This is not the version of this newsletter I intended to write, after the better part of a year away from writing about my life with any semblance of an audience. That version went something like this: New York is hard, but it’s everything I ever dreamed, I swear. Just look around! See the cherry blossoms in spring, hear the three-piece band playing jazz into the gold-green night, drink Chardonnay on your fire escape and marvel at what a younger you would think of your life now.
There are certainly things I love about this place—living blocks from Central Park, the museums and world-class arts, the kindness of strangers and opportunity to strike up a conversation with anyone—but in truth, the past year has been one of the hardest of my life. I never deluded myself that living here would be easy by any stretch, but attempting to make a home, a life, even just staying alive in this city, is a minute-to-minute test of will and vigilance and resolve, a constant call-and-response to the question How badly do you really want to be here? (With the occasional Who the hell do you think you are? and You really thought you could do this? sprinkled in.)
Suddenly, things you never thought to think about, never had to think about before—train schedules and city taxes and exorbitant broker’s fees, which grocers actually sell alcohol and how many flights of stairs you can feasibly carry anything up, whether you can live without an oven or make do with a mini fridge, how long you can go between trips to the laundromat and what base layers to wear when it’s 14 degrees out and who to call when your mail goes missing again and HOW do I turn off these radiators because my skin feels like papier-mâché—become the constant doldrum of daily life. Pile on an endless winter, another wave of a never-ending pandemic, and a spike in random violent crime and it’s less Sex and the City and more Love in the Time of Cholera, Fargo, A Most Violent Year, etc.
If nothing else, New York keeps you on your toes. Anything can happen here, really and truly, for better and for worse. Finally you feel safe closing your eyes, just for a moment, as you ride the train home, reveling in the afterglow of a joyous night out (praise be to Harry Styles.) The very next day, there is a random fatal shooting on that same subway line, and there are a million other moments like this with New York: she loves me, she loves me not. Each time, you rethink everything, a jilted lover ripped from a dream. Maybe you do not love it here, maybe you could never really feel at home here. Maybe you should call an audible, cut your losses, throw the whole city away. At the very least take cover until the storm blows over.
And that is what you have done, for months and months on end, through the bleakest winter, through death and despair, through disappointment and heartache. You distract and deflect, disappear, waiting for better days. There will always be a better time, a more interesting place, newer, shinier people, the next promotion, a few more pounds to lose, the great love of my life waiting just around the bend. Waiting for all the stars to align to finally start living. Waiting until X, and Y, and then Z…I swear I’ll be ready then. Healed then. Worthy then.
I have spent my entire life terrified of missteps and failure and mistakes, of letting the mask slip, trying to live up to some perfect version of myself who exists only in my mind, inevitably sinking into disappointment and self-doubt when I fall short of my own impossible standards. When I fail to become this infallible woman. I thought if I became the first in my family to graduate college—from a fancy university, with honors, no less—I’d be content. That a fun, shiny website or big-name newspaper would validate my talent and intelligence and existence on this earth. That living in Europe, or a breast reduction, a move to New York, a man who loves me unconditionally, would all bring me closer to that fabled perfect version of myself.
And for a time I am happy, fleetingly, before reality and self-doubt creep in: My god, how could I have spent all that money? Do I even look that different? All of my friends and family are 3,000 miles away. What was so wrong with that job, that city, that relationship? Why did I want for more? Why in god’s name did I do any of this?
In my mind, the perfect version of me has no room for error, no need for second-guessing. She is effortlessly successful, flawlessly beautiful, wicked-smart and cultured. Loved and deeply in love with her life. She’s the one who gets to show up, and all beta versions—rough drafts, experiments, works in progress—up until her are unworthy of taking up space. I cannot share my writing until a piece is perfect. Pursue music until my skills are perfect. Wear a bathing suit until my body is perfect. Be loved until I am perfect. Never mind that nothing is perfect on the first attempt. That nothing is ever really perfect, anyway.
A hunger for perfection, holding yourself to impossible standards, being afraid to show up authentically—this is how you spend your whole life waiting outside, waiting to be invited in. But no one is coming to give you permission, to convince you to start living, to save you. Time will keep passing, disappointment will keep coming, rain will keep falling. But there will be sunny days, moments of joy, peaks to the valleys, too. My work will never be truly “ready” because it will keep improving and evolving, for as long as I live. There will never be an opportune time to stand on some rooftop and scream that I love New York. I love my life. I love myself. In all my messy, mistake-filled glory. So how about now?
I’ll admit that in the storm of the past two-plus years, battered by the constant trauma and emotional whiplash of a world turned upside down I have shored myself up, sealed every crack that all the water and all the light used to seep through. It is easier to shrink and retreat, not shake any already-precarious ground. Who are you to take up space, to believe you have something to say, least of all at a time like this? Besides, everything has already been said and done, and you’ll likely fail, and should you even manage to create something, it’ll probably be sub-par anyway. And did I mention that the whole world is on fire and death is imminent and there’s no point in trying anymore, really?
If you, like me, cried at the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once, you probably saw yourself—a little too clearly—in the villain that is nihilism, nothing matters-ism. Related to the sentiment that life isn’t fair, that its injustices are bound to crush you, that the life you dreamed of may very well be out of reach, in some universe very far from this one. But you, like me, are here.
Manhattanhenging. Silly, imperfect, here all the same.
Maybe, in some other universe, had a minute choice or a millisecond in time played out differently, I’d be married with kids, or maybe an editor-in-chief, a pro golfer, a singer, a politician. Or maybe I would have stayed in my home town. Maybe, with a lack of resources, been a cautionary tale about mental health, or a gun violence statistic. Maybe I wouldn’t have survived this pandemic. Maybe I’d still be exactly here, right now.
You hope that if you play the game of life just right, you’ll ultimately be happy—but there’s no winning when you’re playing by someone else’s rules. I have spent 28 years tamping down my own desires and instincts and molding my wildest dreams into something palatable for the general masses. But now is the time of monsters, of purging, of radical honesty, of pursuing pipe dreams and experimenting and admitting things I’ve never said out loud. You can spend your whole life running only to get nowhere. You can only hide from yourself so long.
Sometimes I mourn the time wasted being untrue to myself, but maybe nothing is truly wasted if it teaches us something. I dwell on how I could have bought a house last summer, could’ve pursued my best van life, could have chosen to march to the beat of my own drum, even if everyone in my life thought I was losing my mind. But those choices would have brought their own problems, too. Wherever you go, there you are. Waking up with yourself, stuck with yourself. Seeing different landscapes with the same eyes, loving different people with the same heart, filtering the world through the same tired thoughts.
All I can control are the choices I make from here, and that’s a hell of a powerful thing. After all, I have gotten everything I have ever wanted, accomplished everything I ever set out to do. I wanted to end up here, and by god I got here. And if not here, then where? If not now, then when? If you cannot find the freedom to be your most authentic self in this violent, rat-infested city of dreamers and radicalists and freaks, then maybe you never will. To be clear, this is not a love letter to New York; but to myself. About showing up where I am, blooming where I’m planting. About finally going after what I want, other peoples expectations and ideals and death-grips on beliefs of who I am be damned.
These days, I show up to things that scare me, frequenting coffee shops and meetups and bars until I become a regular, a known entity. I introduce myself to everyone I meet. I send pitches and submit writing and share my poems and sing because I am tired of censoring myself, of rejecting myself, cutting myself off at the knees. I take myself to dinner and bike across the Brooklyn Bridge, stroll through the same park where I watched the sun set on my first trip to New York, still feeling everything was possible. Believing, in my heart of hearts, I’d get here someday. Not knowing how or when or why, but feeling it in my bones all the same.
I don’t know what my future in New York holds. It’s a hard place to love, but it forces honesty. Radically. Who are you, really? What do you want, really? Pretending only leads to misery, and no one is really watching anyway. Shed the old narratives and untrue stories you’ve told yourself for far too long. Stop being afraid to fail, and start being terrified not to. Put one foot in front of the next. Explore every opportunity. Be open to love, change, happenstance, the universe. Fumble in the dark until one day at last you wander into the brightest, warmest room you’ve ever seen, where all of your wildest dreams and most ridiculous fantasies and everyone who feels like home have always been waiting for you to arrive.
-Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds
Thank you for reading, for bearing with the mess, for being here with me. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time.
-Liv
(P.S., Because this song is so damn good, and because the newsletter wouldn’t be complete without a song rec, obviously.)