My First Project

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Everything in my life has brought me to Brooklyn, a place I don’t want to love but do anyway. Ever since I moved I’ve always felt like I’m cheating on California. But the more I live here the less I want to go back home and the less I’m willing to admit it.

Before I moved I had never visited New York, so people thought I was crazy. Pretty soon I started lying and said I had been there before and that I thought it was great. In reality, the only time I had been to the northeast was when I visited Washington D.C. at the age of 8. I also spent two hours in the Newark airport one time on the way home from Europe. I remember looking down at the New York City skyline and wondering how it was down there. When I finally moved I decided everyone else was right and that I really was crazy. At almost every job interview I’ve had, people have asked me: “But…why did you leave California?” I didn’t have a good answer.

I think everyone who has moved to this city from somewhere else has a similar story, so I feel like the “moving to new York City” cliché is pretty worn out. Still, it’s an important story for a reason.

A few weeks into living here, I went to Times Square to meet my boyfriend and his coworkers. Right as I exited the subway on 42nd street, my phone died. My phone has always been something of a safety blanket for me here, because it is one of the only things that connects me to everything that was once familiar. I looked up and saw bright lights and huge buildings and millions of people zipping around me, and I panicked.  I rummaged through my purse for pills a therapist had given me, but I had gone through all of them in similar experiences.  I panicked again. I have never felt so claustrophobic in such a huge city, and I have never felt so alone among so many people. The vibrations in my body that I can always rely on to tell me when something is not right were moving quickly and wouldn’t stop. They were blaring loudly like a bullhorn, begging me to leave.

I soon found out that no one who lives here goes to Midtown if they can avoid it.

New York is the first time I’ve tried to actively push beyond panicked senses, making me wonder if the vibrations I’ve allowed to guide my life for so many years are just making me aware of childhood fears and not actual danger. Sometimes I think that my body has brought me to so many ill-advised transitions in life, and I’m not sure which sense trust anymore. Sometimes I think it’s just telling me: “I don’t want to grow up.” There’s a definite “felt sense” somewhere in there, but there’s also an acute sense of fear that has been with me since I was small. I think I get the two mixed up.

In less than three years in New York, I’ve worked as a freelance writer, a barista, a marketing coordinator, a restaurant hostess, a photographer and finally, as a graduate student and researcher, a path my body had been avoiding out of fear that it wouldn’t work out. Sometimes I feel like I’ve already lived someone else’s life in New York, which has been sped up and compacted into dog years. I have a theory that the seasons here make everything feel urgent and make people move quickly. In California it’s an eternal spring, and life rolls by without winter to mark the end of the year. With seasons, you feel the weight of each passing year, and decisions are more urgent. California feels like sitting on my front porch in Santa Cruz as a college student, watching the rest of the world zip in front of me. One day I stepped off your porch and realized I was bored.

I spent my first year in New York isolated and broke, and begging my boyfriend to move back home with me. Because I was unemployed by choice to move here, I would go to the grocery store and have all my cards declined.  A few times I broke down and called my mom for money, going against bodily vibrations that I should do everything without any help from anyone. I was a grown-up now and I had to act like a grown-up.  But I always ended up crying on the phone to my mom, which felt good because I didn’t even need the money I just needed someone to listen to me.

I lived on 90th Street for the first couple years and could not sleep because trucks idled all night outside my window and cabs honked at anyone who was double parked, crossing the street, or generally in the way. I lived on the 5th floor and the steam heater would still turn on when it was over 60 degrees out. I paid a broker’s fee. I paid $200 for a deadbolt lock. My street was constantly covered in dog poop and I stepped in it. They say your first New York apartment is always the worst, but I just thought it was New York.

Moving from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn, everything changed in an instant and all my decisions came to the start of something new that’s less of a struggle. It doesn’t feel like everything is sped up and compacted but as if there is something stretching out in front of me and beckoning longer years ahead. I like how the trees feel in Brooklyn and how the streets sound and how the trains are slow like in San Francisco.

It’s amazing what changing your location can do.