New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down
I recently made my first solo pilgrimage back to New York last week. I found, lurking on the streets, the ghosts of who I had been as a New Yorker. Walking down 5th avenue I paused outside my old office building – remembering that summer day when the five of us had taken our photo in the abandoned lot across the street; the sisterly bonded love pulsing through us. I walked through Washington Square Park toward the West Village and past the storefront of the CVS I crawled to for Gatorade by the gallons when I lived in a studio and came down with the flu – fearing I would die alone in an apartment the size of a Midwestern woman’s closet. I strolled through Soho past the showroom of a designer for whom I once worked a fashion week runway show. Past the first date spot I had with a man who broke my heart. I dined in the restaurant that gave me a family of humans so divinely woven into my becoming that I cannot imagine a world without them.
As I walked I listened intently to the past. It came back in droves and it came back fast. All the details of the many lives I’d lived. Of the many women I’d been – and shed – and become. I thought back to my life in San Francisco. Quiet, steady, lived with ease. And I craved my layers again. I craved the bustle of people beneath the small New York sky searching for love and fame and Dough doughnuts. I found myself missing the pure struggle that eventually leads to opportunity; forcing a multitude of lives to be lived at once. I missed the ability to be and change and be and change over and over.
And then I went to a bar in the heart of Brooklyn – a place I once called home and vehemently pitted against the surface plasticity of Manhattan. This was my tribe, my identity, my place – and I was eager to run back to it. However, this time, surrounded by the waning youth of the Brooklyn millenials, I felt odd. I felt displaced. I no longer saw myself in the faces of the girls wearing 90s-inspired overalls without shirts underneath and scrunchies in their hair in an attempt at too-cool feminist sex-appeal.
I stood against a wall and watched as a girl raised a cigarette to her stained lips and leaned into her boyfriend. I noticed their matching fresh tattoos; the skin of their forearms still raised and raw from the needle and I thought, “how wasteful”.
And with striking disillusionment upon this thought, I realized that I no longer quite belonged. That maybe I’d outgrown my most worn-in, beloved pin on the map. The pin that raised a woman. Maybe all this time that I’ve been staring at my fixed reflection in the mirror, there’s been an imperceptible, but true shift. A shift that’s settled me into who I will be. Have I veered off and settled into a ditch, perhaps? Has quieting my world and simplifying what feeds me dulled my edge? Does this change make me a stranger to myself?
But then I remembered with relief. That wherever we go. The adventures we seek or don’t. The people we love physically and those we carry with us. The slow unraveling. The monotony of daily ritual. The dogs we greet. The lattes and Old Fashioneds we consume. The words. The mistakes. The risks. Those are what actually evolve us. What sustain and grow us. It’s not so much about a spot on the globe, but about our choices wherever we are. It’s about what we need most in the moment and whether or not we had the courage to ask for it. Or simply take it.
New York, I <3 you.