The Grass Only Looks Greener Because Of The Instagram Filter (It’s Valencia)
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America… I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” — Sylvia Plath
After graduation, there are two possibilities. You can move to a new city and attempt to become a person (and fail miserably accordingly). Or you can stay in your hometown, the place you’ve always known. If you stay, you’re stuck with a serious case of FOMO, surrounded by newborn babies, always in fear that you’ll run into your high school classmates at any moment.
No matter what choice you make, there’s the “what if,” the greener grass, the other side — which you see every day, filtered to the extreme — on social media. If only people shared their real lives instead of their best moments… But I guess crying in the shower or Netflix in bed won’t ever look good, even in Valencia.
This year, I chose to make the move that always seemed like something that would inevitably happen. After all, I have all of the qualities necessary to be a New York, nay, Williamsburg transplant — struggling writer, check, Jewish, check, and full disclosure: “Gossip Girl” is my favorite guilty pleasure, even though my resemblance to Shoshanna on “Girls” seems like more than a coincidence at this point.
After spending six years in New Orleans, a city that hasn’t really ever changed, I needed something different. As much as I was deeply in love with the city — a place where it’s normal to start drinking before noon and music seems to come out of the sidewalk cracks, surrounding you like the heat — there was the sense that nothing there would ever advance, because it hadn’t in the past.
In New York, there’s a rhythm, a pulse, an energy — in New Orleans, people are happy to enjoy everything as eternally untouched as a Duggar on their wedding day. The Mardi Gras krewes have the same aristocratic, archaic traditions, and the upper echelons run the whole place. Everyone’s happy going to festivals, eating crawfish and drinking every day from the time the sun comes up — which is perfect, to a point. Once you’re tired of the alcohol, the excess and the inability to become who you really are, it gets a little bit old.
I contemplated change for years, scared of making the wrong choice — the one that would lead to people feeling sorry for me and leave me feel like I was missing something. I know there are risk-takers out there; I’ve just never been one of them. People who go sky diving, and like talking to strangers on Tinder dates, and “put themselves out there” on a regular basis. People who look for new opportunities, and move cross country, and don’t look back. And by changing, by forcing myself to move away and move on, in some ways, I started to become one of them.
New York has been terrifying, and overwhelming, and I’d be lying to both myself and you if I said that I didn’t have regular crying jags over my inability to afford anything other than breathing.
Girls from my college, from my high school, write me, and they ask about whether or not they should move to this ridiculous city. They see my photos, and they experience that all-consuming FOMO that makes you feel incapable of deciding on the next move you’ll make. Because no matter what fig you take, there are a thousand others that will fall to the ground — but you’ll see them on social media every day.
So, what was the real change? Was it moving to New York and sleeping on couches and writing and ignoring the fact that it looked like I might never have enough money to pay rent for a hamster wheel of my own? Was it when I started to feel as a human being that made me finally realize that my sarcasm was the easiest way to mask social anxiety? (Along with drinking, of course.) After all, once you move to New York, you realize that everyone cares far more about themselves than you, which allows you to be whoever you want. Maybe it was it the fact that one major change left everything up in the air, leaving me open to a million to come — making me realize that I can’t control anything, and that everyone else’s lives aren’t what they seem to be.
