I'm worried I made a huge mistake moving to New York

A refined journal entry from May 14, 2025

I moved to New York from Fort Collins, Colorado, five months ago. Like every other young person here it seems, I moved to pursue a career in writing and filmmaking. My friends have all told me how proud they are of me - how “impressive” it is I just up and moved to New York. Well, thanks guys! I assume that a big part of the impressiveness is the gumption it takes to move somewhere you don’t really know anybody. Especially somewhere with such hustle and bustle, such a high concentration of excellence and SUCH expensive rent as N e w Y o r k  C i t a y! But I fear: what if it’s just downright stupid?

It was so easy to imagine the spectacularity of life in New York with my friends beside me in Fort Collins. It was so romantic to look around our college bar - Trailhead - through a lens of premature nostalgia, secretly hoping that a hot stranger would take note and think I was having very intelligent and creative thoughts. (Which - let it be known - is actually what’s going on almost 100% of the time). I’d look around and think, so smugly, ‘well! This was lovely, but onto bigger and better things!’ which haunts me when I look around the bars here, next to one of my new Friends in New York, and remember Trailhead’s $4 gin-and-tonics. And because I miss my old friends so much.

The actual, articulated fear of I’M WORRIED I MADE A HUGE MISTAKE MOVING TO NEW YORK sprang into my head two days ago, on a blubbery bus ride back from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was returning to the city after a weekend visit to my longtime friend Julia. I felt a real urge to yell for the bus driver to STOP! Let me out! So I could return to Julia’s house and bask in that ephemeral atmosphere that is created during every short visit. It’s not just the saying goodbye to your friend, but saying goodbye to her bedroom, her apartment, the rose-colored atmosphere you two have created. That wisp of a world that exists only for you two and only in this town and only for these few days. And once you leave you wave a hand through that world - poof! The rose-colored cloud dispels.

The weekend before that, I was at LAX, blubbering at another friend - Lauren - from the passenger seat while she gently tried to get me out of the car so she wouldn't get harassed by the airport people. I thought about how there was a time when I saw Lauren every day, but now, for the foreseeable future, her face will exist only in the context of that tragic cloud - watermarked by a clock counting down the minutes until we separate indefinitely again. I was crying not about the loneliness of being New in New York, but because I was confronting the lifelong grief that comes with having good friends live so far away. A life of creating these mystical atmospheres and being forced to - choosing to - wave each one away.

Luckily, I’ve had many more visitors than trips. Which means I’ve been doing a lot less blubbering on public transportation than I COULD be! I’ve found that it is much, much sadder to be the one leaving rather than the one being left. When my visitors leave me, I fend off a tear or two, but once they’re gone I (sorry guys) pretty quickly continue on with my life. Do my laundry, go for a run. I’ll often remind my visitors to say goodbye to my bedroom, and that seems to make them sad. 

And I think that’s an important contrast. This atmosphere I’ve been talking about, that I’m always so devastated to leave, exists in New York too! In this bedroom, in this apartment. My friends feel it when they arrive, and they miss it when they leave. We all get to live in our own warm and lovely cloud; we’re only ever sharing it with our friends. We’re only ever guests in our friends’ clouds.

On the bus leaving Cambridge, I didn’t yell for the bus driver to stop the bus because A: that’s weird, and B: I knew the feeling would fade. You do some yoga, you clean your room. You see the view of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Q train. You remember that you actually really enjoy the New York cloud you’re creating, saturated with the wisps of friends’ visits left behind. I do still feel, though, that the only permanent solution is for everyone I love to move to New York. Bunk beds!