Last fall, when everyone was posting this (admittedly horribly true) Onion article, I was pretty irritated about it. I still live here, damn it. And it happened to come at a time when it seemed like everyone I know was leaving me to go do something else with their lives. (Looking at you, Dave.) Just two years ago, I remember a friend asking me if I could stand to leave, if I got a job elsewhere, and I couldn’t imagine it. How could I? Everyone I need is here. But then a disturbing number of everyone I need didn’t need New York anymore.
I wanted to live here ever since I was a little girl, in Brooklyn specifically. It seemed like being able to go to Coney Island and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge would be the essence of magic. And it was, for a few years! People would come visit me and I’d dutifully take them all the way down the F train, and say, yeah, I know the Cyclone is really harsh on your skeleton and stuff but it’s really important, you know, historically, and we’d eat some overpriced nasty fried food and I’d point out Shoot the Freak and be all yeah they’re keeping it real I guess. Then we’d go back up to downtown Brooklyn and I’d march my friend across the length of the Bridge just at twilight and they’d say, yup, it’s very pretty. Can we go now?
I don’t want to say the magic is gone. It’s just through a very thick lens now. I was at the Met yesterday with someone I met at a conference, and while we both stared and stared at some unfamiliar Flemish paintings, the super-famous Impressionist stuff seemed oddly unmoving. I tried to explain to him that it was similar to how I felt about New York. It was like trying to look at a Van Gogh you’ve seen since you were four. It’s the real thing; how exciting! But also it’s not really there, because it’s behind the lenses of all the things you’ve heard about it and know about it.
The worst part of living here has been the toll it’s taken on my sense of myself. Grad school doesn’t help either, but overall my experience of school has been as warm as one can expect. Really it’s just the way people treat each other here. No one is ever special. No one’s feelings matter. Everyone is just a projection of your own desires or needs. If you’re like me and don’t really have feelings, this seems like a paradise at first. Oh look! No one is up in my business! No one wants me to change or grow or become someone I’m not! It is a paradise for the emotionally immature.
I don’t just mean dating, though that is, of course, part of it. I just don’t really exist for people here. And when it turns out I do, that someone cares about me, I don’t even know where to begin with them. I was going through some terrible stuff last month and didn’t inform a close friend about what was going on until it was over. I said, “I totally blew you off.” He said, “That’s OK!” Of course it turns out he was agonizing about what he’d done to upset me. But he felt it was his duty to say it’s OK.
It’s not OK. I’m tired of it always being OK to treat people like garbage. The men I’ve dated here have treated me worse than a stranger. (Apparently the most terrifying thing in the world is that someone might accidentally think you like them, so you’re always justified in being rude as fuck.) I’ve made a few good friends, but I always fear I’m about two drunken confessions away from losing anyone in my life here. I’m tired of people assuming I’m full of shit until I prove I’m not, every single time. I almost lost it at my interview when I was describing my work and a couple of people there responded excitedly that they thought what I was doing was important. Really? I’m so used to having to feed compliments to myself about my writing, my teaching, my everything, because if there’s one thing living in New York has taught me, it’s that no one’s going to love me but me. I am free to love others but my love means nothing.
The hard part about leaving New York is all logistical now. I don’t know how to drive. I have to buy a car. I have to get an apartment and move my stuff and order books for my courses. I have to finish my dissertation. When I go, I will always take with me the hardness that I got while living here. People in other places seem to think it’s cool, and maybe it is. That’s what coolness is; it’s being self-contained, inert, un-needing and un-needed. I just feel a little too old to care about whether I’m cool anymore.
oh WB. never change. please, don’t let whereever you are going mellow you in any way. stay as hyperbolic and neurotic and dramatic as you are!
As New York moved from a renting city to a mortgage mad haven for the rich it has both cleaned up and gotten harder to live here. But as BW would be quick to remind us, THAT IS the story of New York, “it was SO much better before those goddamn STEAMSHIPS!”
When Dave gave me the news he was leaving I fell back on “defensive thought # 237″… “well at least I live in New York.”
And I know that you are a reasonable person, and a subtle thinker, and all those things you say about what New York is, or what New York does to people are a little slanted here.
But just as I love the Onion and I love New York, I love AWB!!!!!!!!!!!
safe travels! and thank god for TGW!!!!!!!
Every word of this was like a little pin-prick in my brain, it will not surprise you to hear.
I read that onion article and laughed bitterly. It isn’t that life here is one long parade of rats eating other rats, but just that it adds up, and you never know when you’re going to be the rat what gets eaten. A friend of mine says you always have to have your armor on here.
My cow-orker just came in here and talked about waking up last night to hear her neighbors screaming at each other so loudly she was afraid there was going to be violence. We all kind of said “oh yeah, that happened to me one time.” It’s things like that. It’s things like the fact that we all said “yep, that’s how life is here.”
But then I tell people I’m fucking leaving and they don’t believe me, and they’re right.
It’s hard to know what keeps us here. We don’t move here for the Met or the Brooklyn Bridge. We’d just vacation here for that. We move here for the other lunatics that think this is an ideal place to live, but then something happens. They couple off or they move to a neighborhood an hour away and suddenly it’s like they’re in another town or they just can’t take the rats anymore and do move to another town.
The thing I hate most sometimes is that I have a large number of friends and yet am accutely conscious of how much time I spend alone. There are shows and drunken weekends but nobody hangs out. I get worried that all of this, this and the things in your paragraph 4, is just a function of age 30 in the rearview. I don’t really know.
For what it’s worth, you’re not two drunken confessions from losing me or, I imagine, anyone here. (And by “here” I mean “this virtual place we come to for what New York was supposed to be.)
With apologies for comment length,
FPS
i love you AWB!!
come for a weekend and let us teach you how to drive! then we can go to delaware and you can shop for your car, tax-free.
xoxo
trix
oh u know this is going to engage me… BW where are u to back me up here.
May 6th, art openings in Chelsea that I will be attending, (that dreary piece of shit nabe that is all about marketing (i know))
May sixth, in one night… Kara Walker, Ashley Bickerton, Alexander Ross … and… wait for it… JASPER FUCKIN” JOHNS!!!!!!!!!
Come on people. THAT is THE BIG APPLE!
I enjoyed reading this. Best of luck to you.
Thanks to Lane for years ago passing along the ultimate New York sucks but it’s also amazing song.
just seen on FB
“I saw a license plate yesterday that said ‘I miss New York,’ so I smashed their window and stole their stereo.”
Thanks y’all. And Trixie, I will have to take you up on the assistance! You know I’ll be quite close by after I move, so if you want to come out to the countryside, you’ll be welcome any time.
New York is tricky, and it’s been nice living away from it for the past eight months just to remind myself that there are other life styles that are worthwhile. (I know that sounds horribly provincial; it is.)
I once read some New Yorker profile of some fascinating character that began, “Like all true New Yorkers, X was born in Iowa.” And for better or worse, AWB, I think that’s you. Of course, one of the essential features of a true New Yorker is facing life as it comes to you, so you’ll be absolutely fine at your next job, and wherever you end up after that.
And not caring whether you’re cool or not makes you infinitely cooler. This might prove to be a burden, but as a true New Yorker you’ll just live with it.
AWB, this post really surprises and saddens me. I didn’t know NY was still SO like that (and having never even lived on the east coast, much less NY, I can go only by hearsay anyway). I’m sorry to hear it is, even sorrier that it makes someone I like feel that way. I know that’s all part of its mystique and all, and I always thought maybe one day I’d give it a go, but that’s based only on many vacations, all post-’90 so I never saw the “real” NY (I guess). I hate to sound naive, but rats, cockroaches, ennui, hatred, really, STILL? I thought that was CBGBs-era NY. I love the grit I see there, but haven’t experienced the loneliness of living there or the dailiness of the dirt. I want to believe it’s magic.
u know i just got a call from a friend who has to crash at the studio for a week. he’s from dallas. hates texas, in this hellish “couch surfing landing a job thing” that is SO common here. my studio mate and i talked it over and he has 7 nights here on the futon.
FF would remember an old friend, Babs, she moved like every three months, CLINGING to manhattan. Brooklyn might as well have been Texas back in 94. She’s in Oakland now.
and it’s like that, it was like that in the 70’s and it’s like that now… it is a mutherfu**in’ tough town.
AWB, this is a fascinating and wonderfully written post, as always. I’ve read it through a couple of times, and there’s so much to comment on. But I keep coming back to this quote…
“If you’re like me and don’t really have feelings, this seems like a paradise at first. Oh look! No one is up in my business! No one wants me to change or grow or become someone I’m not! It is a paradise for the emotionally immature.”
… and I can’t decide: Are you being sarcastic when you say “If you’re like me and don’t really have feelings”? The context certainly makes it seem non-sarcasatic. But I have to say (based on your posts more than on face time with you (of which we’ve had very little)), you seem to have a LOT of feelings. Which you express heartbreakingly well, at least in writing. So – what do you mean here?
It’s something I don’t fully understand about myself. I probably write about feelings better than anything. I don’t know if I was born this way or if it has more to do with a childhood of being told that any feelings I had would be considered irrelevant, but probably the most unanswerable question for me is when someone asks how I feel about something. What I *think* about it, I can do. But it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve had a few friends who demand to know what I’m feeling and, God, it takes like an hour or so of thinking about it to conjure up an idea of what that might mean.
In the past when something really sudden and sad has happened, I’ve suddenly felt really sick to my stomach. It’s hard to tell what of my feelings-problem is just who I am, and what is a lifelong habit of having relationships with people who are pretty sure I shouldn’t have feelings, and if I express anything at all I’m wrong (or, ugh, “being so needy”). When I was going through Terrible Thing last month, I never thought about it in terms of how I felt about it, but my roommate said, at one point, “Um, your voice is all weird right now.” And I thought about it and lo, my voice was weird. “Oh is it? Wow, I think I’m a bit upset!” Then we talked about the feeling I had. I’m growing up!
Being in the professional, romantic, geographical, social, etc. positions I’m in right now, and have been for almost a decade, it’s been so much easier to revert to my childhood state of never thinking about feelings. My experience with thinking about feelings has been almost uniformly negative, so it’s generally easier not to have them. I’m being somewhat sarcastic when I say I don’t have them, but maybe we could say I don’t *experience* them unless I’m drunk or someone really grills me about it.
…or if I’m writing, of course. That was the one allowed outlet when I was a kid. Aestheticize your feelings and you get to have them. Then I’d read my super-emo poem or whatever and my mother would cry, not because her daughter was deeply sad and isolated, but because she knew I was going to be a great writer someday. Alas.
well, since LP got all probing on you…
you have enormous feeling. especially in relationship to sex. and you are wonderfully self assured when it comes to sex, and talking about sex. but there is an element of … what we could call casual sex that requires some emotional suppression. a cutting off, distancing.
could this be related to your ideas about not having feelings? is leaving new york a relief perhaps because you feel too much? too deeply?
just crazy ass artist’s bar room banter….
I think i know you well enough to say ” NOT that I give a shit…” (because, after all, i’m TGW and so are you… and u know that i really do.)
No, sure, I’ve often wondered if my ability to suppress feeling is a survival mechanism in response to being incredibly sensitive and reactive.
Anyone else see this story in the NYT? Strange timing.
I have never lived in NYC and never really had a strong desire to do so. It always seemed to me that economic stratification makes it an unpleasant place to live. Only if I were a bazillionaire would I ever want to be a part of it and wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep. The constant grind of working one’s ass off just to scrape by, along with the constant reminders of others’ extreme wealth, seems just punishing.
When I was in college in Chicago, I would visit my brother and friends who lived in the city. My advice was always the same: move to Chicago. It’s cheaper, the apartments are bigger, the ambience generally less harsh (depending on where you live), and there’s still a lot to do.
LA, well, I have my love affair with it, yes. All the same, I frequently see the undesirable elements. I’ve never felt, though, that they could add up and grind me down like NYC could.
People often say that about NYC, that the money some people have here grinds them down. One of my roommates is moving to New Jersey because he can’t stand the fact that there’s all this quality of life here that he can’t afford. It doesn’t bother me much, I guess, because all the rich people here seem so fucking miserable.
The other thing I learned pretty early on is that a lot of fun can be had in NYC if you own one decent-looking outfit. With no money for food or booze, I could go to a gallery opening and get some wine and maybe some fruit if I was lucky. I also figured out that, because other people had money, I could sometimes get myself taken to a really good restaurant. I quickly realized that this is actually a pretty popular form of prostitution in the City, so I quit, but I ate and drank some nice things.
I came to meet a lot of those people who have so much money. I worked for some, dated others, was friends with a few more. They seemed like some kind of weird new animal to me, not anyone I would compare with myself in any way. Some of them were nice; some were assholes. Usually they were, like everyone else, a combination of resentments and joys.
Not all the rich people are miserable, of course. I should log in when I comment so I can edit.
This is the weird thing about NYC. We are allowed to tear our city to shit, but if someone who doesn’t live here does it, we’re likely to come to its defense. Seriously, though, Chicago? Not in the same league. I miss my big 1BR I rented for like $700 but I’d never move back.
Me, I don’t think the rich people are miserable at all. I know if I made enough to live in a big apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, take cabs whenever it was late or rainy, do my shopping at Zabar’s, and spend January somewhere where it doesn’t snow or get dark at 4:30, I would complain about 50% less.
If NYC is so great, why can’t people celebrate it without ragging on other places? Y’all doth protest too much.
Fair enough, it was a cheap shot. FWIW, Chicago took a lot of cheap shots at me. I’m actually pretty fond of the place now that I tend to visit for a few days during the three months that aren’t winter!
AWB, a lot of what you wrote about your difficulty experiencing feelings resonated with me. I was always the problem-solver, so I had/have trouble just allowing myself to feel the emotion of a situation without jumping in to fix it somehow. Have you read “The Drama of the Gifted Child”? Very insightful book about the coping mechanisms that get us through childhood, that maybe are not so useful in adulthood.
I do know the book, although I’ve often wondered if these are problems a lot of not-“gifted” kids have too. A friend of mine in Al-Anon says they talk about these things often there, too. Kids who grow up taking care of parents who are going through difficult times with mental illness, trauma, divorce, substance abuse, etc., tend to grow up gravitating toward other people they can take care of–people who “get” to have feelings instead of us, and we have to respond to their feelings rather than having our own.
Yeah, AWB, I think that kind of giftedness is what Alice Miller is talking about. I thought that book was helpful, although someone, I think Janet Malcolm or a character in one of her books, pointed out that it would make absolutely anybody hate their parent for at least a couple of weeks.