New York Essay 2014
Hi there. My name is Amy Wilson. I’m a writer. In July of this year I moved to New York City to follow my dreams. I want to tell you about what this has been.
To say that I’m afraid to write about what it was like to move to New York City is an understatement. I think about starting this essay all the time but until THIS VERY MOMENT have not put fingers to keyboard. Writing for me often feels like wrestling something to the ground and the thing that I am trying to wrestle by writing this is huge beyond measure. Also, I don’t know what will happen when I pin it.
As all writers know good writing takes courage. Not only the courage to confront yourself and comb through your own mind, but the courage to stand by what you’ve said once you say it. I admire writers who are good at this and have sympathy for those who struggle, which in my possibly-naïve estimation is most of them.
I couldn’t start writing this until I felt like I could say something about New York and mean it. But here it is: there is very little to say that could truly be right. Don’t you think that’s freeing? But don’t you also think, that freedom, is terrifying?
*
The first way that New York changed me came very quickly, when I dropped my habit of trying to write down and/or remember interesting things I heard said around me. That’s what happened in the first few weeks I was here, when I didn’t really know anyone and floated around like a ghost the way you do when you are new.
The second way that New York changed me was in a few waves. As I met people in the city, particularly young people, I started to feel confused about how much I should actually care about what we might call the trappings of success, minor or major, our own and others’: who went on a date with an actor from Girls, who won a latte-art contest, whose story is forthcoming in Tin House. The answer seemed to be, “a lot, but not in public”. The change happened when I realized I couldn’t do that, and made the choice (or succumbed to the compulsion) to care deeply and all the time. That said, I really feel that caring deeply and all the time is the same thing as not giving a damn.
I started wearing longer skirts, and shorter skirts, and growing my hair longer although for my hair longer means “bigger”. I very quickly got used to everyone around me being way more beautiful than their equivalents would be in Michigan, where I lived, or Oregon, where I’m from. (And I love it.)
Occasionally now I wait until I’m down to my truly, very last, no more, not even the ones that are too small or too big or have holes in them left, pair of clean underwear before I do my laundry — which I never would have done before. I’ve learned to divide my day into exceedingly precise chunks, to know exactly how much is possible to accomplish, and to know it’s unlikely that I’ll accomplish more than 70% of that on a very, very good day. One time I caught a man’s eye as the doors of the F train were closing and realized he was a noted author; another time I stood in line at Whole Foods behind another noted author, not once but twice. I say “noted author”. At the end of every day I feel like I’ve aged a million years. (And I love it.)
To survive so far in New York as the person I am I’ve had to tighten my grip on what matters and loosen it on what doesn’t. This city offers many distractions and in a contrary way contains both endless fuel for anxiety and the cure for it, which is to stop having so much to spend. In New York City I find myself in a cloud of butterflies: a tacky pun on the side of a van, a man strolling down Houston with a cat on his head, jeweled child-size dresses in windows of the Garment District, the albino squirrel who lives in Prospect Park. These details catch my eyes constantly and it is my instinct to lock them down.
There’s a lot of talk of “making it” in New York and I’ve rarely felt I know what that phrase means. For me I think I started to make it when I realized that if I kept walking, some of the butterflies must end up landing on me.
*
I know you probably wish I could be more specific. That I could tell you what deli I ate my best lunch at, or what it felt like to lean over the railing of the Staten Island Ferry. Names and neighborhoods. Intersections. Exhibits. Concerts. Shop windows.
This is the thing though that is challenging about writing about New York. The specifics of life here are vivid, so meaningful and important in the moment, but also insanely numerous and impossible to contain. I do happen to know, however, this evolution:
After a month my favorite thing about living in New York City was how often I heard Billy Joel songs in public places.
After six weeks it was the sense of being part of a massive, incomprehensible organism.
After eight weeks it was the David Byrne bike racks outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music that spelled, “WRY ROMP”.
After ten weeks, the way these old ladies say “cough drop”.
After four months in New York my favorite thing about living here was the smell of flower stands on a rainy day.
And now it’s how it feels to leave this place knowing I’m coming back.
In the time that I’ve been here there has been a lot of civil unrest. You must have heard about it.
In an immediate sense and in an ethereal cultural way, New York is in turmoil. I think it would be wrong to try to write an essay about moving here without mentioning this. To my understanding much of this turmoil centers around the problem of identity. The recent bubbling-up of tensions between the black community and the police is one, poignant and horrible, example but there are many more. The neighborhood I live in is locked in an argument about gentrification. Women and men don’t know how to talk about rape. A lot of people say New York City is dying, and disappearing, that the city they knew has succumbed to the massive forces of money and tasteless hordes.
Identity is a tricky thing. What it encompasses are things that can be seen and are unseen, that can be leveled across groups and are strictly individual, that are tangible and are emotional. Right now in intellectual circles these subjects are much discussed: Race. Gender. Class, sometimes. Privilege and dis-privilege.
What I wonder about is the internal side of identity. I don’t know anyone else’s emotions but what I sense around me, in the culture and in New York, is fear — of all the human, soft things to fear, like being alone and change and the passing of time and the possibilities for good and evil inherent in all the other self-contained little universes streaming by you on the sidewalk. I wonder how to be less afraid and how to better understand the fear of others.
In this as in many things perhaps New York is the canary in the coal mine, the place where some things get worked out before they are spread outward. Or maybe it just feels that way to me because I live here now — the third way New York is changing me is it’s making me forget what really matters and what only matters here. Help!
*
It’s 2014, a strange year. It’s always so hard to know what’s changing, oneself or the environment, but in this case I feel it’s most likely both. We live in interesting times, and so do I.
These details catch my eyes constantly and it is my instinct to write them down. That’s because I’m a writer-person, one of the (as Joan Didion put it) “lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss”. There are many of us living in New York City. For me the greatest and most rewarding challenge of being here so far has been learning to let things just arrange themselves.
Earlier this year I packed my worldly possessions in a minivan and drove it from Michigan to Queens, alone. On the way I listened to the soundtrack from Evita, David Byrne’s Here Lies Love, Court and Spark, Avalon, and the Greatest Hits of Pat Benatar. These music choices were more than coincidental — they were to remind me of people who seek the world beyond the curtain, who want glitter and peachy gauze and exotic lamps. I am also one of those kind of people. The combination in myself of writer-person and peachy-gauze-person is what makes New York City the right place for me to be. The convergence of those types of people and more in this city is what gives it such a wonderful and enduring mystique.
I’m a 27-year-old woman with gigantic ambitions and I’m here to tell you: the mystique of New York City is alive and real, although people here sometimes get jaded or possessive and become reluctant to admit it. I feel it when I walk down the street and I am happy, because I know my dreams are here. Somewhere.
