WAYUT: City so nice they named it twice
You ever think about how every city is just a place?
Dear Meg,
Hi!
I came across your newsletter after following you on Instagram. I’m about to graduate from a small Midwest college, and I’m really considering moving to New York but I’m kind of freaking out. I don’t know anyone there, all my friends are here, and I haven’t lived anywhere besides my hometown my whole life. Is it worth it? Should I be looking at other cities? Stay where I am? I’m so torn because I want to shake things up but I’m worried moving there might be a huge mistake. What was your experience like moving to New York? Would you do things the same if you could do it over again? At this point, I’ll take any advice you have for me.
Sincerely,
The Almost-Graduate
Dear Almost-Graduate,
I didn’t know I wanted to move to New York until my graduation weekend senior year of college. I confessed to my parents over my celebratory dinner that I “wanted to move to New York, maybe” to “try and be a screenwriter.”
As the youngest child of three, I’m lucky. I can say anything to my parents and they aren’t surprised. At that time, my mom and dad already lived through my brother up and moving to LA to become an actor. I probably could have told them I wanted to become an astrophysicist—me, an English major and Religious Studies minor—and they would have lifted up their drinks and cheers’d me.
Part of why I wanted to move to New York was because I’d convinced myself I was in love with a boy in my acting class. He spoke about moving away from everything he’d ever known and loved as if it was easy.
“We’ll live in Brooklyn,” he would tell me as we walked home from the bars late at night. He was convinced we were going to live together. (That’s a whole other story.)
“And I’ll plan music festivals and you’ll be a screenwriter.” He made it sound so simple.
As much as I fawned over the boy, I was more enamored with the future he’d painted. I didn’t have to move back to Chicago and work at an advertising agency and meet some guy named Matt or Sean or Hank at a bar and get married and have pale, probably-Irish children.
I could live in New York and be a screenwriter.
Ugh. Just writing that out makes me feel like an asshole. But it was what I wanted. At least, it was what I wanted to try.
The night before I moved, I panicked. Things with the boy didn’t work out (shock!), and now I was just…moving to New York? For myself? What the hell was I thinking? I voiced my fears to my parents, who probably took one look at the pile of packed boxes in the corner and thought, No way she’s getting out of this one.
Once my dad got me to stop pacing and sit down, he said, “New York is a place like anywhere else. People are trying to live their lives and get by, just like you.”
And that is my wisdom for you: New York is a place, like anywhere else.
Do you want to move here because you’re hoping your life will look like a lengthened version of those Day in My Life TikTok videos made by the people who claim that “Dimes Square” is totally different from Chinatown?
Or, do you want to move here because you want to live your life—do you want to lug a 65-lb. suitcase up six flights of uneven stairs, try and fail and try again to make friends, get yelled at by a man on the subway while a mariachi band plays in the corner, work a job that you hate but meet people that you love, be a regular at your local diner, shamefully hail a cab three blocks from your home because you wore new shoes that cut your ankles so bad you couldn’t move? (Speaking from personal experience.)
I think the biggest mistake people can make before moving to New York is attributing some sort of mysticism or romanticism to it. In doing so, they unintentionally try to shape the city into something they can expect or control. But New York’s axis is chaos. There’s no need to mystify, no need to romanticize it—if you move here and live here with intention, do your best to get by and treat your community with respect, your life will be mystic. It will be romantic. Not because you’re living in New York, but because you are living.
New Year’s Day 2020, my roommates and I moved into our first apartment. I woke up in my roommate Luke’s room (I was crashing on his futon), looked around at all his unpacked belongings and asked, “Are you moving all this stuff?”
“Yep,” he said, unruffled.
“How are you going to get it over to the new place?”
He shrugged.
What followed were two tense hours involving me hauling all of Luke’s belongings into the back of an Uber XL while he and my other roommate Jonah walked Luke’s mattress a mile and a half to our new apartment. I got the better end of the deal, I think.
I spent the afternoon making a frantic trip to a mattress store and buying basic necessities we would need for our first few days in the apartment.
That night, Jonah, Luke and I sat on storage boxes in our kitchen, eating burgers and sipping directly from a bottle of red wine. We talked, exhausted, and when I went to bed, I slept on a mattress in an empty room, ecstatic.
You asked if I would change anything if I could do it over again—forgive me for being cliché, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point was that I did it.
I don’t know if New York is the right city for you. Practically, I invite you to do some research and learn about the places you’d be interested in moving to—I wanted to move to New York, but I also considered Seattle and Los Angeles (though I was put off by how sunny LA is as I am a chronically sweaty person). Can you afford to move without a job, or do you want one secured before you move? How will you ensure that you’re meeting new people and becoming familiar with the area?
Once you make your choice, brush up on your neighborhood, learn about the local spots and buy from them when you can, treat your neighbors kindly and with respect.
When I was 22, I had a lot of romantic ideas about how my life would look. But my dad helped me think about what I wanted my life to be. Those ideas faded away—the boy, the false image of being a “writer.”
What’s left is my life. Friends who bring me so much joy and love me so hard I couldn’t have dreamt them up if I tried, sitting down and churning out features and pilots not because it is a dream but because it is my career, silly dinners and ripped grocery bags and losing my inhaler over the Manhattan Bridge while biking home and loving this city because of all that it is, not because of all I hoped it would be.
I am living, and I am getting by, and I have New York to thank for that.
Talk soon,
Meg