New York anniversary, year 2.

There is a feeling that New York fosters within the bowels of the subways, a moment that feels as though someone has cooked it up specifically as a smack in the head for anyone who was thinking they could remove themselves from the wonderful demographic cesspool that New York is so famous for and escape to the suburban pockets of uniformity of their youths. This, of course, is the moment when you realize that the person sitting next to you on the subway is getting off at the same stop as you. I mean, sometimes this person looks like you, but, let's be real, more often than not they look like nothing you've ever seen before and can't believe exists in polite society, and now they are getting off at your stop. With you. Moving in tandem through your neighborhood, potentially living in your building. My narrow midwestern mind has a moment of panic as it tries to process how this person could possibly be existing on a parallel track to my own. New York smiles quietly at the literal and metaphysical tableau it has created just for me, gently cracking open my skull and prying until the light and air starts to hit me right in my under-used brain.

New York is a constant reminder to each and every one of its ridiculous inhabitants that we are all the same.

*

I remember the exact instant that my small brain expanded to house the information that I was part of a connected ecosystem, that my tiny actions on this earth could potentially impact every other human being on the planet, if not every creature. Maybe some people are born with this sense of scope hard-coded into their brain, but I was definitely not. I'm guessing I could say the same for many of the folks who grew up in nice shiny bubble communities in the midwest. Not that I'm knocking any of that. It certainly was nice.

Anyhow, I was eight years old and we were moving from one lovely suburb of western Michigan to another when this particular expansion took place. Despite the fact that a move meant I would have to switch schools, I had generously decided to forgive my parents for this as it meant a new bedroom for yours truly, and I had long since proclaimed my current bedroom to be tragically undersized (my tendency to over-dramatize situations has not progressed much since then). I remember that in the midst of my triumph, my mom was stressing out because the people trying to move into our current house were anxious for us to get out so they could move in, but the owners of the house we wanted to move into were stalling on closing because they had not yet found a new house to move into. She was explaining the situation to me on the verge of tears, and I did not understand what she was making such a big deal about. My brain was registering one one channel only, and that channel was the huge purple bedroom in my future - how could anyone possibly be upset with times such as these ahead of us? So she ditched the realtor-speak and went for a simpler explanation.

"The people buying our house can't move in until we move out, and we can't move out until we have some place to move in, meaning we need the people in the house we're buying to move out. And they don't want to, which means we have to wait. Us moving depends on whether they move."

At that moment, the light-bulb went on and I realized that not only did our move depend on their move, but there were people trying to buy the house of the people trying to buy our house, and that THEY couldn't move in until we moved out and the people buying our house moved out of their house and into our house. And someone was trying to buy the house of those people as well! And the same went in the other direction, for the people who were moving out of the house we were trying to move into. What seemed like a singular event ("let's get a new house!") was in fact a much, much larger affair, and involved jumping into a line of millions and millions of people all moving houses at the same time. You couldn't, then, decide to change your own situation without impacting innumerable other people, people you will never meet but that were involved in the transaction you made when you were eight years old and begged your parents for a larger bedroom.

I don't remember my reaction to this, but I do remember trying very deliberately to digest the shock and take in the enormity of the truth I had just uncovered. I don't think I've slept quite the same since.

*

Today marks two years since I moved to New York City, another year of catalyst added to the heat of my particular journey of self-expansion. I closed year 1 on the beach in Miami; year 2 at the office preparing all kinds of planning presentations, so I hope you'll forgive me that my reflections aren't quite as blissed-out as they were last time around.

Everything has changed, but not much has changed. I still hate the heat, I still miss Chicago (the tulips on Michigan Ave in the spring! ack), and I still create all kinds of stress for myself from the energy and dichotomies that the city presents. But the whole thing appears as a more mature sort of struggle, through a lens of gratitude for the proliferation that my life here continues to foster. Life is, after all, pretty grand.

Someone told me this weekend that the first two years are the hardest. As these have been two of the best years of my life, I certainly hope they're right, and I continue on.

I continue to try, I continue to take it in, I continue to expand, I continue to arrive.

New York anniversary.

I arrived in New York City one year ago, today.

One truly does arrive in New York. I don't think it's possible to show up without at least some (potentially false) feeling of grandeur. Soon to be squashed, of course. Unless you're Beyonce, one of first things you realize upon arrival is that the city hasn't noticed your entrance.

But you push through feelings of unimportance and announce your arrival to friends and family, proud as a parent watching a child taking its first steps. Your first steps in New York are important in that way, even if no New Yorker would be caught dead acknowledging them.

I unfurled my hastily packed-up life, set up our beautiful DUMBO apartment and waited for the stuff of movies to start happening to me.

Of course, it didn't. Maybe it does for some, but for most, you have to earn it, or at the very least, go out and find it. But I didn't know any better.

So I kept walking. And started running, despite the heat. I ran the streets of Brooklyn, to the park and back, along the bridges to Manhattan. I ran in the morning, evenings, all the time enveloped in waves of unbearable heat. 

For some reason, it never occurred to me that a New York summer would be so damn hot. With the heat, a resentment of New York began to build.

A note: It seems appropriate that, in honor of our anniversary, I should let loose with a confession. Here it is.

About two months into the summer, I broke down and admitted to my mother in a ridiculous fit of hot, embarrassed tears, that I hated it here. I hated the heat, the garbage, the smells. I hated the swarms of tourists by the office, hated fighting through masses of people just to get to and from work each day. I hated living among such poverty, shocking as it was to be venturing outside of a variety of cushy well-off bubbles for the first time in my life. I hated my boyfriend's schedule, the long hours, the traveling. I admitted to my mother and, cathartically, to myself that I missed Chicago.

I missed the sparkling clean streets, living on the beach, the miles and miles of breezy bike paths along Lake Michigan. I missed kindness, polite strangers. I missed running by the water. I missed working with my best friends and walking to the office every day, unencumbered by trains and tourists. I missed the beautiful park behind my apartment, missed sitting quietly by the fountains night after night, dreaming about moving to New York.

Chicago was a beautiful safe place, where nothing ever happened.

My mother, blunt as ever, asked if I would like to move back, and I said no. And I really didn't. I wanted the dirt, the grit, the strife. I wanted to struggle to achieve, to not have anything handed to me. I wanted the badge of résumé honor that came with making it in advertising in New York. I wanted to be worthy of a city as dark and beautiful as any on this earth. Lying in bed that night, waiting for Sir to come home from a business trip, I took a deep breath and blew it out, letting go of Chicago and committing to my relationship with New York.

It sounds stupid, but it worked.

Once you let go of what a place isn't, you can start to see what it is, and you remember why you were so dead set on arriving there to begin with. The tragic charm, the history, the beauty of the whole thing. The pulse and the energy. The quiet parts, flanked by madness. The nights in the Village, the weekends in Brooklyn. The bridges and the cabs and the trains. The weird interludes and "only in New York" experiences that made me want to write and write and write, even if I didn't. That magical movie feeling - it really is everywhere. And my god, the food.

I've spent twelve months eating my way through this city, and I'm definitely larger for it. And I don't just mean fatter, although I won't argue with you there. It's been my own little Eat Pray Love experience, the 'eat' portion. I exist more than I did, I am more than I was capable of being. To quote Lewis Carroll, I'm much muchier than I was before, and all the better for it.

People are always asking me which city I like better. It's not a fair comparison, really. Chicago embraces you. New York waits for you to embrace her. She just doesn't have that kind of time.

*

I'm celebrating my first anniversary with New York on the sand in Miami, quietly allowing everything I've accumulated over the past year to strip away with the waves. Somehow it seems fitting - balancing a year of extreme emotions with ultimate peace and calm. 

It's also one year living with Sir, who remains buried in the Times as I head out to the surf. Yet another scary, hurried decision that could not have ended better. I can't remember the last time I felt this content.

Because I'm realizing, in the middle of a perfect vacation on a perfect beach, that I won't be sad when it's over. That this vacation is a time to reset, not escape. That I miss my life in New York. I don't think that's ever happened to me before.

I think that's when you know you're doing it right.

I think that's when you've finally arrived.