How I Gave Up New York
It’s easy to forget the big city dream when you’re living your actual dream
This isn’t a new story. It’s an old one, in more than one way: because it’s happened to others, because it’s probably been happening for centuries, and because it happened to me some five or six years ago, but I only realized it now. Nonetheless, this is the story of how I gave up the dream of living in New York City.
It begins three days before my sixth birthday, when I am yanked out of my hometown of Warsaw, Poland, and forcibly transplanted to Houston, Texas. Sure, at the time my parents had great reasons for doing this: Poland was still a poor communist country, my father had been in Houston since I was born, they thought I would have far greater opportunities, and so on. Nevertheless, I began planning my escape from Texas the moment I set foot in the state, and around the age of twelve or so, I set my sights on the destination: New York City.
To my teenage self, New York City was everything Houston wasn’t: cultured, alive, walkable, full of interesting people who worked outside of the oil industry. Plus it had actual seasons and a functioning public transportation system.
It was, in a sense, more European, though I didn’t realize at the time that it was Europe I was actually seeking. I just wanted a place where dreams came true, where I could live a bigger life than what I saw around me in Houston: graduate, get a 9-5, pop out some kids and buy a four bedroom house with a state of the art AC unit. Oh, and spend all of your money on your car, because you’ll spend most of your life driving it.
Even before I knew what kind of life I wanted, I knew that a life in Houston was the opposite of it.
I didn’t actually step foot in NYC until I was seventeen. The first time I went with my parents, the second time with my first boyfriend, and the third and last time was not long before I would move back to Poland. Each time, I was confident that one day I would end up living in my own shoebox apartment in Manhattan, scraping by but still knowing I made it, solely because of my new zip code.
As the end of high school approached, I applied to a handful of colleges, but only one mattered: NYU. And I got in. Not only that, they offered me a $10,000 scholarship… for the entire four years. As much as I appreciated their generosity, pragmatism (and my parents’ lower middle class status) meant that there was no way on earth I could afford to live in New York, much less go to that school, for $10,000. In 2001, tuition and room and board were about three times that per year. Maybe I could have taken out enough in loans, but even at eighteen I realized no dream was worth being in debt until retirement.
So I stayed in Texas, and enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, the best school I could afford — and most importantly, one that would at least get me out of Houston.
Four years would pass, and while I had some good times in Austin, it was still in Texas, and it still wasn’t New York City — the prize at the end of the academic tunnel. I started thinking about grad schools there, but the same problem always popped up: money. New York was expensive. School in New York was even more expensive. I was still a poor kid from an immigrant family, and I had already run up a modest debt from my undergrad years.
So in 2005, I decided on Plan B: find an affordable grad school program that would get me out of Texas, and move to New York after finishing that. Possibly to do a PhD, because I had heard they actually pay you go to school then.
That’s how I ended up in Krakow, Poland, where I would spend a year and a half earning an MA at the country’s oldest university, the Jagiellonian, for a relatively affordable sum.
That was nearly a decade ago. Somewhere in that time, the dream of New York faded further and further into the background, as my actual life and location became far more captivating.
I stopped thinking of Plan B, and began concentrating on Plan Life: travel, freelance, and enjoy the hell out of living.
Living in Krakow has given me something that would be damn hard, if not impossible, to achieve in New York City: a life where I spend only an average of two hours per day working, where I can live in an apartment much bigger than a closet on $500 per month, where I can travel around a continent of multiple cultures and languages for $20 flights, where I meet and befriend people from all over the world on a regular basis — OK, that last part happens in NYC as well, but probably not as easily.
For now, I call Krakow home. I probably won’t stay here forever, and perhaps lately Berlin has become a new New York for me. But I finally stopped feeling like a failure for having never moved to NYC, and I know that even if I never live in Berlin either, I’m OK with that, as long as I live a life I’m proud of.
Plus, it’s pretty damn beautiful here, don’t you think?
