I’m back home now, and I’m feeling something I haven’t felt since the last time I returned from a big trip.
Friday night I came in the door, dropped my bag, sat on the couch out of habit. Instead of the relief I had looked forward to from the plane, I felt an intense uneasiness. My apartment is clean, spacious, utilitarian and unlike New York City in every way, and to this moment it makes me queasy.
It’s no wonder, either, that feeling so comfortable in the crowds of Manhattan (“like a warm bath,” I kept saying) I feel quite out of place in a city that is so starkly different, even if I do call it home.
What is a surprise, though, is that I’d been enduring some measure of this restlessness all the time without recognizing it. My living situation is nearly perpendicular to my actual values, and I didn’t realize it until I fit so well in a place so dramatically different than here.
It was a revelation to me that I crave a buzzing social life, walkable shops, dinners with friends, art and art people, cafés that aren’t franchises, buildings that are older than my parents. Yet I live in a dull park of two-level apartments at the edge of the city, with nothing in its walking radius but box stores. This is not a neighborhood.
One afternoon in Manhattan I was in a museum and I had to find a way to write something. I’m sure a lot of writers feel it. It comes on with the same kind of urgency as having to pee.
I quickly ended up sitting on one of the viewing benches in a room dedicated to Kandinsky, typing on my phone.
Things I have learned in ny.
Read more. Get healthy. Get calm but stay playful.
Create something everyday. Poem, stream of consciousness, article, drawing or narrative.
Find your people. Get close to the action.
Absorb art. Read More
I'm in the last year of my PhD and the number of days I have left to actually write my thesis is rapidly approaching double-digit territory. However, because I am a master procrastinator, in the last 4 months I have learned to ride a motorcycle, moved house and begun taking...