Defining My Relationship With New York

Sometimes you come across a concept phrased a certain way and it just hits you in the chest with its truth and makes you understand a huge facet of your life more deeply. Trolling around Happy Opu the other day, I had an experience like this—when I read a description of New York as a place that has plenty of potential to hurt you—but also a place that “begs you and eggs you on to be exactly who you really are.”

Reading that sentence, I totally understood, in a way I hadn’t quite been able to before, exactly why I’m here—and why I need to be.

I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I grew up in a rural area in Vermont, and I love the country. I love hiking and camping and living in isolated spots in the woods where I can’t see anyone else’s house from mine. I love falling asleep to crickets chirping and swimming in ponds and rivers and going barefoot all summer. If I had kids, I would want to raise them in a place like Vermont. I might want to settle down there myself one day. But not yet.

And I’ve lived in many different cities. I love to travel—I’ve lived in London, I’ve spent time in Paris. I never really understood the sometimes-common New York-centric attitude that holds that the city is really the only place in the known universe worth inhabiting. I understand it now in a way I didn’t before. But I want to live in other places besides New York. Just not yet.

I’m not ready to leave—because I’m not done becoming who I really am.

There’s more opportunity in New York than anywhere else. No matter what creative passion you have, this city offers you the opportunity to go as far in it as you can possibly go. You can hang out at book parties and meet agents and publishers who can help you have a career as a novelist. You can act and meet agents who can help you have a real acting career. You can make it big after joining an indie band and playing popular hipster bars and music halls in Brooklyn. In New York, you can follow every passion and interest as far as you want to—and find a huge community of people who share your interests.

I want to be a successful actress and a novelist. I want to join a slam poetry team and perform salsa and learn martial arts. I want to sing and model and act in commercials. In any other city, I might be able to find great outlets for a few of these interests. Here, I can have it all—every night of the week.

I don’t think anywhere else in the world would let me live this creative, multifaceted, passionate life, full of potential for artistic success, quite as well as New York does. I look forward to the day when, instead of working and striving to be this person I’ve been trying to be, I find I’ve become her—as easily and naturally as putting on a well-fitting pair of jeans.