New York 2020

12th May 2020

I came to New York for mental health respite five years ago. I intended to return to grad school one year later. Then two. Then I chose to stay in the city and to leave the world toward which I had worked my entire adult life. While it was a world of academic uncertainty, I thrived in it. In the chaos of never feeling entirely sure of yourself but finding your best selves within those obscure readings and the endless search for your own meaning and clarity. Sort of like life mirrored by the limits of the pages of the texts with which you worked and joys found in moments you felt things open to infinite possibilities. There were pieces for you to grasp. The entire effort of the chase made your work and ability to read and mark your meaning –– and yourself –– feel like you were given some semblance of control in this uncontrollable world. 

And then you found yourself in the city that everyone you know always dreamt of living in (and you never particularly cared for it yourself). But then, you arrived and found that it offered you a different version of this ability to mark yourself in an atmosphere so much grander than you knew was possible. And if you chose, you could disappear in the marking. 

The initial attraction to New York was its proximity. An eight hour drive from where you were at the time. Then, when you found out you would be moving to Brooklyn instead of up the banks of the Hudson, your thoughts shifted to find you liked the ability to be anonymous in daily life. Coming originally from a small town where people painstakingly pined away at infecting your personal life, this felt new. The ability to take comfort in not being known in a “real” city. And while you had always loved the realness of the unknowability of things, perhaps you had found the spot in which to situate your own life . . . finally. 

But now it is five years later. And you never finished your final degree. And you have spent the last five years working in an industry you know and love, but one you came from by birth and not the one you trained for. The one you felt you needed to leave to find a life of your making. To find your making. 

And now you sit here during this pandemic of Covid-19. And all of your worlds have ended –– or been brought to a halt, at least. And you are able to sit and question every single choice you’ve made in your life. And the main thought you have is to wonder why you didn’t leave New York and finish your degree. Not that its completion would provide any more stability in this chaotic time. Or before. But it would, at least, have given you something you could point at and say: I did that. It would have given you something in the world to be proud of. To feel like you didn’t fail. To exist. To find that thing you can look at and say: if I did that, I can do anything.

But here we sit, New York and I, and we wait for some uncertain future time when we can “re-start.” And in re-staring, maybe find a hopeful rebirth of futurity in some place, in some time, in some fashion. 

But, what that means is as unclear as the reason you stayed.