A Small-Town Kid in New York City

Location, location, location. Who doesn’t fantasize about the fabulous place they’ll be living in ten years? I know I imagine myself in LA or Phoenix, living in an apartment and working at a publishing company or literary magazine. I will definitely appreciate the warmth of either city I plan to end up in, and I will relish the fact that I will never have to shovel snow from any driveway nor off any roof.

I didn’t always think of myself as a West Coast or Southwest kind of person, though. I, like many young people, had my sights set on New York City for years. An internship I did in Manhattan during the summer I turned seventeen changed my perspective on that particular city, however.

To give you some background, I grew up in Nicaragua and Arizona, and went to high school in a small town in New Hampshire. None of these places have the same crowded crush as Manhattan. Arizona, especially, is known for its sprawling, seemingly infinite desert, which I spent plenty of time traversing in the passenger’s seat of my mom’s car as a kid. As a kid, I definitely grew sick of living in small-town Arizona (even though I appreciate that experience in hindsight), and I dreamed of moving to the big city and making it as a writer.

Until that summer in Manhattan when I worked at the Academy of American Poets on the fringe of the financial district and lived with family friends in Brooklyn, I had been to Phoenix and Boston and Managua, but never to New York City. I don’t think I quite believed before my internship that New York is a city unlike any other, and I thought myself equipped to enter the teeming city with just a tote bag and my meager city experience under my belt.

Upon my arrival in Manhattan, I was immediately accosted by the smells and lights and noises that completely enveloped me, and the way that the city was so crowded that all the buildings and crowds seemed to bleed into each other. During those six weeks when I took the subway back and forth between Manhattan and Park Slope, I couldn’t get used to the constant sensory assault. I loved my internship and am very grateful for the opportunity, but my perspective on the city itself completely changed. I imagined somewhere lively and metropolitan, and NYC  is absolutely those things–however, it’s also very overwhelming for a small-town kid like me. Plus, the East Coast is cold. It snows there.

The internship, overall, was a great, life-changing experience and gave me something awesome to put on my resume, but I’m actually even more grateful that it taught me where I don’t want to live once I’m done with college. It sure wouldn’t have been a good situation if, after graduating, I secured a job in New York City, moved all my stuff up there, and then realized a week later that the city is just too energetic, fast-paced, and crowded for me to be happy there.

I realized, that summer, that sometimes, it’s more valuable to learn what you don’t want to be doing.

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