“30 is the new twenty,” a friend recently said to me...who is also on the cusp of 30.
Is this a lie we have all collectively told ourselves after "Sex and the City" seemingly made it cool to be in your 30s in NYC with an overconsumption and alcohol problem? It seems, without consciously realizing it (well, let’s be frank, it was a little consciously), I have aligned my life with the likes of Carrie Bradshaw—a writer, an overspender, smoking (vaping) in my apartment as I write this drivel for a newsletter. As I stare out my window, I can’t help but wonder...what am I doing with my life?
I moved to NYC when I was bright-eyed and 20. It had been my dream since I was 12, and I first emerged from the depths of Penn Station with my dad to 34th and 7th Ave. The smell of dirty hotdog water and roasted peanuts, vaguely of pee (it was the summer), still under Bloomberg’s reign, just off the heels of Giuliani, and I, small and meek, wearing my best Abercrombie and Fitch, trying desperately to act as if I ran the streets of Midtown. Heading directly to Times Square, I turned to my dad and said, “I’m going to live up there one day.”
I, of course, was pointing above the TRL studio and didn’t realize then that no one lived in Times Square and that the outer reaches of Hell’s Kitchen gained its name respectfully as grounds for actors in cheap hotels and rat-infested studios—a place where I would come to groan at every time someone wanted to go out there. But the booze were cheap and they didn’t card if you were a cute girl or gay, since Chelsea neighbored the border of the hellish landscape.
I grew older, and for the next several years, every summer when my dad had his annual week off, we explored the seemingly never-ending grid. I started growing out of the flashing lights and in-your-face advertisements of 42nd Street and, instead, wanted to explore where the artists were born—Greenwich Village. Smoke shops and pride flags flew in the air with force. We went to lunch at Paddy’s and visited record stores, and my dad smoked cigars, making sure to tell me not to tell my mom about this. The city became our place to become other people—a secret between the two of us. I’d shop in stores Long Island had yet to meet, like Urban Outfitters. We’d descend into the subway, getting a feel for what the average New Yorker experienced. I saw different walks of life I was too young to fully comprehend.
Once I moved here officially, I moved east to LES. I drank my early twenties away in green rooms with my then-music photographer boyfriend. I met highly regarded industry people I never even heard of, but who had an artist’s mecca of contacts casually encased in their iPhones. I convinced producers to buy me beers and drunkenly told them “I’m a writer” with the arrogance only a fourth whiskey ginger can produce. I went to dive bars to listen to shitty bands with egocentric frontmen who thought they were Lou Reed. I met Zoë Kravitz, and for a brief moment, Penn Badgley knew my name. I met a girl who I assumed my ex was sleeping with, who was the inspiration for Father John Misty’s “Strange Encounter,” and who was the size of my pinky from all the coke she did. I learned people actually snorted Adderall for fun, which I scoffed at because why wouldn’t you just do coke? I was witty on the outside but so deeply insecure and uncool in front of almost moguls, made to feel like I didn’t know enough about anything to have a conversation of substance.
I lived in a slumlord’s apartment building after I graduated college, held together by duct tape (literally). I made friends with the baby mice that lived between our stove and used my grandmother’s chiffon scarves from the 50s as curtains because we were too broke and frugal to splurge on real decor.
Eventually, I moved on to a wannabe filmmaker boyfriend and was “forced” to stop drinking after one too many sticky situations and lewd behavior. I got sober. I stayed dry. I became addicted to becoming good enough. I figured out I was bisexual, which I always knew but buried deep in the back layers of my mind, ignoring the obvious signs of deep infatuations with friends and making out with girls when the liquid courage kicked in. I got out of that emotionally abusive relationship with the then-filmmaker-now-real-estate-agent. I worked awful, soul-sucking jobs to get by in an attempt to figure out who I was. I wrote, designed, and self-published my first poetry book. I reconnected with friends. COVID hit. The city and the world changed. George Floyd was murdered, and it changed again. I became a copywriter. I got a cat. I started smoking cigarettes again after quitting for almost 4 years. I started going to AA meetings. I got a sponsor, did the steps in another attempt to becoming good enough. I relapsed and did it with a vengeance for 6 months. I went into psychosis—a quiet psychosis—where friends now ask me if they should have brought me somewhere to get help, and without looking at them, I say “probably” with apathy. I got a full-time copy job. I lost that job in the peak of layoff season. A several-decade-long genocide became at the forefront of people’s minds and feeds, and the world raged against the clear brutality happening on the other side of the world in the Middle East—a place where I grew up learning and then unlearning was a breeding ground for evil. I am working at a restaurant, the first time I’ve worked in the service industry since 2019, as a host—a title I haven’t held since I was 20. I work alongside bright-eyed 20-something-year-olds, with a road ahead I have long passed. I am the old one now. I first visited this city when some of them were toddlers or hadn’t even existed yet.
And it all feels cyclical and a bit cynical, in an age of melancholy nostalgia. I’m still writing; I’m dusting off the keys and budgeting—something Carrie Bradshaw never taught me the 101 on. I’ve lived as a Samantha, a Miranda, a Charlotte—a sexually liberated woman, a work-oriented cynic, a housewife, a homemaker.
Now, 3 months into 30, I’ve run out of characters, and I’ve tried on so many hats in my real life that I don’t know what else there is to pick from. I’ve lived so many lives in this city that I wonder about the number of lives I still can live out here, in the most expensive and arguably hardest city to live in in America.
I’ve been imagining what my life might look like in this decade; on a few acres of land, with grass to lay in and enough space in my home (a home I OWN) for my books and trinkets I have collected over the years. Maybe have some pet chickens and outdoor cats. Maybe a dog. Maybe my cat Jasper and I could roam without worry in the field of wheatgrass, and I could plant tomatoes or blueberry bushes in the backyard with no fence.
Carrie Bradshaw hated the country. She spoke openly on the show of her loathing for fresh air and the wild. But I’m not Carrie, or any of those women. I’m not a party girl or masochist or host at an upscale restaurant or even really a copywriter (poet, yes) when you peel back the layers.
So, who am I at 30? And, more importantly, am I ready to find out if I say goodbye to my first love, New York?