How ‘Goodbye to All That’ Convinced Me to Stay in New York

By Lindsey Wojcik

“I am going to die in New York City.” As morbid as it might seem, it was the answer I gave to my friends and family when they asked when I was going to come home to Michigan before I had even left. I wouldn’t touch down in the metropolis for months, but I had resolved that once I moved there I would be there for good.

Five years later, I’m living in Astoria, N.Y., with my boyfriend in the nicest apartment I’ve rented since first moving to Manhattan in 2009. My journey through the boroughs of New York hasn’t always been comfortable or satisfying, nor has it been what I expected. I can no longer say with confidence I will die here. 

Last year, during a particularly rough time, I picked up Sari Botton’s Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a book of essays inspired by Joan Didion’s 1967 essay of the same name. Botton’s collection features 26 essays penned by women, including Botton’s own (“Real Estate”), who have loved, lived in, and left the city I call home. Some of the writers have eventually found their way back to New York. The book’s authors, from born-and-raised New Yorkers to transplants that hail from the Midwest (like me!) and elsewhere, present the perfect mix of relatable, yet very different, perspectives on only-in-New-York experiences.

The first line of the first essay, Hope Edelman’s “You Are Here,” pulled me in just like New York had. “Like so many New York stories, this one begins with real estate.” Edelman’s got that right, I thought, recalling the first apartment-related essay I penned at the start of my New York tenure.

During my slow read of Goodbye to All That, I was closing in on my five-year anniversary in New York, feeling drained from urban life—financially, at least—and stuck in an uninspired editorial career. However, after finishing the book’s last essay, “Minnesota Nice,” I realized I was not quite ready to say goodbye and here’s why:

An aerial view of New York City

Because I still get a New York high.

New York has a super power. The sights, sounds, and smells give its explorers a sensory overload equivalent to a euphoric high that leaves its lovers wanting more. I experienced it the first time I visited the city as a tourist seven years ago and each subsequent visit I made before moving.

I am not alone. In her essay “Crash and Burn,” Eva Tenuto writes: “From my first hit of New York City, I was hooked. I got high off the energy and craved it when I returned to my quiet, boring country home.”

Tenuto’s words were a gentle reminder that, after five years, I still get that high. I get it every single time I decide to walk to my destination instead of taking the train. For example, a few weeks ago, I walked from my apartment in Astoria to Central Park. My legs wanted to stop, but Manhattan’s skyline and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” blaring through my headphones gave me a high that lured my tired body over the Queensboro Bridge. When I reached my destination, the park was speckled in autumn’s colors, giving me the highest of New York highs.

Because I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. 

Everyone comes to New York in search of something. Most are looking for success in a career or in love. In “A War Zone for Anyone Looking for Love,” Liza Monroy expresses the fear that “living anywhere else meant you’d given up,” and “the successful people were simply the ones that stuck around.” Monroy adds that she was determined to become one of those successful people, and I am too.  

Of course, success is subjective. In many ways, I’ve crushed it in New York City. I found love and a home, however, my professional choices haunt me every day. I moved to the city hoping to eventually see my name on the masthead of a glossy, consumer magazine. The years and the desperation for steady income have led me down another path—one I’m very grateful for in this economy—but that does not meet my creative needs. I don’t want to leave the city until I’ve rectified that by either “going consumer” or finding another creative outlet.    

Socrates Sculpture Garden in Astoria, N.Y.

Because I’m still up for the challenge.

Do I sometimes get tired of the grind? Absolutely. Otherwise, I would not have questioned my ability to last another year or two here. New York shovels a lot of shit into the faces of its inhabitants. Sometimes, it’s literal shit. However, New Yorkers take it all in stride, and I have learned to do the same.

Goodbye to All That helped me realize that the inevitable challenges of life will ultimately follow me anywhere I go. I will have to find affordable, comfortable housing in another town. Instead of frustrations that come with the MTA shutting down an entire subway line, I’ll have to navigate closed roads and construction. And crime, similar to the apartment burglary I experienced during my first year in New York, happens everywhere.

At this point in my life, I am not searching for anything else, like I was when I first moved to the city. If anything, I’m looking to improve my New York life, not escape it. So, no, I am not ready to say goodbye to all I’ve got.  

For more essays, check out our full archive. 

Refilling the Treasure Chest: How I Moved On After I Was Robbed of My Writing

By Lindsey Wojcik

Who steals a jump drive?

Better yet, what motivates someone to steal an item that's relatively cheap to purchase at any office supply store?

I often obsess over what plausible answers to these questions would be because four years ago my jump drive and laptop—both of which contained my entire college portfolio, among other valuable items. My prized writer possessions were stolen from me by faceless, unknown person or persons who burglarized my New York City apartment—an apartment in a new neighborhood that I had just moved into three weeks prior. I was saved from the frightening experience of a home invasion, however, losing everything I had written—digitally, at least, published and unpublished—was, in some ways, more frightening.

I was a recent college graduate chasing an editorial career in the big city, miles away from home, and my entire body of work was taken from me. I felt helpless and much like Carrie Bradshaw when her computer crashed (as someone who had recently moved to New York City, I was also a “Sex and the City” addict). “What if everything I’ve ever written is gone?” Carrie ponders. “When’s the last time you backed up?” Miranda asks. I thought I was the anti-Carrie by backing up my work by using a jump drive. As it turns out, it didn’t matter.

Again, I have to ask: Who steals a jump drive?!

I too wondered if all was lost, so after experiencing the five stages of grief, I began a mental checklist of the important work that my stolen technology contained. Every single thing I ever wrote for my university's student newspaper—where I worked for three years, eventually becoming editor in chief—came to mind. Was that all erased?

Thankfully, the journalism department at my alma mater required a portfolio to graduate. That lovely black portfolio with hard copies of only some of my standout pieces was safely nestled near the crime scene. All was not lost. Although it felt like it because, with the exception of those few printed pages, PDFs of every story that I’d written and published in college were on the hijacked jump drive.

Being a pack rat was my saving grace. I had kept a hard copy of each volume and number of my college’s newspaper stashed away at my parent’s home back in Michigan. There are two Sterilite totes filled with those newspapers, as well as copies of the weekly alternative newspaper I interned at, stacked in my childhood closet. And even that got me thinking: Are those totes are waterproof? I sure hope so. If I lose those because of water damage or, God forbid, a fire, I will lose it.

However, all of the unpublished Word documents saved on the stolen computer that held my college-aged thoughts and ideas vanished, which is soul-crushing in many ways. I’ll never know the end of those old, unfinished sentences scattered over many saved pages with ambiguous names. And any future memoir recounting my college years will require long, deep thought from my wine-addled brain.

Though I’ve accepted the loss of those material items (okay, maybe I am still harboring a bit of a grudge) and have since replaced my computer, the experience made me re-think how I archive my written work. My personal archive is still a work in progress, but since the break in I’ve kept a paper trail of everything. I’ve also tried to leave a digital footprint of my work (published and unpublished) somewhere on the Internet.

My professionally published work is mostly digital, so I have a compiled list with links to those stories stowed on my email account. Perhaps, as an added safety measure, I should consider printing out each story with my byline. I also have hard copies of each magazine I've written professionally for in some of those totes at my parent's home. I am grateful they allow me to store so much of my stuff there. My current New York City apartment wouldn't allow such storage (and as Daniel Ford points out, the New York Public Library might not be enough).

My unpublished pieces now reside in a folder on my Google Drive. You can steal a woman's laptop and jump drive with precious content once, but steal again and all is not lost for the woman—unless Google is down. Does that mean that Google owns my life’s work? Maybe I should check into that.

I have half-filled notebooks in every room of my apartment scribed with ideas, half-written pieces, and some nonsense. It helps to look back on those lost thoughts, and often, it tailspins into a cohesive piece that I could eventually publish. After all, that’s how this post began.

A writer’s archive of work—published or unpublished—is a treasure allowing the writer to display the sparkling gems that earned great praise or even strike gold with the rediscovery of an old thought. It is sacred, and it should be treated as such.

Go forth a build your own treasure chest. Just make sure to put a LoJack on it.

For more essays, check out our full archive.