Substack again after feeling a block from sharing my voice for years.
By the time my birthday party happened at the end of January, I had so many people to invite I had to be selective and ended up breaking it up into a celebratory birthday week. It was the best birthday I’d ever had.
Like sunlight cutting through clouds of years past, so much abundance came through, and every day has felt exciting because it’s felt earned. I worked hard on my identity and had restraint for a decade before I dared set foot here as a resident. I haven’t at all numbed out the hard parts about living in a city — I’ve never believed it would be easy. I’ve often said that surviving in a big city must be like learning to play with a horse. Different than playing with other types of animals, a horse is bigger than you. If you’re gentle, respectful, yet not dependent on validation, it’ll let you ride it. But even as you’re in charge, you can never for one second forget who’s the big boss.
Every day I’ve lived in New York City for the past 120 days, I’ve gotten up and paid my respects to this place. For me, walking down the streets in conversation with the buildings requires a specific reverence.
This reverence is for this entity — I am not owed a good time here. It’s supposed to be hard to be here. But if you can’t handle a bit of pain, then you will not thrive in a city that has stood the legends of time. The pain I’ve selected led me straight to the joy here.
I can’t not thank LA for bringing me here, too. The pain of leaving it does interplay with the joy of being somewhere else now.
I moved to Los Angeles in 2018, as a 22 year old, to understand what it would be like to be in a big city. I already knew also that I could not handle putting more pressure on myself to make it big, to be a career woman cut throatedly fighting her way through the NYC media scene to be top dog. I was too burnt out and sad at that point. I needed to go somewhere that’d force me to slow down.
My mistake was assuming I’d feel that way forever. But right as I entered my 27th year in 2022, I knew it was time to move on, because I’d gotten what I was looking for. I believe sometimes some relationships give you what you need in large supply for eternity, but many cannot keep doing that. Tis how it also is with cities.
Los Angeles was big enough to ground my desires, though. It was diverse, with the beaches and the trees and the downtown areas and the diversity of people. I’m visiting it soon, and my heart aches again. It felt like a soft embrace of a woman’s bosom, a mother welcoming home, but a manic pixie dream mom, one who reminded me I could dream but at my own pace, without speeding it up to match anyone else’s.
On the other hand, New York feels like the embrace of a man — one steadying me, reminding me every time I pigeon hole myself into frightening self deprecation that I’ve grown out of needing other people’s wings to fly. It was only through detaching and knowing who I am, thanks to Los Angeles, a place that welcomed that, that I could handle York.
I’m actually absolutely, absolutely shocked that NYC has been enough. It has been more than enough. It has been enough financially as a freelancer and enough emotionally as a chronic lonely person. I was lonely enough to find myself somewhere else, and to watch my network amass over the years neatly in one place. They keep me company only as much as I let myself also keep myself company. Despite my extroversion, NYC keeps me grounded in my inner world.
I can say that as I enter my fifth month, that if I were destined to have burned out by now, I would’ve by now. But it seems for now, I won’t.
I’m not without my demons — but at the same time, they matter so, so so much less in all of this.
As I said in a Tweet thread:
“I miss LA more now that I don’t feel trapped there. What sucks though is that now spending a week or even a month wouldn’t be enough to feel satiated, but spending longer than five weeks would feel like too much.
My community exists more in NYC now, but the fondness I had for my LA lifestyle is so eternal even if it was lonelier. This feels like an impossible choice.
If I could just zap all my NYC ppl over to LA for a bit, have them live life with me, through the Koreatown nights to the Dockweiler Beach bonfires to the Silverlake thrifting to the WeHo celeb watching to the Malibu hiking to the DTLA wandering, they’d see why I was here for 5 years.
And I’m sad that I feel deep to my core that I’ll never be a young, single, wistful, early 20s college grad anymore escaping a fixation on her career to dwell in eternal summer and live out a dream that I do not deny or regret to this day.
The incompatibility of it with my life’s trajectory feels heavy for me, for saying goodbye to it was like saying goodbye to some part of youth.
I am still young, but I am not young enough to consider myself a child anymore. There may be a day I go back to LA, but that day is not now.
Moving to New York and learning how to write for myself again to cope with the fragility of ego, instead of seeing the lack of need for it reflected in the landscape, makes me see that LA was my rehab truly .
There’s a contradictory joy, a repulsion that I once had this joy, when I think about it.
At the time, I so badly wanted to commit to one place and never leave. Now, I know that that is part of my journey — it just doesn’t feel like LA was that place for me.
Yet, if I’m yearning for LA right now, it means that NYC is enough. Right now.
Because I would not say I’m “homesick.” Because now, NYC is home.
When I talk like this, people often say, “Then why don’t you move back,” and at this point I wonder if they ever had loved someone they simply were not compatible with and couldn’t create a life with, but that separation did not mean you loved it any less than what’s meaningful.
It’s not bc I feel regret that I currently feel sadness. It’s because I *don’t* regret leaving LA, that I went to NYC and have been there long enough to see I *do* see a long term happiness there I couldn’t find in LA, that I really feel it’s over. There’s no chance at this moment of going back.
NYC has been enough for me. NYC is going to be enough for me. Because I haven’t forgotten NYC kinda sucks. In its own, charming, esoteric, embarrassing, titillating ways. I hate hate hate how much my life is a cliche, yet I love love love that adulthood hasn’t disappointed me at all. It’s made me realize company isn’t as far reaching as I feared.
I didn’t grow up wanting to live here, because I never for one second really idealized it. Instead, I idealized how I could be around the people. So many people. Not just youthful people, but also old people — children — poor people — sad people — happy people. New York feels like a conglomeration of all of the thousands of people I’ve known through my life, where I can remember the variability of the great big world out there. I need this reminder for my life to not feel like a prison at times, where my desire for agency has nowhere to land and sprout.
A high density of people lets me be able to meet them with wonder, without also idealizing what each individual is to me. It’s the mass of them that I find myself repeatedly enthralled with, without placing individual expectation on a specific one to give me everything. Pain in this life is fungible; and New York feels grounding in its optionality, because I know the somatic feeling of alignment, and I know when to stop searching.
A city is a container for people. It’s seen so many people, that it knows everyone’s bullshit. Refusing to respect the animism of a city is to not do it justice. Respecting the animism of a city is to understand that people owe you nothing, but you also owe no one anything. You instead, move through the world understanding a grander picture of how it can aid you in being kinder.
The thing about cities is they put you right next to where people are. If your relationship with people is nebulous, and undefined and ambivalent, then you will feel ambivalent about the city.
I don’t feel ambivalent about people. I embrace the rose with thorns that is intimacy, that is the sweetness of connection and the chasm that is separation, just like every big city is full of sweetness and chasm. Even exposure to this — the remembrance of it — is enough to enamor me.
And every day I’m on the subway, I feel these conflicting desires – the resentment I share this world with others, and the joy I have it.
How dare you be here with me, and thank god you are here with me.
Throughout my whole life, I knew that I wanted to be where the people are and listen to them for so long, to also tap them on the shoulder and tell them also of wonder, and I have never for one second been disappointed with or regretted my decisions because I know how to keep myself sustained.
No part of me is caught off guard, because I didn’t look at the generalities about what NYC is or isn’t. I can’t say what it is objectively, because I only say what it means to me. It’s different than what I could have expected if I measured it by what others say, but as this is the 7th city I’ve lived in as an adult, I think I have an understanding now of the spirit of the city and how it wants you to be humble yet excited.
I can say it filled exactly the hole in my heart I was looking for, but the hole of that it felt like a worthy struggle. It felt really like, I deserved to be here, because I worked on my mental health and my connections and who I am as a person enough to get here.
Epilogue:
One reader has asked about what age is suitable to move to New York City. I’ll explain my general thoughts about how everyone regardless of personality should handle living in a big city in a post later this month. I can’t really speak about New York City in generalities, because it’s going to hit differently for everyone. I also wonder if there’s some astro-compatibility involved here; after all, Manhattan has a Capricorn moon very close to my sun’s degree.
I’ll have more on this in a future post. I wonder if New York City will be enough for you, or if somewhere else will too.