Walking the streets of New York, undoubtedly the greatest city in the world in my opinion, is oddly lonely. I'm sitting in a bistro off Canal Street, watching person after person walk by, yet I can't remember the last time I longed this much for the company of a good friend.
In an unexpected turn of events, I find myself on the precipice of change, anticipating moving to New York to start my graduate education this fall. I've been back and forth from DC and New York four times in the past month, interviewing for new jobs and chasing my passion. I could not be happier for this move, and I know that I will thrive in such a bustling place. Yet, I could not be more terrified.
New York has a set of rules that one must learn, and mastering them feels like a rite of passage. I'm learning that you must always carry cash, especially if trying to eat cheaply, and you should never make eye contact with anyone on the subway. Unlike the clean and carpeted DC metro, there is a constant, lingering smell of urine underground to which I am not yet accustomed. A few weeks ago, I let a cab driver make me believe I under paid him. A Yankee fan and a Mets fan are completely different kinds of people, and I still don't understand how New York baseball fans choose their allegiance. It still takes me a few seconds to determine whether a person is asking me for directions or soliciting money for charity when someone stops me on the street. I have a difficult time walking past homeless person and not giving them change.
I'm existing between two worlds right now, neither fully present nor absent from either. I know I will flourish, yet I can't help but feel lost. All I really want to do is curl up in bed, but with the demands of finishing my current job, preparing for graduate school, and looking for a new job, I have to keep moving. In the city that never sleeps, this should be easy. But I can't quite get there.
In chemistry, a transition state exists when a molecule is forming or breaking a bond - the molecule's structure is somewhere between the product and the reactant, and if energy is graphed against time, the graph's peak is highest at the transition. Though it may be too anthropomorphic, I feel the same model applies to humans. If we place anxiety on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, then in our transition state, our anxiety is at its peak.
I wish there was a simple, scientific solution to catalyze my feelings of anxiety forward to comfort, but like so much in life, there is no fast forward button. One of the hardest things we must experience is the uncomfortable dissonance of feeling unsettled and anxious even though rationally we know it will be okay.
I'm reminded today of the first time I ever traveled alone. I was in Vienna, wandering through the Christmas markets in the Museums Quartier, and without explanation, I began to cry. I felt so overwhelmed with some mix of emotions, lost in my transition state between living in Europe and the states. I wasn't alone, but as I wandered the streets of a foreign city, much like I have today, every feeling I had for the past month bubbled up at the surface.
There is something incredibly emotional about being alone in a crowd. Perhaps it's the idea of being so close to other people who don't give a shit about you; an inch might as well be a mile. I'm just holding out hope that, as I transition from yuppie Washingtonian to jaded New Yorker, that it won't feel so rough anymore.
