Loving and leaving New York is not a novel concept.
Imagine loving New York and fantasizing about living in the city for most of your life, and then finally having the opportunity to make that fantasy a reality. It may have been an uphill battle, but at last, you’ve arrived.
You’re in NYC, working and living for a few years or perhaps longer. Maybe you came to go to college and stayed for a job. Maybe you came for love and met the guy or girl of your dreams, got married (or not), but decided to stay because you hate long-distance relationships, and well, you’re in love, after all. Or maybe, you came because you love New York and no job or person was involved.
For whatever reason, you made it to New York, and despite life’s ups and downs of living in the big city, you’re somehow figuring it all out.
Forget the romance for a minute.
Okay, those stories almost sound romantic. But for a minute, forget all the romance. Somewhere along the way, between practically selling your soul to be able to move to New York and affording to make the escalating rent month after month and all the other expenses you need to pay just to stay in the city, life happened. Now you’re not really too sure that you should be in New York any longer. In fact, you’ve decided that it could be time to leave New York.
Let’s get this straight. You wanted to live in NYC for as long as you can remember, and now, you are finally living in New York…..but you want to leave?
The scenario of loving and leaving New York isn’t novel. In fact, it happens a lot.
People have been loving New York City and leaving for a long time.
Joan Didion’s famed 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” elaborates on her love affair with New York and her decision to leave. Here is one of the essay’s most famous quotes:…
“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.”–Joan Didion
In a similar vein, the book Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, edited by Sari Botton, is an anthology that was published in 2013. The book features 28 women writers who tell their stories about falling in love with New York and eventually leaving for more space, cleaner air, a degree, a relationship, a house, family, or their sanity.
I adore this book. My favorite essay is by Maggie Estep, a beautiful and celebrated writer, who, sadly, passed away in 2014. Here’s a selection of quotes from her story…
On her first encounter with New York
“I fell in love with New York City one day in 1971, when I saw dozens of people blithely stepping over a dead body on a sidewalk. I was seven years old, walking in Midtown with my grandfather. It was summer. The air smelled like rotting fruit. Steam rose from food vendor carts. There were snarls of traffic, bleating horns, women in cheap knee-length skirts. And that dead body. On the sidewalk.”–Maggie Estep
On one of her apartments in the East Village
“I moved into a room in a rent-controlled apartment on Avenue C. There were rats. I would hear them at night, knocking things over. I’d put boots on, walk into the kitchen, flick the lights on, and find the rats nonchalantly snacking on dry goods, like a bunch of old people at an early-bird buffet.”–Maggie Estep
On realizing that she might leave the city
“….I started taking longer and longer bike rides, pushing into the far reaches of the outer boroughs, looking for still-untamed pockets of my city. I was location scouting. For books I was writing or would write. For images of the city that would burn into my heart. I didn’t know it yet, but I was starting the long process of breaking up with New York.”–Maggie Estep
I’d be lying if I said the thought of leaving New York has never crossed my mind.
I think many New Yorkers feel the same.
As I get older, I wonder about sustaining this ridiculously overpriced lifestyle, and how practical it is to continue living in NYC. I also love my time away, and adore exploring places I’ve never been before.
However, no matter where I go in the world, I always look forward to coming home to New York. And I believe that alone means that my time here isn’t over yet.
Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York is available on Amazon.
And there’s a follow-up book I also recommend, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers and Their Unshakeable Love for New York, also available on Amazon.
Thousands of people move to New York every year in search of something. And my thoughts on when it’s time to leave New York.
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