Surviving Vacation

Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood
Hop a flight to Miami Beach or to Hollywood
But I’m taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River line
I’m in a New York state of mind
— Billy Joel, New York State of Mind
FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS, weighed down by acute sadness, I have found it a struggle to even drag myself out of bed every morning. So, naturally, I did the unthinkable: I dragged myself 2,800 miles away. To New York City.
Why did I do it?
I found myself confronting the same question less than an hour into my arrival in the city. No sooner had I stepped foot in the tiny private room of my new Midtown apartment, taken off my shoes, put down my bags, and gotten settled into bed than I found myself actively questioning what I had just done.
This was a vacation, and vacations are supposed to be fun. Then why was I suddenly terrified at this prospect?
Five days lay ahead of me — five very hot, very long days. Were I in any other frame of mind, that would have seem like a laughably short amount of time in which to experience, let alone get to know, a city like New York.
But time is a shapeshifter when you’re sad. Days and weeks can blur into one solid chunk of time. It can speed you by so quickly, you wonder where the time went. Or it can trundle along so sluggishly, the hours crawling along to a slow funeral march of clocks. Even the same day can simultaneously feel long and short. Nights can play tricks with your mind, hours seeping into nothingness. You try to catch sleep, but sleep won’t come.
All you can do is lie in bed and wait for daylight to break, or to hear footsteps of your roommates in the hallway, the smell of coffee, sounds of sleepy awakenings — something, anything. Some sort of signal from other people’s morning routines to make up for the agonizing lack of your own. Something to mark the end of painful hours of still, unsleeping darkness. And the restless, fidgeting, twisting shapes of your own body.
Tomorrow will be better, you tell yourself.
But tomorrow isn’t better, and sleep still doesn’t come.
I found myself in my new New York City bed, powder-blue. Its sheets had not yet creased when I realized the impending horror of what I had done.
I had been foolish enough, I had been cavalier enough, I had been impulsive enough to do this.
To think that I could just uproot my life for a week and will my sadnesses away. Hadn’t I been trying all along? Hadn’t I tried to slowly chip away at the numbness inside of me? Hadn’t I felt the edges of its broken, glinting shards, needling and stabbing into startling pain, sometimes astonishing, blinding, staggering pain?
The numbness was far worse than the pain, so surely this must mean I was making progress.
The prudent thing was to go get diagnosed, maybe go see a shrink.
Befudddled and confused and ashamed, I kept my sadness carefully under wraps, disguised it as an up and down, disguised it as an ebb and flow. I hid it even from my closest friends. And when the cracks started to show, I slipped into a carefully constructed and well-rehearsed narrative: I just haven’t had the easiest past few weeks, but I’m feeling great now. I’ve been feeling better all week, all past two weeks, all month. No really, I feel great.
Hadn’t I been trying all along?
It is true that I’m not in that state of blunt, unyielding numbness anymore. It is true that I have done myself a disservice by not going in to get medically diagnosed, something I’ve realized I need to desperately — and will soon — rectify.
But it is also true that I’ve made progress. Sometimes incremental, sometimes painful, stagnant, minuscule, going back-and-forth — but I’ve been trying. Some days are worse than others. I’ve felt the weight of my own unhappiness crushing me, and it is something that you can’t shake off. You can’t make yourself feel happy. Forget happy — you can’t make yourself feel not sad. You can’t ‘snap out of it’. I tried, and failed multiple times.
You would have to be either extraordinarily (some might even say, foolishly) idealistic or masochistic to plan a solo vacation as an antidote to constant, unyielding sadness. I could have saved my vacation days for happier times, times where I actually looked forward to having fun. Not dreading it.
Not dreading it, as I did this afternoon.
Not feeling guilty about the money I’m spending, in hopes of driving away emptiness inside of me.
Not feeling like a trickster for not being honest with my friends who agreed to show me around about the real reason I was here.
Not feeling stupid and so audaciously, so myopically arrogant to think travel would be a solution to my problems.
Not feeling guilty for missing work.
Not feeling like the most ungrateful person there ever was that was fortunate and blessed to go travel where they wanted to and then had the nerve to complain about it.
But why New York?
There is no doubt that some of this was romanticism on my part. Even amidst my sadness, I’m an idealist, I’m a romantic. Like the mocked man from the punchline of that Louis CK joke, I think: ‘Maybe something good will happen.’
It is not surprising that people who like to write, in particular, also happen to like drama. They have a flair for the melodramatic, the exaggerated, inflated contours of their own reality, and sometimes (most of the times) their own egos. Perhaps they do it make up for the disappointingly, decidedly less exciting counterparts with their real, everyday lives, so stark in contrast to their richly embroidered daydreams and fantasies. And perhaps, when they — or rather, I — talk about them in the plural third person, I actually mean me.
It is no wonder, then, that I sought out New York City to be my refuge, or my deliverance, or my antidote, or whatever idealistic identity I suffused it with. There is no place in the world as hallowed as the quintessential crucible of dreams, and I latched onto that mythos.
I needed the prospect of a big, grand promise: possibility, re-invention, redemption.
I thought New York would offer me all this, and more.
Like a poor woman’s Eat, Pray and Love.
Except in my case, it seemed like it might actually be an awful lot like Eat, Mope and Sleep.
I have loved New York from a distance, all my life. Without ever having lived here. With only ever having learned to love it from countless movies, sitcoms, songs, and books I loved growing up. From first-hand accounts of rhapsodising friends who talked endlessly about the city they had travelled to or left behind.
I’m about to find out if any of that is actually true, and that is one of the many reasons why I’m terrified.
A few weeks before I came here, I wondered:
I’m afraid: what if I go to New York, and it changes me?
And I’m even more afraid: what if I go there, and it doesn’t change me?
What if it doesn’t do anything for me, what if I go there and find out that here it’s just another city, just another place, and a place I’ve loved without ever really having truly known it? What if, when I get closer, I discover that I had only been dreadfully wrong all along?
I wondered if I should cancel my flight back home on Sunday and book one tomorrow. Los Angeles wouldn’t be New York, but it would be LA. It would be home, and it would be comfortable, and home to all my friends and work, the two things that brought me stability and happiness.
This was not a good sign. I had been in here not even for an hour and I already found myself wondering if I should hasten my return back home.
I felt like I made a big mistake. I felt like I had built something up, in such loving detail that it would be impossible to live up to it in reality.
Planning a vacation is much easier and much more fun when it’s in the future. You don’t have to confront the reality that you’re just being overzealous and conflating things with a misplaced sense of meaning.
Even the train ride into the city was not enjoyable. It was painful. There was no pleasant jolt of anticipation, that excited feeling in the pit of your stomach you get when you’re looking forward to things. Something I never imagined. Instead, my body ached, constricted, recoiling into itself. I was deeply, deeply unhappy, trying everything to keep that at bay, in anguish that what I had worked so hard to battle and drive away had come roaring right back. It was here again, and I would be engulfed in it once more.
I was not pleased to find out that Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata hung prominently on the wall in the living room of my new temporary home. It used to be a poem I had once loved. But now I found it irksome. I was annoyed by the simplicity of all his dictums, as if it were that easy. I found its preachiness annoying.
But in spite of myself, I found myself drawing the smallest amount of begrudging comfort from the poem, especially the last lines. Internally, I rolled my eyes and thought I might as well pack up.
I went back to my room, the one place I shouldn’t be in. I should be out in the city. That’s the whole reason I came here. My room had a sickening, sweet perfume-y smell to it, that made me feel even more sick than I already felt.
I tried to go to sleep, because I hadn’t slept all of last night. Perhaps my body was finally exhausted, and now, at last, I had done it.
I couldn’t shake off the surge of fresh pain that now seemed to erupt into waves. The prospect of going back home was beginning to seem more attractive by the hour.
Sometime later that afternoon, curious about the dark, completely opaque blind on my window, I went over to see what it was all about, and lifted it. As it turns out, the view was less than impressive. I was on the fourth floor, so I wasn’t very high up. My building stood looking a parking lot, not exactly the most inspiring of views.
But I saw something else. I saw people and heard noise from the street below. The steady, background-like hum of traffic. I was looking down on 9th Avenue.
For some inexplicable reason, this unassuming sight brought me the tiniest flickr of happiness.
t’s raining in the city tonight, and the downpour has been incessant, almost unstoppable for the past four hours.
It is 11 PM in LA, but it’s 2 PM here in the New York. It’s the early hours of the morning, and I’m still awake, but for a different reason, not persecuted by insomnia tonight.
I’ve somehow stumbled into this. I’m here for the next four days, living in the middle of Manhattan, with no solid or set agenda.
I don’t know if this experiment will succeed or fail. It could go either way.
New York can be whatever and whoever I want it to be. I can be whatever and whoever I want to be.
