Moving to a new city is hard. Moving to the huge metropolis that is New York City (or as I call it, The Land of Tiny Bathrooms) is probably the hardest. The journey to New York is one that millions of people have taken for decades. Mine is not new or super courageous, but it is a look into what happens when a naive Millennial from a DC suburb decides to restart in New York City. Here's how I did it, in 21 steps.
1. Save up all your money, plan and dream to move with your best friend. Do this for more than a year.
2. Each pack your possessions into one minivan (because, in a practical decision, you downsized so much that the essentials don’t even fill a minivan) and road trip it to Brooklyn.
3. Arrive late at night so you have to quietly sneak your stuff into your apartment, then get freaked out by a car that parked in front of you. Somehow convince each other that it must be a Russian mobster. Whisper-scheme to run upstairs with your most valuable possessions, only to see the non-mobster pick up his friend and drive away.
4. Feel really thankful and then really annoyed that you brought a car to Brooklyn. Aahh, peace of mind! But... where does anyone park in this land? Is there room to park in THE BAY?
5. Realize how totally possible it can be to uproot your own life and physically plant it somewhere else.
6. Get overwhelmed by having your senses bombarded at all times from being constantly enveloped in crowds and noise and light.
7. Feel thankful that you have a friend and partner in crime to figure out New York with.
8. Realize that the once dreamy New York is actually a garbage town filled with garbage piles and garbage water and street garbage and garbage on top of garbage and garbage being thrown out of moving busses...
A typical winter's day in New York.
9. Start to get a taste for Halal truck food because it’s cheap and everywhere (honorable mention: pizza by the slice).
10. Eat out for the entire first week because you're too exhausted to figure out how groceries work here.
11. Buy tickets to ALL the cheap comedy shows, because you’ve been hungry all your life and now you’ve moved into the comedy buffet that is New York - but miss most of them because you’re bad at trains.
12. Realize that all your stuff won’t come from a big shopping mall or Target, but from lots of small mom and pop stores. Unless you are really bent on buying that plastic set of drawers from a Target that’s a 40 minute train ride away, and triumphantly hurdling that thing across turnstiles and through the subway back to your abode like a champion.
13. Have a weird moment when you’re alone for the first time in days and you’re listening to the soundtrack to Joseph and the "Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" on Youtube because it was stuck in your head randomly, and just start sobbing because YOU DID IT AUDREY, YOU MOVED HERE TO FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS... MUCH LIKE JOSEPH, AND HIS COAT OF DREAMS AND MANY COLORS!
(Any dream will do, Joseph.)
14. Miss your first improv class because you spent literally the entire day hunting down a futon.
15. Feel real loneliness that comes with not having a city-wide social support system yet.
16. Hunker down into survival mode for days on end, then for the first time in a long time crack a joke, then laugh until it hurts because it’s so cathartic and it makes you feel normal again.
17. Witness the most hipster-y hipsters you’ve ever seen, contrasted with a quickly gentrifying neighborhood and a community that has lived there for years.
18. Have a sneaky feeling that you don’t belong here because you haven’t done something amazing yet.
19. Get ghosted by your temp agency and feel the panic of being unemployed in an expensive city (this is where the "saving all your money for two years" kicks in). Shamelessly reach out to everyone you know in New York for that sweet, sweet scoop on who's hiring.
20. Realize that everything moves so fast here, so you jump into the stream and become one with the current (ain’t no time to ponder the moral implications of each coffee cup size when there's a huge line of impatient New Yorkers behind you).
21. Count your blessings. Be so thankful that you had the resources, the opportunities, and the people in your life that helped you get here….
*cue the soundtrack from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat*
