I've Been Thinking About Moving Again
When I moved to Boston for university, I took roughly eight mega buses to New York City in the span of four years. Some trips were made just for an hour-long stroll through Times Square (yes, I’m also disturbed by the unabashed pleasure I derived from the place that shall-not-be-repeated). There was a month left before I was set to move to NYC after graduating. There were no jobs lined up and even less apartment prospects. However, I possessed the confidence that only a 22-year recent college graduate with a liberal arts degree could have. I had a degree; what could possibly be the hold up in landing a job? I told myself that job searching would be easy because I wasn’t moving to NYC to become a model or an actress. I wanted to work at a university. Clearly, my arts degree didn’t prepare me for the complexities of a metropolitan job market and the statistical odds of interviewing against 8.336 million other candidates. Too late to ask for that refund though.
My partner and I ended up in a 200 square foot apartment on 114th Street that we couldn’t afford. We landed the apartment less than 2 weeks before we were set to move and only because a family member was willing to be a guarantor. We applied for other apartments further down in Manhattan, but the price range below 100th Street was different. We were laughed out of many a leasing office.
We moved into our front-facing studio and learned (a bit too late) about the nightly block parties. The neighbors would put their speakers directly onto our window sill and wouldn’t turn down the music until about 4am when the party would start winding down. I always wondered what line of work they were in that allowed for such flexible sleep hours. Sometimes I’d take the yoga mat and spread it in the bathtub to try to get some distance from the noise. I went to work at Barnes and Noble in Tribeca. My partner went to work at an Asian fusion restaurant in the Lower East Side. After we paid rent and bills and made the minimum credit card payments, we’d be left with $0 in our bank account. I used to say that we had earned the perfect amount of money that month; not a dollar too much. A few months later, I landed a higher education job with a salary of about $30K (before federal, state, and city taxes swooped in like hungry vultures). I worked from 9am to 8pm most days. During my first month at the job, a supervisor hit on me while we were working late. I didn’t tell anyone because I was too scared to lose my job. The salary was barely enough to survive on but it paid $2/hour more than Barnes and Noble. Two months after that, there were layoffs. They told me if I wanted to keep my job, I’d have to transfer to their Brooklyn location. Now my commute was two-hours long - each way.
Then the letters started coming in. I called them hate mail but technically, they were loan repayment reminder letters. It’d been 6 months since we graduated. Time to pay up. Our loan payments drowned us even further. Credit cards started being used more liberally to make up for the fact that our minimum loan payments took half of my monthly salary. And so it went for one whole year. My free time was used up crying in bed or crying while roaming the streets.
Whenever I wasn’t working, I would walk along first avenue from our apartment on 114 th street down to 80 th street. I’d spend the whole time crying, wondering if I had ruined my life. I cried for a year with a level of dedication that I hadn’t shown to any other hobby or interest. I closed my eyes and cried the entire 2-hour commute home. I cried while waiting in line at the grocery store. I cried on the phone to family members who didn’t quite know what to say anymore. And then things got better. Time is mystical that way. Give almost anything enough time and things are bound to get better. I doubled my salary when I landed a job at a different university the following summer. Through sheer luck, our application was accepted for a rent-stabilized apartment in the Upper East Side, one block away from the apartments we were rejected from the year before. Free time started being used to explore the city and meet with friends. The crying decreased to a pre-move-to-New-York regularity. There were plenty of challenges during our years in the city: layoffs, cockroach infestations, graduate school tuition payments. But we always compared them to our first year and felt grateful.
Up to that point, the move to NYC was the scariest thing we’d ever done. We stood at the edge of the cliff and couldn’t see the bottom. It’s only after you jump, and let yourself indulge in a dramatic fall, that you realize the cliff was actually a roadside curb. And maybe you are splayed across the asphalt and your knees are scuffed up but you do eventually get back up. When it’s your first big move, your first big jump, you don’t have any proof that things will get better. Until they do. And things typically do get better.
On one of my many walks from 114th Street to 80th Street, I called a family member to ponder how badly I’d messed up by making this move. He told me the move was necessary to show me how hard these big transitions really are; to learn that the pain and stress of achieving “some naïve childhood dream” isn’t always worth it. Now that many years have passed since that faithful and fitful move, I realize that I couldn’t disagree more. If anything, the move to NYC taught me that I can do this again. Now that I’ve seen just how scary and stressful these moves are and have survived, I know that I can do it again. I know what to expect. I know that the curb always feels like a cliff in the beginning. At some point, I’ll get better at sticking the landing. But it’s important to have that evidence folder tucked in the crook of your arm, some tangible proof that you’re able to survive when things get hard.
After 5 years in NYC, we packed up again and moved to Seoul. Then to Seattle. The moves haven’t gotten any easier but how we feel about them has changed. The set-up is always the same: apartments are hard to come by, jobs are impossible to land; the unfamiliarity of everything is uncomfortable at best and unbearable at worst; the pain of many weeks (or months) with just an air mattress on the floor and no Wi-Fi; the craving for a routine and a go-to Thai restaurant is a daily occurrence. When you move abroad, you add language barriers and visa paperwork into the mix. Perhaps each place brings its own unique challenges that you hadn’t experienced before but the set-up is always the same: stressful and panic-inducing. I just don’t feel compelled to play my pre-assigned role of “stressed-out and anxious mover” anymore. I’ve already seen what happens when you jump off the curb. You eventually get back up. And each time, it gets easier. You just have to jump first.
Julia Potapoff is a content producer and strategist by day, and professional book store browser by night (late afternoon). Based in Seattle, she can be found trying matcha lattes at every cafe in the city but can’t be found anywhere online.