I Am Not That Young Anymore

There comes a time when the intrigue falls away & all you are left with is a recurring character in a life that you’ve made for yourself. My current recurring character is the city of New York, and the time has come for me to CONSIDER options other than this overpaid (and sometimes slightly overrated) actor. I’ve realized that by removing other options from my short list I’ve limited myself.

The cruel truth is that I’ve been falling out of love with the City for the past couple of years now, but I haven’t yet admitted that it might soon be time for a progressive migration (read: exodus). A wise man (last name Camus) once said, “One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray away from it.”

Question to self:

Could this whole New York “phase” now be considered little more than a distraction from the life I’m meant to have?

As much as I can’t see myself anywhere else, I’m day by day growing more and more doubtful that I can see myself here for much longer.

Magnetism can be powerful…and tricky. I was drawn here out of a n intense desperation, and from the beginning I got wrapped up in the romance of it all. I was overpowered by the false promises the city made me, but realistically couldn’t keep. And eventually I fell into a self-destructive pattern that will continue to repeat itself if I don’t work to break it.

Part of me feels defeated, but this is not a story of defeat. It’s a story about reaching that pivotal moment when the fantasy life I once imagined for myself in New York no longer seems attainable or attractive, or simply no longer seems worth the exhausting chase. This is the story of a person, not pulled to one city or another by familial obligation or job relocation, but rather by some grander idea of who they are and where they might best fit.

I’ve asked myself if maybe I’ve over-stayed my welcome. Maybe the city is tired of investing in me and seeing limited ROI. And just like I’ve never believed in the One in love, I no longer believe in the One in life. New York can’t satisfy me for life and maybe we’re both needing more.

When I take a step back and I look at the City, I realize that I was never meant to be the center of the universe. That makes it easier to shift my global position without feeling like there are deeper implications than there truly are. I’ve tested myself against the stresses of this city and I may be stretched to my limit.

The problem is you can’t just leave New York. You have to QUIT New York. You have to admit to yourself and proclaim to the world that you’re packing it up, calling it a day, turning out the lights.


Enough about me. Let’s hear from someone else. The following is an edited excerpt of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”, an essay about her decision to leave New York:

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots.

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.

I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California.

We were colonials in a far country.

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions, New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.

I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always.

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.

Leaving New York - REM