Ahh it’s an age old tale. Young, naïve kid grows tired of the slow, comfortable small town she has grown up in and decides to trade it all in for life in the big city.
The calling comes slowly but steadily. Suddenly, running into your family doctor, your church pastor and your best friend’s mom on a trip to the grocery store loses the pleasantries it once held.
Suddenly, you realize you’ve been partying in the same basement, sneaking the same alcohol, and hanging around the same exact people every weekend for eons, and while it used to bring comforting consistency in knowing what your weekend plans would be, it now seems repetitive and arbitrary.
Suddenly, you realize every time you and your friends decide you want have a “night out,” your attempts to find plans inevitably end up in getting ice cream or getting pizza, because as the age-old saying goes, “there’s never anything to do in this God-forsaken town.”
Suddenly, you realize you frankly don’t care if neighbor’s brother’s wife’s aunt likes the Christmas gift your neighbor’s brother’s wife got her. Actually, you find all of the “he said, she said” that those around you seem to focus on only mildly significant.
Suddenly, horrifyingly, you realize how habitually monotonous your entire life has been. You realize that every day of your entire life has been more or less the same. You realize that the biggest upheaval you’ve seen thus far was last year when you switched from pop tarts to cereal for breakfast. No, you haven’t been living, you’ve merely existed for a period of roughly 6,570 relatively identical days.
So, after memorizing every last crack in the sidewalk pavement on your daily run, you think, what’s next?
You realize that there is an entire outside world with so many new thoughts to think and so many new sights to see and so many new parts of yourself to discover. There are so many conversations to be had, and so many diverse people to have them with. There are so many injustices to be made right, and yes, you, your young, inexperienced, and broke self, you can probably personally fix them all.
So, wide-eyed and full of vigor, you pack up your belongings and move to New York. Actually, you leave most of them at home in hopes of re-birthing into a new self who would never wear any of what you own. You enthrall yourself with never-fading twinkle of the city lights and you romanticize the constant noise, because they are a sign of life. They are a sign of energy, of encounters, of interactions, and opportunity. It’s a place where the only consistency is change. It’s a place where you can be anyone you want to be (seriously though, there will always be someone on the streets weirder than you), and you can do anything you could want to do, so long as you put yourself out there.
It’s also a place where nothing is spoon fed to you, and nothing is easy. You could be sleeping on the streets tonight and for the rest of the city, life would go on as per usual. But as they say “life begins at the end of your comfort zone” and the challenge is exactly what you came for.
