This is not just another 'why I'm leaving New York' essay

For a certain kind of writer, the lure of the “Why I’m Leaving New York” essay is inescapable. The notion of entering one’s very own version into the canon is like catnip to the bodega cat they like to think they’ve befriended, and the essay format itself is so overdone as to be beyond parody (though McSweeney’s did a tidy job of it here). It’s all so gauche and self-indulgent — aw, yet another nice girl from the country couldn’t hack it in the big city and now she wants us to give a crap about her “journey” — and the derision the glut of such essays has produced online is surely justified.

I swore I’d never write one, because up until very recently, I never thought it would come up. In general, self-reflection, nostalgia, and all those other emotional things aren’t really something I’m comfortable trafficking in; I write about politics and culture, not my feelings (not that there’s anything wrong with doing so, it’s just not how my brain works).

Sure, I’ve always thought about how nice it would be to move to Maine and open a tea shop, or move back home to the Pine Barrens and learn to be a butcher, or move to Georgia with my boyfriend and buy a farm—but also kind of thought I’d die in one of the five boroughs. Getting by has been a perpetual struggle, but it was comforting to think that these past nine years of working myself sick and living in rooms above restaurants with greasy air and walls so thin I could hear my neighbors snoring would someday — someday — pay off in a decent two-bedroom apartment with a big kitchen and a balcony. It had to.

Getting here was always the goal. After all, I was a weird kid from the sticks who wanted to be a writer, and that’s what you were supposed to do. Staying here this long was a triumph of sorts, one marked more by stubbornness than anything else. When I first moved, I promised myself I’d stay for a decade, long enough to feel like a “real” New Yorker; as the years went by and my relationship with the city began to mirror the mutual resentment of a loveless marriage, I hung on out of principle. As my ninth anniversary sauntered by, I assumed that nothing would change.

The thought of leaving New York City wasn’t even on my radar, until it was unceremoniously thrust upon me.

Digital media is in a state of abject turmoil, and now as ever, it’s been the workers who have paid the price for assorted media CEOs’ mismanagement, stupidity, and greed. 2,400 digital media workers have been culled this year alone, and the bloodbath continues apace. As one of said workers, I got caught up in the latest round of “corporate restructuring” and, alongside 249 other people, was let go from the media company where I’d spent the last four years making almost enough to pay rent. This sudden shift in my meagre fortunes meant that my already painfully expensive living situation was now completely untenable, and I needed to figure out an alternative.

Simply put, this city is too expensive even for a person like me —someone who is privileged to be in decent health with no dependents and a now-remote job — to have a good life here. I am a freelance writer with an unstable and fluctuating income, no health insurance, and an increasing sense of dread at the thought of either paying thousands of dollars to live in a small room in a noisy apartment with multiple roommates, or rushing my relationship along to move in with my boyfriend too soon and potentially ruining something precious. The only other way I could afford to live within the city limits would be to move further out, and become even more complicit in the cruel process of gentrification and displacement of families of color than I already am.

So, I left. For me, that meant stashing most of my worldly possessions in a storage unit in South Brooklyn and subletting a room in Philadelphia, a city where I’d spent my teenage years going to metal shows and my early adulthood almost finishing college. The rent is less than half of what I was paying in Brooklyn, and there’s a washer/dryer, a backyard, and central air. Forget AOC’s garbage disposal — I have a bathtub now. After spending so many years in New York, the presence of these most basic middle class amenities has rendered me nearly speechless. (I know that this is another essay trope, but I do not care, because it’s so easy to forget what a warped perspective New York living can impart).

It was a logical decision. I’m not going to rhapsodize about the pizza, or kissing on a deserted M train platform at dawn, or “Showtime!” or the old gents playing dominos on the corner, or pretend that it was an especially torturous decision to pack up and try out something new. It’s OK. People move. Leaving New York isn’t anything other than that — a move, neither good nor bad but thinking (and personal essays) make it so. For many years, New York was the only place in the world I could see myself living — until it wasn’t.

I will miss it, and will probably go back eventually, because the man I love still lives there. Though he’s lived in Brooklyn all his life and has deep family roots there, he is on the cusp of wanting to leave, too; the city he knew has largely disappeared, and he doesn’t see a place for himself — a working class punk who spent his teenage years brawling on the Lower East Side — reflected in its oligarch-friendly sheen. Though I am and will always be just another transplant, I’ve lived here longer than Joan Didion did, and have had enough of my favorite places shut down and friends leave to have at least an iota of understanding of how much it can hurt to see your home changing.

I do love this city, even though it’s been trying to kill me for the past nine years. When I moved here at 22, I was immediately infatuated with all it had to offer, tripping down the concrete with stars in my eyes. The ricochet pace of living can be exhilarating — or debilitating. There are magical pockets and secret gems and incredible restaurants all over the place, but there is also desperation and garbage and the constant threatening presence of the NYPD, who never let you forget that they have the power to kill you if they want. The subway does always smell like piss, and nobody can afford rent unless they’re making the kind of money someone like me will never see, and nothing about any of it feels fair, really (it isn’t meant to be, mind—that’s the fun of living under capitalism). At 31, the grit and gridlock has lost its charm, and I just want to live somewhere with a garden.

Every big city has its problems — there is noise everywhere, and rich leeches everywhere, and the aroma of fresh urine wafting gently past your nostrils on a hot summer day, and that is certainly not a uniquely New York experience. It is also not one that anyone who is free to move where they like is required to undergo, and is probably a good argument for not moving here in the first place.

Inequality is so rampant in this country that, until we dismantle the overarching systems that fuel this hellish capitalist reality, poor and working class people are guaranteed to suffer whether they’re living in Kenosha or in Crown Heights. New York just has a way of maximizing all of it, dialing up the misery and neon to 11 until your eyes hurt and you’re not sure which way is up, then daring you to do something about it, because f**k you.

So, you know what? It’s goodbye for now — and f**k you, too, buddy.