August 1st, 2011.  I packed up a weeks worth of clothes, got on the coldest Bolt bus in existence, and geared up for the 5 hour bus ride from Washington DC to New York City, where I was starting my first real world job.  I got off at Penn Station at 11:30PM, unsure which direction ‘Fashion Avenue’ would take me, my knuckles turning white from how tightly I was clutching my phone, begging it to lead me in the right direction.  It was all very “Don’t Stop Believing.”  But it was also one of the most frightening moments in my entire life.  And this is coming from a girl who once thought it was a good idea to dye the bottom layer of my hair goth black.  So, not to brag, but I’ve got a pretty good scope of “scary life moments”.

That was one year ago.  I can’t believe it was that was an entire year ago, and yet that it was only a year  ago.  And what’s even crazier is that up until a week before I got on that bus, New York was never a realistic part of my life plan.  Gasp!  Are you just shocked that I’m not one of those people who knew at 5 years old that I wanted to make it in the Big Apple?  But it’s true.  After a sheltered childhood in the California burbs, I was sure I would do what most people did when they graduated from college: I would stay in California.  Because no one was drinking the Cali Kool Aid more than me.  Up until my senior year of college, my plan was to move to Los Angeles and Make! It! Big! in television.  But after a freeway accident left me car-less, that part of my plan became less intriguing.

So I did the responsible thing after I graduated: I decided to up and move to Washington DC with no real plan in place and enough money to barely make it to October, in the hopes that a drastic post-college move would just sort my life out for me.  I know, I’m like the model citizen of Smart Life Decisions.  And as a reward for one of the most irresponsible things I’ve ever done in my life, it actually worked out.  God knows why.  For the longest time, I chalked up my success to surviving on my own on the East Coast as sheer dumb luck.  But after a year of living here, I’ve become slightly less irresponsible enough to realize that it wasn’t just luck that got me to a year.  I made it because I wanted to.  Because I had to.

This inspiration for this blogpost came from a pattern I’ve noticed more recently.  The strange pattern exists in the outlook people have of living in New York.  For those who were bored, or just ended up here not really wanting to be, New York finds a way to push them out.  For those who need to be here, want to be here, New York finds a way to make it work for them.  It’s very you get what you give.  And for me, I gave it my all.  Although I knew I was only one crying phone call away from having my parents bail me out and fly me back to California, to give me my childhood room back and reassure me that New York just “wasn’t meant to be”, I was unwilling to accept defeat.  My stubbornness causes a lot of issues, but it also saves me from accepting anything but my best.  And now after a year I can say that beyond being in the right place at the right time, my stubbornness is the reason I made it a year in New York.  Because for me, there was no other option.

Now having been here 11 months longer than most of my friends and family (and I, honestly) thought I would, I come  across a lot of people who ask me why I like it here, why I’m still here.  For the longest time it felt like everyone was collectively waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to happen to me, like a homeless person coughing on me, for me to be like: “THAT’S IT! YOU WIN, NEW YORK. I’M LEAVING. CALIFORNIA, TAKE ME BACK!”  But that moment never happened.  And honestly, I don’t think it will, at least not until I’m really ready to leave on my own accord.  I am madly in love with this city for a lot of reasons (a huge one being I can spend $1 on a slice of pizza for a meal, which is essentially my success story to affording NY), but the biggest reason is that I am surrounded by likeminded individuals who are unwilling to settle for anything less than their best.  This is the same reason two of my best friends are Kelsey Finnegan and Chris Tung, who, I’m sure of it, will both be running the universe in a few years.

It is really hard to live in a city like New York.  You have to be okay with feeling dirty all the time.  With putting your paycheck in your bank account on the 30th of the month, and seeing it disappear two days later on the 1st of the next month.  With standing extremely close to strangers on the 6 train and not feeling uncomfortable that their chest hair is a slight subway move away from touching your nose.  But the cool thing about it being hard to live here is that not every can or wants to do it.  So the people who can do it relate at least on that level.  High fives that we are all okay with standing on crowded subway trains in a collective cloud of strange people’s BO!

I’m sure 50 years from now after I’ve lived in a place longer than the average lab rat’s lifespan, I will look back on this ~serious blog post~ and think how silly it was that I felt I knew so much after one year of living in New York.  But I still hold strong that I have learned and lived more in this one year of living on my own, in one of the biggest cities in the world, than I did for a large chunk of my life prior.  And for that, I will be forever grateful.  Because whatever happens, wherever I end up, I have the peace of mind to know that I made it a year in the place that was the inspiration to the line: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!”

Alright, that’s enough cheesiness for the day.  I’m going to go hug my cat and listen to the theme song from The Jeffersons.