notes from a year in New York

on arriving & waiting out storms

Hello, dear readers! During what’s been a mega-tumultuous year, I wrote many things in bits and pieces and am now coming back to tidy them up a bit and share them with y’all. Consider this the first in a ‘from the archive’ series.

After falling off the face of the earth for a brief spell, I’m so glad to be here again!¹ If you like being here too, consider tapping the ❤️ above — it helps this newsletter more than you know.

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I think it took me one year to arrive in New York.

Meaning, I technically landed in New York City one year ago, at the end of August, wobbling under a backpack and flanked by two suitcases packed with crumbs of a year spent abroad: well-loved journals, crinkled sunhats, stacks of postcards. With JFK conveniently situated on my way home to California from Portugal, a stopover to see friends was in order.

And then…what began as a cursory visit stretched into months, because I mean, if your dear friend had a spare room in Manhattan (technically a student dorm, but still, a spare room nonetheless) wouldn’t you also possibly be enticed to stay a while? And especially if it was fall, and the whole city of New York was enchanted with the rich honey colors of autumn, blanketed in orange and yellow? And if you had just discovered the joy of eating dumplings in Chinatown for the very first time?

As I first dipped my toes into the waters of New York, I floated here and there: a few months stowed away on the Upper East Side; three beautiful weeks in London to meet new coworkers; three more cold and snowy weeks in Williamsburg. In the new year, I sublet two more apartments — a cozy, sunlit spot in Clinton Hill and a cozier spare room in Bedstuy — tasting neighborhoods as I waited to see if my three-month contract would solidify into a full-time job and consistent paycheck.

And then it did, and I before I knew it my toes dipped so deep that I tumbled into the current of the city and was swept downstream.

One year later, I’m finally feeling a sense of arrival. Not that I think I’ll stay forever — or even another year, who knows! — but: I am beginning to absorb the wisdom offered by the city’s tough love. (New York is a ruthless teacher. Its master class is called Figure It The F*ck Out, graded on the curriculum of Sink or Swim, Baby!)

This arrival feels like finding a sense of routine, purpose, and direction, after many days spent running in the wrong direction or walking in circles. It feels like knots softening and untangling. A relaxing, a settling in.

Since last fall, my heart and mind have been tossed through a bit of a storm. As a result, my creative spirit (life force, chi, etc.) has flickered down to a teeny ember taking shelter underneath a banana leaf, waiting out the rain. (Hey, I tell myself during this time. At least we are feeling alive! Even if that’s because we are getting slightly battered and drenched and our teeth won’t stop chattering!)

I will tell you about the storm. I understand that in writing this newsletter, I have made a habit of sharing personal stories on The Internet. I am actually very okay with that. I kind of love it, even if it is also scary and humbling; my hope is always that the sharing helps us feel a bit more connected in our messy human experience.

So, an update: my boyfriend and I broke up in the worst and messiest way. Despite spotting the iceberg of Heartbreak Doom from miles away and trying to steer away from its massive, ship-sinking island, we crashed straight in. It was heart-wrenching and messy and I have surprised myself this year with just how much I am able to cry.

It also feels a bit embarrassing and uniquely twenty-something when on work calls, my colleagues recount their weekends spent in the land of Adult Domestic Bliss: repainting kitchen walls, hosting in-laws, adopting another dog, while I sit thinking wow that sounds like an entirely different galaxy, maybe even universe, from the one I’m living in, where I have hopped between six different apartments in the past 12 months and spent the weekend on a mediocre Hinge date where the warm glow of a few drinks with a stranger eventually gave way to the familiar ache of heartbreak and if I don’t keep frantically journaling 300 pages morning and night I might actually sink into the abyss, forever????

The new job, by the way, is awesome. But during this storm, on these Zoom calls, my brain and heart are trying their best to hold it all together, giving nothing away to my very competent colleagues as I try to handle, as my little brother calls them, the Twists and Turns of Life without dissolving into a puddle of tears. 

So I have been crying on the subway.

Something about the train’s publicity feels anonymous; it’s better than crying on a Zoom call, or in a coworking space elbow-to-elbow with a bunch of vaguely young and professional strangers, or in my apartment shared with my very sweet roommates. So I cry on the train.

Sometimes I try to resist.

More often I will put on Slowly by Olivia Dean or The Scientist by Coldplay (this song was there for my 8th grade break up and all these years later, it’s still there. Ugh. No one ever said it would be this hard!) and allow them to spill quietly: the flurry of emotions that have been bottled, shaken, waiting to bubble over until I am alone and sitting still and then they do bubble over, streaming silently over the curves of my cheeks and into the cold brittle air.

The good thing about crying on the subway is that no one really notices. People tend to be very absorbed in their phones, books, or each other, so it actually feels very private.

The author Bill Hayes calls a good cry a “car wash for the soul.” This year my soul has been loving the car wash. She will emerge fresh and raw and clean, and not too long after, go “again!” I tell her we can go as many times as she needs.

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When the train arrives, I brush off my tears and hobble into the station and up the stairs — stations that seemed so novel and romantic and exciting when I first moved to New York, in my honeymoon phase, stations that are now unimpressionable at best and mildly horrifying at worst, damp with mysterious liquids and dry with warm gusts of wind fanning from the city’s belly, creaking and sticky and filled with rivers of people scrolling TikTok, leaning against each other with their hands interlaced, ankles touching, gangly teenage boys with backpacks and bone-tired commuters with their eyes closed and Seasoned New Yorkers with paperbacks in hand, leaning casually against the car doors, weightless.

The good parts of New York, mostly, are the people. There’s this current of energy that sweeps you along, and sweeps you next to people who are fascinating and wonderful and very much alive.

In spring, the sticky air becomes pregnant with clouds that swell until they burst with rain, thick drops that tumble from the sky in magnificent showers. There are bursts of magic everywhere: flashy magic, like catching the Black Keys spin vinyl records at a bar in the Lower East Side and watching Blake Lively unfold herself from a limousine like a flower at a New York Fashion Week, or toasting your friend’s first comedy show in Bushwick and dancing til the wee morning hours while your best friend DJs in Williamsburg, and also ordinary magic: the first flurry of snow in wintertime, or toddlers splashing in rainbow fire hydrant fountains in the summertime, or the NYC Marathon where the good kind of tears well up in you because you can just feel that the people in this city love so much and live so much and the energy that is multiplied by 9 million living in such close quarters can literally lift you off of your feet until you swell and burst and melt into part of something. 

That’s all. And now I’ve maybe finally arrived.

I watched the sun set behind the East River last week, glinting off the whole entire skyline of Manhattan, reflecting indigos and purples and blues on shimmying ripples below, and felt a wash of I’m here. Like I can breathe in the air, really breathe it in, now that the storm is clearing: now that my heart (and injured foot!) are on the mend, now that I am settled in an apartment, now that my insides feel more like the soft sweet air after it pours instead of trees being tossed in the wind.

(…for now.)

If you are weathering your own banana-leaf-storm of sorts, know I am sending you the biggest hug in the world! And that it will pass. It always does.

Love,

Eden

Left: A rainbow between skyscrapers one year ago; Right: the skyline last week. Arriving!

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What I’m thinking about this week 💭

• Our ability to make it happen. In other words, agency. I felt very Out of the Flow during this emotional storm, and as I’m finding my way back into it, I’m remembering that creating the lives we want requires active participation. Like with many life lessons, this a) feels a bit obvious and b) I’m sure I will have to practice and re-learn it forever, but right now it feels revelatory! If I want my apartment to feel more like home, I’m going to decorate it. If I want to build more spiritual and creative community, I’m going to seek it out. If I want to go on fun adventures, I’m going to plan them. Make it happen, baby! (Perhaps another lesson from the great teacher of New York.)

Words of wisdom 🧙

If you can avoid apartment hunting in New York — I was going to say whilst injured, because I found that particular situation very challenging, but come to think of it, if you can just generally avoid the whole thing — maybe do that.

I am convinced that on its own, apartment hunting in New York will age even the heartiest of us by at least twenty years. Add an inability to walk, stand, or climb stairs, not to mention if you also possess a general lack of knowledge of real estate and stubborn resistance to asking for help (“I got it!” she said. [Narrator: She did not got it.]) and, well…godspeed.

Also: it is just really nice to have laundry in your building. I know you think it won’t be a big deal, and is maybe even a net positive because going to the laundromat builds character, and that is cute, but your enthusiasm might dim once your lease is signed and you realize this means that for the next year you are hauling your laundry up and down four flights of stairs and across the street to a laundromat that according to various Google reviews can be described as “highway robbery,” the “worst laundromat I've ever encountered” where “employees yell at visitors for no reason,” and “riddled with bedbugs” who are “very hungry.” (And you will, in many instances, opt to simply buy more underwear and socks in an effort to avoid going at all costs.)

1. I definitely did not have to coax, bargain, and negotiate with myself for months to sit down and start writing again, like a toddler being told to brush her teeth or when all she wants to do is watch The Bear on Hulu and continue leaking tears, nope, definitely not.