Staying, Leaving, or Quietly Imploding Beneath a Serene Facade - Considering New York

As time goes on, more and more of my friends who came to New York from far off places are starting to hate the city, and a lot of them are making plans to leave. I've been thinking about this myself for months now, changing my mind depending on my mood and my career prospects and whatnot.

But slowly yet surely most of the people I get along best with here are making motions to head elsewhere. And nothing makes somebody seriously consider their attachment to a place quite like the prospect of being left alone there.

So, after a long think (and an even longer rant/self-scolding diatribe below the cut), I've reached an honest-to-god decision.

I don't like living in New York because it makes me uncomfortable. And because of that I'm going to stay.


I don't like the weather (the heat, specifically). I don't like how cramped it is. I can't stand how impossible it is for someone to be alone. I don't like how everyone is always in a rush because they're getting three degrees, doing an internship, and working full time. I don't like how expensive it is, how it takes me an hour and a half to get to a place that would take fifteen minutes in a car. I don't like how there's always a million things happening, or how I never seem to be a part of any of them. I hate the fact that the people who know me best are far away, that I live an hour away from the people I am buddies with in the city, that making new friends is fucking impossible and keeping old ones is only slightly less difficult. I don't like how continuously I am confronted with the social dichotomies inherent in a city as poor/rich as this one. I hate how entitled and selfish New York enables people to become (especially myself), and the fact that everyone around me has a fucking epic poem to sing about their adventures while what I have could be generously described as a mildly entertaining blurb.

But you know what? I knew what New York was when I got here. It hasn't changed. The heat is more miserable than I remember (I definitely blocked that bit out), but NYC hasn't really had any pretensions about itself. I can't say that its what I expected, because I honestly had no idea what to expect when I got here. But once I was established, this city has never deceived me. Everything I dislike about New York I knew about within a month of coming here, and at first none of that could tear off my shiny crush-goggles for this place. The resentment that has grown for the city comes from somewhere else entirely.

My first NYC post was two months after I arrived in the city. I wrote:

What makes a city is how you feel while you're in it. And New York is big enough, diverse enough, romanticized enough, to make you feel any and everything. Ultimately, you define this place more than it could ever hope to define you.

The things I have come to hate about New York aren't really about the city, but about the life I'm living while I'm here. New York is so grandiose in the minds of the meek (aka, me) that the mere idea of it makes us believe that we can be the best possible version of ourselves when we arrive. Never mind that for some of us (aka, me) its our first time being truly independent (ish), that we don't know what the hell we're doing in general (much less with our lives), and that we have all the weight of this possibility crushing whatever small yet satisfying reality we manage to make for ourselves. The best parts of NYC live up to the hype, so why can't the best parts of us manage the same?

The constant sense of inadequacy is enough to demolish anybody's fondness for a place.

But you know what? Fuck that.

New York was never a long-term plan. I knew before I came here that I wouldn't be able to live in a city like this for long without losing my mind. But I'll be damned if I'm going to leave blaming NYC for all of my misconceptions, insecurities, and 'issues'. Those are my baggage.

New York's crime is in doing the unthinkable - forcing us (aka, me) to confront the most magnificent image of ourselves and compare it with the stark reality of who/where/how we really are. And I will not be cowed by the knowledge that I have a long way to go before I feel comfortable with the discrepancy between those two versions of myself.

Not that it doesn't suck to be faced with that disappointment, but if you aren't, how the hell are you going to grow? 

Change, for me, has never been a swift thing. It takes time. Growth has always been a long, drawn-out process with a lot of detours, mistakes, and general stupidity, and I honestly hope that the idiotic journey keeps rambling on until the day I die. But if there's ever a time to speed that process up, to be challenged and pushed into expecting more from myself, it's now. And New York, this dumb ass city that I can love and hate at the same time (hopefully without any bitterness), is helping me do that.

So I'm going to stay. For a little while longer, at least.

Let's hope NYC can keep up.