Another New York City Anniversary, Nine Years and Counting

Finally attempting an answer to the 'why New York' question.

I woke up this morning feeling incredibly nostalgic about the past.

My pasts are carefully divided and highly selective in the way they take up space in my memory, and no past is more prevalent than the one where I am 12 years old, declaring I will someday move to New York City. It was kind of a ballsy statement to make, especially at such a young age, but even more because I’d never actually been to New York. I only saw it on TV and movies and thought, wow, that place looks so cool.

I’ve encountered a lot of people that like to ask me why. Why New York? I usually scoff at the question, because it seems like a stupid one to me, and because I’ve never been able to come up with a good answer for it. But today, on the nine year anniversary of when I first got off the plane with a carry-on suitcase, no job, and no permanent place to live, I thought I’d finally try to come up with one.

Emphasis on the word try.

There are a lot of simple, low-hanging reasons to love New York City, especially as a young woman in her mid-twenties who simply wanted adventure. It was easy back then to believe I could be important in New York City just by simply being there, because it is somewhere important. But that answer isn’t enough. The many reasons tourists flock to the city on a seasonal basis doesn’t quite sustain itself either when you weigh out the cost of doing touristy things with the cost of rent. (I do love all those things and happen to think they’re worth the price tag attached.)

If I go even deeper, I start getting defensive, and like a true citizen of our current society, I begin wanting to define myself by the opposition. Why not New York? Why wouldn’t I want to live in a place with dollar slices of pizza, a plethora of live theater options every night, a revolving door of museum exhibits (plus a plethora of revolving doors), famous skyscrapers and buildings at my fingertips, amazing public schools and a transportation system that will get me anywhere I want to go for $2.75 a ride? It starts to feel like a no-brainer.

But New York City means so much more to me than all that, and I think maybe instead of dissecting the reasons I needed to be here specifically, it might be easier to consider the reasons I had to leave where I was. I think that gets more to the heart of the why New York question and I think it’s what people are really asking. They want to know why I decided to move here in the first place and not necessarily why I chose to stay so long. Both have different answers.

I had a challenging childhood, which may just be the understatement of my lifetime so far. I won’t go into too much detail (you’ll have to read that when I finally publish my memoir), but I moved around a lot as a kid (there are roughly fourteen addresses attached to the first eight years of my life). I never had a close relationship with my parents. On top of that was a lot of drug use, the death of my father when I was twelve, and not a lot of money. It’s safe to say that staying put isn’t exactly in my genes and that I had a lot I wanted to get away from.

When I was nine, things got a little better financially because of a move to my dad’s parents house where my food, shelter and clothing needs were always met, but love and compassion were scarce. Maybe it’s cliche to say that I never felt like I belonged anywhere, but it’s the most real way to sum up my childhood and adolescent experiences.

When you’re circling a drain, a dark void if you will, and watching that void swallow up everyone in your family you ever loved, it’s easy to want to get far away from it. It’s easy to feel like if you stay, you will also get sucked into that drain and you’ll never claw yourself out. It’s easy to pack up and go when the fear of starting over is nothing compared to the fear of staying and ending up another statistic. It’s also so much easier when you don’t have a traditional home, or safety net to fall into. When you have no choice but to be independent, you can do that anywhere.

I didn’t know the first thing about figuring out where I would feel most like myself, where I would feel the safest, where I would feel the most free. I didn’t know if the place even existed, but when I saw New York City on an episode of Dawson’s Creek, I decided I wanted to be the kind of person who belonged there. I felt like you had to have a purpose just existing amidst the tall buildings and busy streets.

When I was in high school, I started jogging around my neighborhood with my brother and I always told myself that the further we ran from our house, the more exercise we would get because we would always have to run back the same distance. I applied that same logic to leaving—the further away I chose to go, the longer it would take me to find my way back—and I couldn’t get much further from Southern California than New York City without a lot of paperwork involved.

It’s a funny thing to get an idea in your head that takes hold, and deciding something at 12 years old doesn’t require a lot of thorough processing. I didn’t know to consider money or safety when I’d made the decision, and once I’d made it, it never went away.  I was (am) headstrong and stubborn and while I didn’t think I’d ever actually make it to New York, I felt a kinship with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Ariel in The Little Mermaid—my two favorite movies as a kid. I was looking for somewhere, anywhere. Rainbow or no rainbow, people or no people. I didn’t give a damn. I just wanted something else, and New York seemed to have unlimited options of what that could look like.

I’m three pages into this post and I still don’t know if I’ve done what I sought out to do. Probably not. But I do know that New York City is my home. It was my home before I lived here. It was my home right when I showed up. It was my home the first time I left and flew back, landing at LaGuardia with a sense of calm and relief, like the entire city was waiting for my return. Feeling like the dream to move there was probably the thing that single-handedly saved me.