Hello, to everything else
The thing I’ll remember most about my last few weeks in New York is the near-constant sound of ambulance sirens. When I picked March 30th as my date to leave the city, I couldn’t have imagined that I would be fleeing what had quickly become the epicenter of a global pandemic. When the numbers of COVID-19 cases started accelerating, I wasn’t sure what to do about my plans. For weeks I’ve wrestled with the question: should I stay, or should I go?
The city has been on virtual lockdown for weeks and the daily news briefings have become increasingly grim. I have stayed in my apartment more or less for 21 days now; my mom (and current roommate) is a medical assistant at an OBGYN office and considered an essential worker. I have a job I can do remotely and enough food to last me weeks. I could stay, but what happens if I get sick, or worse, if my mom gets sick? I’m immune-compromised and as I write this the city is rapidly running out of supplies and hospital beds; field hospitals are currently being constructed in the Javits Center and in the middle of Central Park.
So I decided to go; tomorrow I will walk 3.3 miles from Harlem to Columbus Circle to pick up a rental car. I will drive straight to Ohio, stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. I have a few face masks, latex gloves, and disinfectant. When I get to my dad’s house I’ll begin another 14-day quarantine, but I suspect it will last much longer than that. The virus is in all 50 states; but life is a constant game of risk versus reward. I’m trying to be smart and safe, while resisting the paralyzing effects of fear.
I wrote the following about my decision to leave before the pandemic hit—this is not how I imagined my time in New York coming to an end, but life rarely works out exactly how we imagine. The best we can do is move forward; adjust the sails but never stop the ship.
I know that the world does not need another Goodbye to All That-style essay about loving and leaving New York. The city barely batted an eye when my plane touched down at LaGuardia nearly seven years ago on a one-way flight from Ohio—and it won’t lose any sleep when I drive away from it in a one-way rental car, back to Ohio and then beyond. The city famous for never sleeping historically has very little sleep to lose.
There’s a reason the city’s bridges charge steep tolls to cars entering the city but let you leave for free. A real New Yorker—whether you’re a lifer or you opt in until it's time to opt out—knows that a $16 bridge toll is the least of it; the expenses of New York are well-documented and oft-complained about, but it costs much more than money to carve out a life here.
As a kid growing up in Ohio, I dreamed about living in New York so long it became an obsession of mine. I visited countless times, but I tried very hard to view the city realistically—even going as far as living and working here for two, cold and grey winter months in the beginning of 2013 just to make sure I truly understood what I was getting myself into. Those two “trial period” months were hard for many reasons, but as my March departure date loomed I knew I would be back. A complicated medical diagnosis coupled with the slow dismantling of my personal life set me back a few months, but when I saw the “Welcome to New York” sign from my plane’s window seat on July 1st, I felt like I was coming home.
Within the first six months of 2013, it had felt as if my whole world was falling apart. It had been slowly unraveling for some time, but I’m only realizing now how good I was at putting on blinders and ignoring the obvious signs (and there are always signs). My four-and-a-half-year relationship, which was far from perfect even in the beginning, ended for good when I discovered that my boyfriend—with whom I shared a house, a cat, credit cards, and several car leases—had been involved with my closest confidant and best friend for an indeterminate amount of time (with enough time and perspective, the details cease to matter as much as the general outline).
Less than 48 hours after I confronted them at her house in the wee hours of the morning—sometimes life really is like a Lifetime movie—my personal medical drama reached its inevitable conclusion: at 27 years old, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. MS is a scary and unpredictable disease and maybe I should’ve taken my diagnosis more seriously. But when it rains it pours and I could only focus on one traumatic event at a time; I boxed up my fears of losing my independence and got to work changing nearly everything about my life.
It’s incredibly difficult to change any one thing; when it became apparent that I would have to change almost everything, it’s no wonder why I shut down, dug in and held onto my Ohio life far past its natural expiration date. Or maybe I’m being too judgmental; maybe things end exactly when they should and we simply do the best we can with the information we have at the time. Sometimes that means we’re not ready to face the truth because there’s still more to learn, even if the hardest lessons usually come with painful endings.
But before I could start over in New York, I needed to dismantle my former life. I remember writing out a seemingly-insurmountable checklist that included tasks both big and small: change my bank, sell my books, find a job, find an apartment, settle up health insurance debts, etc. Taken altogether it seemed daunting—impossible, even—but one by one I put check marks next to the vestiges of a life that no longer fit me. I was a hermit crab—exposed and vulnerable—who had somewhat violently shed her old shell but hadn’t yet found a new one.
I had initially planned to move to New York as soon as I graduated college, but life really is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. I got a job intending to save money (I had $8k in savings but thought I needed a mythical $10k) and started dating my boss instead. Around the time I thought I would be moving east, I instead moved in with him, an hour south of where I grew up and a world away from where I had imagined I’d spend the bulk of my 20s.
Months turned into years. I learned a lot from both my relationship and my job, but I lost a lot of myself in the process. I stopped reading. I went years without taking a single vacation day. I made personal and professional sacrifices I’m not proud of and never imagined I would make. I kept a journal, but the entries were increasingly bleak and infrequent. In one entry, I simply wrote “I don’t matter,” over and over again until my handwriting became unintelligible. I was a frog in a pot on the stove. I may not have had full control over the knob, but I could see the flame getting higher and higher. I logically realized that the temperature of my life was slowly increasing to dangerously inhospitable levels but I was too tired—physically, emotionally and spiritually—to jump out.
I never did find the strength on my own to jump out, not really, if I’m being honest. I would love to say I woke up one day and magically had the bravery to demand more of my life and the confidence to think I deserved it. But life is not actually a movie. In my experience, people don’t fundamentally change that quickly or drastically. And when we do, we almost never do it without help—whether we know it or not, we change not in spite of others but because of them. No one does anything entirely on their own.
Yes, I had one foot out the door when I returned to our shared home in March of 2013 and told my boyfriend that I had to move to New York—whatever that meant for our already-tenuous relationship. He offered to marry me. I knew enough about him at this point to know that was an empty promise. But as sure as I was that I had to leave, it still took the discovery of his infidelity —not the first time he had cheated on me, but only I had the power to make it the last—to push me fully out the door.
Nearly seven years later, my feelings about this tumultuous time in my life are ever-evolving: I still get angry when I think of all the times he lied to me, I’m still hurt by my former friend’s betrayal, and I’m annoyed when I hear they are still together. But I mostly just feel gratitude. I’d like to think I would’ve left eventually, spurred by the ticking time bomb of my recent diagnosis, or some other nudge from the universe, but I’ll never know.
What I do know is that their betrayal—so obvious, so simple—was in many ways my golden ticket. I was no longer a woman leaving a man for the selfish dream of making it in the big city. I had been wronged. I was a victim. No one would question my motives: I now needed a change of scenery if only for my health—my MS doctor had urged me to avoid emotional stress, as if that’s ever possible. But if it was possible, it meant changing my job (never date your boss), my friends and my living situation; five years after taking the job to ‘save money’ I now had even less in savings than I had started with—but if I was going to have to start over, it might as well finally be in New York.
As hard as I tried to be realistic about New York’s ability to heal my wounds, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I relished the possibility of leaving my old life behind and moving onto something bigger, brighter and objectively better. I didn’t realize it at the time—and it’s embarrassing for me to admit now—but in some ways I crafted a new identity for myself from the outside in. I used to sit in Central Park and watch people walk to work—coffee cup in hand, impossibly stylish and aloof —and imagine myself in their place.
Then, one day it happened: I caught my reflection in a store window and it was exactly how I’d imagined it could be; I got a job in publishing, and then at a historic cultural center, and then at an even bigger publishing house. As much as I loved the subway, I loved walking the city even more.
Right before I moved, I changed my blog title and all my social media handles to “The Only Living Girl in New York” a feminist spin on the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Only Living Boy in New York.” The lyric “I’ve got nothing to do today but smile” couldn’t have been further from how I felt as I tried to begin my life in New York essentially from scratch—“I’ve got nothing to do today but build an entire apartment’s worth of IKEA furniture by myself” would have been a more accurate description—but moments of delirious happiness begun to sneak in between the sadness and homesickness for a place that had never even felt like home.
Slowly, I begin to heal, to grow and to change. The “old” me—the me that went into hiding every time I got into a relationship—started to poke her head out of hibernation. I began to read again. I planned road trips. I made new friends—ones who were shocked when details from my old life inevitably leaked out. They didn’t recognize that version of me and for that I was thankful; I had done what everyone says is almost impossible. I had run nearly 500 miles away from my pain and landed on my feet. I had made it in New York.
Two years, two jobs, and two apartments later, I found myself in another relationship. This one was different in many of the obvious ways from my first one—he was gentle, kind and quiet. But after a few years, I felt my inner light dimming again. I began to make concessions in the name of compromise—some barely noticeable and some actually life-threatening, like when I agreed to hike the Inca Trail and woke up halfway through the four-day hike sicker than I’ve ever been. I had been on immune-suppressant medication for my MS for a while, but I’m a reckless patient. I thought I had taken the necessary precautions but I also want so badly to appear as if I’m FINE that I often ignore the obvious—that I am sick, at least according to some very good physicians and yearly MRIs.
I don’t fault my then-boyfriend for wanting to hike the Inca Trail—and I survived, obviously, with more than a few priceless memories, both very good and very bad. I spent a great deal of our relationship lying to myself; I don’t fault him for not noticing. Once again I had tried to deny what I always secretly felt: that I was no longer being true to myself.
That relationship lasted nearly four years, and I don’t regret a minute of it. He was a safe harbor, a place to shelter from the storm that had been raging in some way or another in my head as long as I can remember. There were lulls of course, stretches of calm when it seemed as if I could coast on this easy life forever; I was traveling more frequently, my job was secure, my relationship was easy. I loved exploring odd, dusty corners of New York and the passion I lacked for my day job was made up for with the work I did on this blog, where I tried to document it all.
But then for completely unremarkable reasons, the storm became impossible to ignore. I ended the relationship but it would take another six months before I was ready to admit to the world what I had always known to be true (and at various times had actually been brave enough to admit, though never fully): that I was attracted to women.
Once that keystone clicked into place, I felt far from secure; to my surprise, the floodgates opened. They had been quietly unlocked at the beginning of 2019, when I got my “dream job” with Roadtrippers, but they flew open violently when I began the painful process of sifting through the deep shame that had shrouded everything I did for as long as I could remember. It seemed like such a simple thing—declaring to yourself and the world, “this is who I am”—but it broke me open in ways I’ve only just begun to discover.
And then, one day New York just didn’t make sense to me anymore. My job didn’t necessarily require me to leave New York, but the nature of the work I am doing encouraged it. I’m no longer tied to a desk, a specific office building or even a certain region of the country. One by one those friends I had made—the ones who helped me heal and grow—left New York for various reasons, each in search of something that even the greatest city in the world couldn’t provide. I had my first significant relationship with a woman, but that too reached a natural end.
Who would I be if I left New York? Where would “The Only Living Girl in New York” go after she crossed the George Washington Bridge headed west? I realized that as much as I had used New York to rebuild my life, my life no longer depended on the city. I had grown stronger here, I had healed a lot of wounds and opened up new ones; I was confident and independent and open in a way I never could have been if I had stayed in Ohio. But as much as New York has shaped me, I knew that I could now survive—and even thrive—outside of it. Leaving didn’t mean I failed, quite the contrary; it means I succeeded in doing the very thing I came here to do: fan the flame of my own inner pilot light and make it burn brighter than I ever imagined it could.
New York was a passive participant in all of this, but it used me just as much as I used it. It took my money, yes, and probably a good deal of my hearing. Two years of sleepless nights spent in a bedroom overlooking a noisy stretch of Flatbush Avenue inevitably took years off my lifespan. But the city gave me much more than it took; it gave me perspective and autonomy; garlic bagels and falafel wraps; a deep appreciation for classic diner coffee, fanciful architecture, and public transportation. I could write 10,000 words on everything I learned and loved in my seven wonderful years here, and it would barely scratch the surface. But in some ways I did just that. This blog’s name and focus may change, but I relentlessly documented my time here and I’m thankful that I have a place to go whenever I feel nostalgic or forget what it felt like to see the Unisphere fountains, the city blanketed in snow, or eat my first knish.
The best cocktail I ever had was at the Waldorf Astoria before it closed for renovations: a perfect Manhattan that cost a ridiculous $36 (perhaps even crazier: I had two). But that’s the thing about New York. You can get the best of everything, but it will cost you—in one way or another. Eventually, we’re all faced with a choice: keep upping the ante—make more money, buy more things, keep going round and round on the carousel grabbing for that elusive brass ring—or decide that the cost-to-reward ratio is just too great. Life has a way of propelling us forward with or without our permission and I realize it’s an immense privilege to be able to stop the moving car on our own terms and look around. But when I did just that, I realized that what I saw ahead of me was no longer in New York.
To stay would have been, in some ways, the easy choice; after all it’s what I’ve been doing for the last seven years. Sure, finding an apartment is a pain and dismantling and reassembling my IKEA furniture for the seventh time might actually be dangerous, but I did it all before and I know I could do it again (and maybe, one day, I will, although that furniture is definitely not coming with me).
What I’ve never done before in New York is feel out of place; I know it’s time for me to leave simply because I feel as if New York is no longer for me. I know now that I am not defined by my relationship to a man (or woman), to a job or to a city. I am me no matter where I go. My pilot light might fluctuate and even dim dangerously low again in the future, but I know I’m capable of getting it back. I am a work in progress for sure—and likely always will be—but for the first time in my life I feel as if I have grown strong roots that aren’t tied to anything external. I carry them with me no matter what the future holds.
Like the gingko trees around the city that shed all of their leaves at once, I am not defined by what I have, who I love, what I do or where I live. I am strong enough to shed my leaves and confident enough to know that I can grow new ones, even better ones. The ancient trees don’t thrive because they live in New York but in spite of it. So I’m not saying “goodbye to all that,” but rather, “hello to everything else”—whatever, and wherever that may be.