by Kathleen Goodwin
I'm currently in the process of moving away from New York City and while I've only lived here for two quick years, now seems as good a time as any for some reflection. Apparently since Joan Didion wrote a piece in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 about her departure from the city (on a temporary basis as it turned out), it's become a trope for self-centered New Yorkers to announce their leaving the city in the same way, as if this place cares about one less inhabitant. I guess I'm more of a New Yorker than I let myself realize.
While many of my peers seemed to consider moving to New York an end-goal in itself, I had never intended to end up here and was primed for resentment that only grew as time passed. To me, it seemed that New York was a fantastic hoax, where everyone claims to love it and to be happy to be there, so no one is able to admit that they feel otherwise. At times I have felt like screaming that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. In “Goodbye to All That” Didion says that New York is “a city only for the very young.” Leslie Jamison, in a passage about living in New York in her novel The Gin Closet, says, “The truth of being young felt like an ugly secret that everyone had agreed to keep.”
Within the surplus of literature about New York writers love to utter universal truths about the city, probably not taking the time to consider if their experience is the same as the woman who does their laundry or the guy who guards the doors at their midtown office. My observations of New York come from the conscious vantage of someone who is white, educated, and gainfully employed in a city where one is likely to have an entirely different experience if she isn't one or any of those things. It would be very easy to write about unfathomably high rent prices, working too many hours, and competing with all of my former classmates for jobs and grad school spots. But that is the allure of the New York I know, after all. It's a difficult and competitive place to thrive which is precisely why many ambitious people want to be here—a self-perpetuating phenomenon.