Joan Didion wrote in her seminal essay Goodbye to All That, “It’s easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.”
In this essay, she writes about her relationship to a place - that place being New York City. She arrived in New York by way of Sacramento, planning only to stay six months. Those six months quickly dissolved into eight years.
I love this essay because it mirrors so much of my own New York story. I experienced the same feelings of awe and disillusion, with my intended one-year turning into seven in the blink of an eye.
The beginning of my story is easy to recall; it’s the ending that remains ambiguous. I can’t pinpoint the moment it came to a close. I don’t remember when my optimism turned into apathy or when I was no longer as unshakable as I was once. I don’t remember when my enchantment with the city turned into disenchantment or when the chaos of the streets stopped feeling like a magical movie that I was directing. I probably won’t ever be sure.
I remember my first day in New York vividly. It was June of 2017. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college in the Midwest, pulling through the Lincoln Tunnel into Port Authority in a car somehow filled to the brim with my meager personal belongings. I had no friends, aside from my dear friend and roommate Jeremy, no money, and no sense of direction, both literally and figuratively. I was there to have a grand adventure, to make sense of myself; ready to piece the puzzle together and discover who I was on my own terms. I yearned for independence, for novel experiences, for magical thinking. I told myself and my family that I would just be gone for a year, and then I’d be back home.
The thing about the city that’s hard to explain to those who have not lived there is that it changes you irrevocably, on a molecular level. Sure, it changes the way you dress and the way you interact, teaching you quickly to keep your head down and move along, but it also changes how you see the world, what you believe in and who you want to become. No matter if you’ve lived there 5 days, 5 months, or 5 years, there will be no going back to the version of you that existed before New York.
On my first day of work, I was walking up 7th Avenue to my big-girl job in Midtown Manhattan, the air ripe with the smell of garbage and ambition. People were fanning out in all directions, carrying coffees, hustling to catch trains, talking too loudly into their phones for 8 o’clock in the morning, and I didn’t feel like a bystander; I felt a part of it all. At that moment, I thought I would never get tired of that feeling. How could I ever tire of that constant current of energy, of feeling a part of something so much bigger than me?
After work, with nowhere to be and nobody to meet, I decided to venture down to Battery Park to see the annual Swedish Midsummer Festival. I arrived, somewhat sheepishly, at a crowd of people scattered across the lawn, wearing elaborate floral crowns and dancing fervently around the maypole. I stood there on the outskirts, soaking it all in, and then I made my first New York City friend. The thrill of making a friend in an unfamiliar place is a feeling that never fades.
His name was Chris. He was a twenty-three-year-old expat from Sweden, spending the summer in the city to gain international work experience. He was living with a delightfully friendly Swedish family in Bed-Stuy, and he, like me, was equally clueless and friendless. We spent the next three months meandering all over our new and inexhaustible home, collecting as many experiences as we possibly could - from firework shows in Brooklyn Bridge Park to ferry rides to Rockaway Beach and leisurely bike rides along the East River. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, but I remember our constant laughter, in complete disbelief that this was actually our life. I felt particularly alive that inaugural summer like something dormant had been awakened within me; everything was within reach. The city was a playground waiting to be enjoyed. At the end of the summer, Chris returned to Sweden, and we remain friends to this day. At that time, I had no idea that he would be just one of many friendships that would leave an indelible mark on me.
New York is a city full of transplants. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is the city of transplants. Everyone there is from somewhere else, everyone searching for connection. I loved how uncomplicated and natural it was to meet new people, how freely people expressed themselves, and how unafraid they were to talk about their loneliness and desire to make friends. I became friends with people from Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, England, Spain, and New Zealand and deepened relationships with acquaintances I had known from back home. During those first few years, we were a rag-tag crew living for each day with the goal of not letting our lives pass us by.
In New York, you never have to make plans because adventure awaits on every corner. All you have to do is go outside. Every day held the promise of something curious and interesting - there was always something I had never done or seen or known before. My fondest memories are of the days I spent wandering the streets with my headphones in, sometimes without, soaking in the symphony of life that was unfolding all around me. Allowing myself to stumble upon life, to create a day entirely for myself without reason or agenda.
Of course, there were difficult days, too. Days feeling immensely lonely despite being surrounded by millions of people. Days feeling suffocated by the endless noise. Days feeling like I had no purpose and no center that was grounding me to the world. Days when I cried because I locked myself out of my apartment and had to spend $600 on a new key, or cried because my obnoxious upstairs neighbor forgot to turn off his faucet that leaked rusty water all over my room, or cried because I was simply defeated by the nonstop hustle and grind. In the beginning, those days were few and far between. I could snap myself out of it and remember all of the reasons why I needed to live there. My friends, my job, my autonomy, my sense of self, my being in the center of it all. So I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed. Seven times over.
Why I left is harder to articulate. It was more of a gradual surrender than any singular moment that made me throw in the towel and pack my bags. More than anything, it was a surrender to the realization that I was now a nearly thirty-year-old adult and needed to start making more logical decisions regarding the envisioned plotline of my life.
The atrocious cost of living stopped being an “I’ll worry about it next year” problem and became disheartening. I was working my tail off, jumping around in a career I despised but couldn’t afford to pivot out of, whispering to my inner self that it’s just a job; you don’t need to love it. I learned that unconvincingly tricking yourself into being fulfilled only lasts for so long before the facade cracks. The once-alluring ease of transport and convenience faded into oblivion as I began to loathe the unreliable trains and increasingly sketchy cast of characters aboard. I got sick of schlepping my groceries home for blocks and up my endless apartment stairs. The lonely days became more frequent visitors in my weeks and were less easy to snap back from. I started to miss my family more. It's not that I didn’t always miss them, but my absence from their lives started to feel painfully acute. It got to a point where I knew that if I stayed another year, I would end up feeling perpetually sour about the city I loved for so long, the city that helped me grow up. I didn’t want to depart on a bitter note. When my lease was up, I chose not to resign. I tied up my loose ends, bid my farewells to the friends who made the city home, walked around on a solo nostalgia tour, and left the same way I arrived. Out through the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the Northern-bound freeway, with my meager personal belongings stuffed to the brim in a UHaul.
As I was driving over the Manhattan bridge into the city on my way out, Good Riddance by Green Day came on the radio:
“… It's something unpredictable
But in the end, it's right
I hope you had the time of your life”
Those lyrics reassured me that I made the right decision. I’ll never forget it, the time of my life.
xo,
Lauren