Living in New York

I just got back from a trip to visit my brother Micah in New York, and even though I only stayed three days, nearly everyone I met on the trip asked, “So could you see yourself living here?” and nearly everyone I talked to about the trip upon coming home asked, “So could you see yourself moving there?” Not to complain about people asking the same questions, they didn’t know, and it’s actually a pretty obvious question to ask. After all, living in New York for a bit is sort of a requirement for young people in this country, or at least young people aspiring for careers in writing.

If I wanted to, I think I could properly convince anyone that I really did want to live in New York. From Micah’s apartment building alone I could see how centuries of people had layered meaning on the place, each leaving behind little artistic flourishes, like little stained glass squares on the edges of one window in the staircase, but not any other, or the crooked tile pattern in the lobby. Space is precious in such a crowded place, giving little details a sort of worth you don’t find in Iowa, where most of the state is filled with the same damn crop. I can imagine that there’s a real wonder to living in New York: looking out your bathroom window and seeing the street seven stories below or looking around any neighborhood and thinking that this place is so old and half-broken but still handling so many people.

But that’s a kind of appreciation I only found after I came back to the Midwest. During my actual time in New York, I mostly just felt overwhelmed. I like to imagine that earth is a knowable place, with a maximum capacity of one thousand humans at most, so being on a subway or street with more people than I’ve ever known made me tremble a little. Partly because of my social anxiety, which I was diagnosed with a year and a half ago and still haven’t entirely gotten over, I can’t imagine living in a city with so many strangers. Sure, such a crowded city makes space feel valuable, but it makes any particular human feel much less so under the city’s mass. This isn’t to say that I didn’t like the people of New York (I don’t think you can judge an entire community, and anyway I just interacted with Micah and his mostly ex-Midwestern roommates), but I don’t think that I could ever be one of them.

I took on the role of a self-aware small town rube during my New York trip. When Micah jokingly asked me how it compared to Grinnell, I’d say something like, “Well, it certainly has a more sophisticated subway” or “Not quite as much corn.” But, as obviously different as New York is from the tiny Iowa town where I live, probably the closest thing to the pressure of being on a crowded subway I ever felt was, paradoxically, running to the edge of town on my first week at Grinnell and realizing how small it really was. How there wasn’t anywhere in town where I couldn’t reach a cornfield in ten minutes, and from then on there was just more corn nearly forever. The feeling lessened as I got used to the town, but never entirely went away. It’s hard to describe, but this feeling was unnerving, approaching horror, and I felt it both in Grinnell and New York, one place with too little and another with far, far too much. Best as I can tell, it’s some kind of imbalance.

And when I think of balance, I think of Edina, Grosse Pointe, or Waco. The only thing they have in common, aside from being places I’ve lived, is that they have just the right density: the people are spread thin, but wide enough that the edge is always out of reach. In other words, they’re sprawling and suburban, which are two qualities that people universally seem to despise. It’s a well-worn cliché to to characterize the suburbs as phony or artificial. People seem to be divided as to where the real world is, the cities or the small towns, but no one sees to think that authenticity hides in the suburbs, least of all Micah. He even wrote one of his college essays on how he hated the Waco sprawl, quoting the lyrics from the Arcade Fire Song “Sprawl II”: “Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / and there’s no end in sight, / I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.” So why is it that I only feel comfortable when there’s no end in sight?

This has ended up being an extension on what I wrote last week. That post was about cartoons, this one is about suburbs, but in each case the source of conflict is the same: I’m scared that I’m addicted to the familiar. I don’t think I brought that post to a very satisfying conclusion, and I don’t think I’ll end this one well either. If I only live where I want to live, then I’ll spend my life in mid-sized towns and suburbs. Staying where I’m comfortable seems cowardly, but moving somewhere that I don’t like, specifically because I dislike it, seems foolhardy. Luckily, this isn’t a decision that I have to make just yet, and it probably won’t ever be a pure choice between the known and the unknown; life is always more complex than that. Still, it’s a question that unnerves me and that I can’t quite answer.