Hello to All This

or, New York I Love You, You Don't Bring Me Down.

On a Friday in mid-July, I walked out of my office in Columbia for the last time, having returned my keys, ID card, laptop, all of that. My supervisor and I had a long and giggly farewell, trading confessions of minor work transgressions that were free of consequences now that I was no longer his underling. I shouldn’t be surprised that the end of this job has hit me with sentimentality, because it was by far the longest I’ve ever spent at one job (almost six years), but for most of that time all I could think of was a future when I wouldn’t be there anymore. It was a difficult and infuriating job that I frequently screwed up and that fed a specific kind of bitterness in my soul. And yet, here I am at the end of it, shocked to discover that–obviously!--I wouldn’t have stuck it out for so long if I hadn’t been invested in and proud of my work on some level. Despite myself, I did actually care and it was more than just a day job, more than the albatross around my neck stealing time from the better parts of my life. And although bubbly euphoria hits me at the thought that I never have to check my work email again, I must grudgingly admit that I am going to miss certain parts of it.

Yes, this is an essay about moving away from New York. I’m sorry to add to that bloated page count. But I simply can’t, and don’t want to, help myself: on July 12 I left my job, a few days later I became a car owner for the first time since 2018, and on July 30 we left our apartment keys in an empty cabinet and filled our new car with houseplants and our dog Bagel and drove up to Syracuse for the next chapter. It seems like an appropriate time to spill some ink about the best place I’ve ever lived.

The last warehouse rave I went to before moving away, with 8am sunlight streaming in at the very end.

When I jumped at the chance to leave Salt Lake City for boarding school in Massachusetts at age 16, it triggered a nomadic pattern that has followed me throughout my adult life. When two years of prep school blew up in my face I bounced back to SLC for less than a year, then it was a year and a half in Portland, then back to SLC for three years, then North Carolina for what felt, at the time, like an inconceivably long period that must surely signal that the Carrboro-Chapel Hill-Durham area would be my forever home. Seven years.

Leaving that community in 2017 was a hard decision to make, and I still feel haunted by North Carolina, an achy, romantic, at times heavy nostalgia that I don’t feel for the other places I’ve lived, not even for my actual hometown. I always sensed something intrinsically romantic about that region (its lush natural environment especially, so vastly different from  the mountain desert where I grew up), even as I lived there, experiencing nostalgia for events while they happened. But mostly I think my hangup is a function of living there during the most tumultuous period of my twenties, and perhaps everyone feels haunted by the place that steered them through the wild melodrama of youth.

In fact, my years in Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Durham felt at the time very much how Joan Didion describes her twenties spent in New York, in her iconic essay Goodbye to All That. Although much of the essay documents life in a Manhattan that has now been largely lost to time and real estate developers, the emotional heart of the piece is about the relationship between youth and the place where youth unfolds. And how, for Didion and for me, that unfolding can create a need to separate yourself from the setting of “all that.” 

Didion describes her first few years in the city of her young adulthood, before the mistakes have had time to collect and braid then tangle and snarl:

“... I knew that it would cost something sooner or later… but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs… Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach… I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” (Didion 1968, 229-230.)

Then your twenties continue, and the bill comes due. You bumble about, you hurt others and others hurt you, you try to change and can’t, you try to hold on to a stable sense of self yet change comes regardless: 

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” (Didion 1968, 233.) 

Goodbye to All That may be specifically about New York, but reading it does not make me think of my New York, because I am not leaving the city feeling like I have “stayed too long at the Fair,” like Didion. No, that particular feeling is one I recognize from my last six months in Carrboro. 

The cluster of towns surrounding the University of Chapel Hill formed the backdrop of the usual suspects of damaged youth and some less usual ones: devastating romantic heartbreaks, severe episodes of depression, one involuntary hospitalization in a pysch ward, totaling two different cars in one year, intense and quickly formed friendships followed by traumatic friend break-ups, far too much gossip and involvement in other people’s interpersonal strife, firings and near-firings, somewhere in there I guess I graduated college, etc, etc. In 2014 I had to move three times in one year. It was all terrible yet weirdly wonderful because I was a young idiot. 

But by 2017 I was over it. Friends were getting married, buying houses, having babies. My old nomadic pattern itched in the back of my mind, and I realized I didn’t want to settle down and put down roots. I left and finagled a way to spend a few months pinging around Brazil, then bummed around my parents’ basement in Salt Lake for half a year, and eventually built up momentum to move to New York in summer 2018, believing I would probably last a few months before my savings ran out and I had to slink back to Utah with my tail between my legs. 

For all the many, many times I have wished that I’d moved to New York a decade earlier (according to Didion, for any transplant New York is “a city for only the very young”), I am happy that I washed up on these shores in my third decade, with a little perspective and experience. We are moving away now on a high note, with far more good friends than people we’ve tried to avoid, waving goodbye with far more good memories than bad. I’m not sure I could bear to have my feelings about New York be all tortured and complicated instead of my current wholesome love that never turned bitter. I loved New York the first time I visited for a single day when I was a tween, and I loved it the first time I visited as an adult in 2007. I loved it more and more with each successive visit over the next decade, each trip making me wonder if this was more than just a tourist’s love, if perhaps I should pay attention to the voice that kept insisting maybe I could make it here if I tried. 

That voice has been validated over the past six years, as New York has poured gift after gift into my lap: this is where my wife and I fell in love and got married, where I discovered raving, where I lucked into a “day job” that fed and housed us for five years, where we adopted our beloved dog Bagel, where I found belief in myself as a writer, where I wrote the stories that got me accepted into Syracuse. And some of these blessings could have happened anywhere, but the number one thing I feel the most gratitude towards the actual city for: this is where I transitioned. 

Like any trans person who transitions after childhood, I have plenty of grief of sadness over not doing it sooner. Yet I suspect that it never could have happened before I moved to New York, that part of me subconsciously waited until I landed in a place that felt safe and right and hopeful before my eggshell¹ could crack. I had known trans people before I moved here, but I’d been largely ignorant of any wider trans community in the Carrboro area, unable to imagine what “trans life” might look like or how I might factor into it.

Then two of the roommates in my first one-month sublet in Astoria happened to be transmasculine. On my first night in the city, one of them invited me to their friend’s screening of an indie movie about trans life in New York. In less than 24 hours I’d already taken in more information about offline trans-ness than in the previous decade. The next few months widened my vision of what transness could be, beyond the narrow definition I’d previously believed did not, and could not, include me. Suddenly so much seemed possible. 

Sometimes, when people ask me what first brought me to New York, I’ll joke that I came here to transition, because that’s the shape everything takes in retrospect. (My actual excuse for moving at the time was that I wanted to break into the field of international development–justifying the major I’d chosen in college–but I abandoned this pretext within a few months.) That might not have been my conscious drive, but it sure was the immediate result. 

And what a place to transition! There are the concrete, practical benefits to transitioning in New York, like how it was relatively easy (still harder than it should be) here to find surgeons and a gender-affirming therapist and an endocrinologist. There’s the fact that most of my co-workers accepted my transition with relative ease because I am probably not the first trans person they’ve ever met. But the greatest gift has been all the other trans New Yorkers. I’m not sure I will ever again be privileged to live somewhere with a trans community this huge and vibrant, and if every other aspect of my life in the city had turned to disaster, I still would have found it all worth it just for the privilege of being trans in a place where there are so many of us, creating an invaluable wealth of shared knowledge and experience. Where we have stood up for ourselves and fought for so long that trans history has seeped into the bridges and waterfronts and warehouses. 

Sun setting from a rooftop in Ridgewood, the setting of an all-trans literary reading.

Whatever you might be into–nightlife and raving, political activism, punk music, literature, stand-up comedy, theater, idk rock climbing probably–you will likely find a trans scene for that thing. It is mind-blowing to me, to live in a place where trans people are so numerous that it can support multiple trans scenes. I never took it for granted every time I recognized another trans person in public, a stranger riding the bus with me for a few stops, the person sitting in front of me at a reading. We just exist here, all over this place, and then sometimes I get to be at an event where I’m in a huge room populated almost entirely by trans people, and that feeling–the reminder that I am not some solitary freak who can’t be accommodated by bureaucratic systems, that I don’t have to exist at worst as a target of scapegoating or at best as a mildly tolerated being that confuses the cisgender world, that in fact I am one of many, that together we are joyous and funny and sexy and powerful–I needed that feeling like I needed oxygen in the first few years of my transition.

My five-year anniversary of being on Testosterone is coming up right around Thanksgiving, and five years doesn’t feel as long to me as it used to, but I’m hoping it’s long enough that I can carry the gift of five years in trans New York with me wherever I go, instead of needing it daily just to survive. I know life won’t be the same in Syracuse, that it will be more difficult to find rooms filled with trans people, but I also feel more confident than I used to about my own ability to build community, and I know Agata and I will find our people.

I wrote most of this essay  in July, when we were still in Brooklyn, and we have now been in Syracuse since August 1. Our last two weeks in the city were beautiful and sad and happy and overwhelming, and the move itself was mind-bendingly stressful like moving always is (plus there’s been the roller coaster of the last six weeks of national news on top of the rest). And now, here, our lifestyle is disorientingly different: driving anywhere in town takes less than ten minutes, driving to the next town over takes less than fifteen; my dog doesn’t have to search for blocks for grass to pee on because we have a backyard and grass is everywhere regardless; our new apartment is luxuriously huge, with a kitchen that feels like something Nancy Meyer dreamed up in comparison to our 1-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn. And surely the pace of life will pick up once the school year starts, surely it can’t be this quiet all the time? How is it even possible for a neighborhood to be this quiet at night? I grew up in suburbia but I’ve been immersed in its opposite for so long that I’m returning now as an alien. 

The current view from my office window. (I have an office now! Like in my home! A separate room and everything!)

And because Syracuse is an East Coast university city, just like Chapel Hill, all of this reminds me of North Carolina. Reminds me that I am going to have to share space with fraternity and sorority members once they arrive in a few weeks; that I will inevitably find myself searching across campus for the cheapest place to buy a still-overpriced sandwich between classes; that the seductive whispering of all this green foliage should put me on guard for ticks any time I venture off-path. “Indie sleaze” is apparently back and so it seems fitting that I’m getting excited about drinking PBR at my local bar all over again. All these college and post-college memories come back to me as less haunting and more friendly, like discovering one of my past selves in a sales bin at a thrift store, dusty but in good condition. 

It’s now Brooklyn and Astoria’s turn to haunt me, and I can already feel that ache settling in–when you miss New York, it’s a bit like having a famous ex, reminders of them inescapable wherever you turn. When I listen to techno while doing chores, my body gets excited in anticipation of a rave next weekend, a pavlovian response that hasn’t yet updated to my new bookish normal. I am deeply invested in the story of Bed-Stuy’s goldfish pond, a drama unfolding a few blocks away from our old apartment. Agata will show me tik-toks of some gross thing happening on the subway, and in unison we go, dammit, I miss New York. That’s the thing about loving New York: you masochistically love all the shitty things too, like some kind of stockholm syndrome, because the shitty parts can’t be removed from your love without changing the object of your love. 

We’ll be back soon. It’s a five hour drive from Syracuse, which still seems to me like practically nothing since the bloom is not yet off the rose when it comes to the freedom of having a car. I don’t know if it’s in the cards for us to live in the city again, but I comfort myself with memories of my relationship to New York throughout my twenties, when I visited as often as I could. My city will be there, in some form or fashion, unless rising waters someday reclaim it. And we’ll be there, as often as we can, grateful for all its gifts.

1. ”Egg” is what we call a trans person who is not only closeted, but who has not yet realized it and come out to themselves as trans.