Love letter to NYC on leaving
I didn’t dream of moving to New York City.
Not really.
I always envisioned myself living in a big city, even as a little girl in Davenport, Iowa. But I didn’t visit NYC until I was 19, en route home after a semester studying and living with a family in Toledo, Spain.
And by the time I first set foot in New York, I’d already fallen hard for Spain. In fact, my first memories of NYC are of reverse culture shock as I returned to the U.S. — huge billboard after huge billboard on the ride from JFK into Manhattan, towering skyscrapers, and chaotic traffic. Those two days in NYC, showed around by a friend of my dad’s, were touristy: a visit to the Twin Towers (soon to be destroyed on 9/11), attending the Today Show (with guest then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton), going to Times Square and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I got to know New York shallowly on trips as a reporter in the coming years, including in college when I embarrassingly got Sbarro Pizza, only to be admonished by a colleague this was sacrilegious, like going to Italy and asking to eat at Olive Garden.
And then a chance emerged in early 2007 for me to cover the New York Yankees for Newsday. I didn’t dream of living in New York before I got here. After 12+ years living here in the last 15 ½, now I do dream of New York. And now I’m leaving. For Spain (Valencia), half a lifetime later.
NYC became my home through the moments.
Early on, those were taking the 4 train from 86th Street to 161st Street Yankee Stadium for 100+ Yankee games, a late-night bite at Luke’s on the UES after covering a game or maybe meeting friends for drinks when I finished work after midnight on a weekend. In that first 2 ½-year NYC stint, I was out of town 180 days a year covering the Yankees, but in the middle of an icon of New York City, breaking news on the Yankees signing Mark Teixeira or joking with Derek Jeter about Notre Dame vs Michigan.
Surely, I had proved the refrain, “New York — if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere …” by breaking stories on the Yankees beat despite being the only woman, the youngest reporter and the newest to New York.
I left NYC to get my MBA, needing other career options given widespread newspaper layoffs and restructuring. I wanted to stay in sports, but on the business side. I went to Wharton, also getting an MA in International Studies (Spanish) at the Lauder Institute at Penn. I interned between school years at Real Madrid, thus pulling me closer to Spain and farther from NYC.
I graduated and took a job at ESPN Deportes in Connecticut, with hopes of getting back to NYC soon. But the month after graduation, I suffered a freak concussion that led to a 24/7 migraine for nearly 2 years. I moved back to NYC just over a year later, needing more specialized doctors and to not be car-dependent.
Excitement over my initial return to NYC was drowned out by the stabbing pain in my head from the chronic migraine and the beginning of memory problems — even forgetting what subway to take to get home from work — due to an undiagnosed lacunar infarct (a “mild” stroke). Finally the stroke was diagnosed as I got into a study at NIH on people who had had traumatic brain injuries.
As I recovered, I became more ingrained in NYC and it in me. From watching Champions League games at Soho’s Boqueria between naps and doctors’ appointments, I became friendly with the chef, who gave me customized sangria recipes for my sister’s wedding. I cried happy tears in Hudson River Park as I regained balance and had less pain and could finally run again. I finished the NYC Marathon in 2014, raising money for stroke survivors, thinking as I ran through the pain how little two more hours of pain from pushing through to run 26.2 miles mattered compared to two years of constant migraine pain post-concussion.
I was broke those years despite a good salary, paying 50% of my after-tax salary to medical loans and costs and student loans. I would regularly eat PB&J or oatmeal several nights in a row to then afford one beer or glass of wine out with friends. Yet I came to love life in NYC more and more. A chicken gyro from the Kasbah truck for lunch in Central Park a block from my office at ESPN. Runs with Nike NYC that brought new friends and took me through neighborhoods I knew less, from Bed-Stuy to Roosevelt Island.
As I got healthier, I explored more and more of the city. Reading on the grass at Governors Island, getting ghosted (before I knew the word) by some guy, brunch at Good (dearly departed) after a 15-mile marathon training run. Subway rides to Rockaway Beach on summer weekends, or more frequently, soaking in the sun or free workouts in Hudson River Park. Long walks through the city, especially favorites like meandering strolls and people-watching from the West Village to Greenwich Village to Soho to Nolita.
I found a higher-paying job. I had to leave the sports industry to do so, but I no longer spent hours awake at night worrying about finances.
I broke in NYC a few times — my brain (the stroke), my bones (stress fractures from running), my heart. And after one of those breaks, I decided in spring 2018 — having at last paid off my medical loans — that perhaps I should revisit my dream of moving to Spain. That plan got expedited days later when I was laid off, so I never really reflected on leaving NYC until I was gone. No time for pre-nostalgia.
The months spent between Madrid and Barcelona looking for a job showed me I could live with more uncertainty than I had realized. I came back to NYC, close to finalizing a job in Barcelona, to move out of my Fort Greene apartment, packing a lot into what I expected to be my last weeks as an NYC resident. I walked Summer Streets with friends, ran in Central Park, got late night slices of pizza at Joe’s, rode Citibike all over, burst into tears at The Dead Rabbit over an ex, did the trapeze in Hudson River Park despite a fear of heights. That job fell through, but having given up my apartment, I was all in and kept going past any legitimate financial capability to do so. And I found a job, as CMO of an early-stage startup Polaroo.
Even as I left, it was a very NYC thing to do — chase the biggest dream, not take no for an answer, push and scrape and defy the odds to make it. Only I couldn’t. Not then. My visa to work and live in Spain was denied in early 2019.
I returned to the U.S. and found a job at Mastercard, settling back into life in NYC a few months before the pandemic hit. I was still determined to eventually make my way to Spain.
And a funny thing happened as we lived through the grim early pandemic months. An extrovert living alone with a high-risk medical condition, running and walking through the city were among my only favorite things that weren’t off-limits. I took thousands of pictures during those runs and walks, reaching every borough but Staten Island on foot, documenting and showcasing the simple beauties of NYC — of many sunrises on the Brooklyn Bridge and sunsets in Hudson River Park, of the Naked Cowboy and nobody else in Times Square, of street art supporting Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and of couples taking wedding pictures in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The simple habit of finding the interesting, the odd, the beautiful, around NYC brought me closer to the city.
And while I already had a rich and large circle of friends and acquaintances, I made more serendipitous connections. Faces that grew familiar through our repeated encounters on my morning runs. The classmate I ran into in the neighborhood who became a close friend. The people at Tomiño who brought me closer to Spain with their food. The couple running the laundromat who gave me a bottle of wine for Christmas.
People think New Yorkers aren’t friendly or there isn’t a tight community. Nothing could be further from the truth.
NYC is full of people who will lend a hand and who want to make a difference. To name a few examples:
§ Gathering with tens of thousands to protest the “Muslim ban”
§ Joining hundreds of runners for a run (masked) to protest after George Floyd was murdered
§ A dozen people stopping to help a cyclist delivery driver who’d been hit by a car
§ Many helping those less tech- or English-literate to get Covid vaccine appointments.
§ A waiter at my neighborhood restaurant offering to help me with boxes as I moved
§ The staff at my daily coffeeshop, Oslo West Village, offering to bring me coffee after my foot surgery if needed
§ Pitch and Run club of successful investors and entrepreneurs opening up their time and network to meet anyone who shows up to run, and perhaps pitch, and make good friends along the way
New Yorkers may be in a perpetual hurry, but we’re caring and helpful and resourceful.
Sometimes the members of the community may surprise you. As when I was getting my coffee after a run and a woman’s dog cozied up to me, only for her to warn me “He’s stinky, he’s getting a bath today,” and for me to respond without looking up from the dog, “No worries, I’m stinky too,” only to realize I just told Brooke Shields I was stinky.
But that’s the thing in NYC — Brooke Shields is just another New Yorker. As interesting as the next person. Any person you encounter in New York could be fascinating, full of interesting contradictions.
In my dozen years living in New York, I did a lot of things others might find cool or impressive — building businesses at ESPN Deportes and Samsung Pay, qualifying for the Boston Marathon with my NYC Marathon time 2 years after a stroke, publishing a personal piece in the NY Times on sexual assault and harassment in baseball that had millions of views, participating in a panel on Broadway with actors after their Tony-nominated (and later winning) show, joining the board of the non-profit The Opportunity Agenda.
And those are all part of my New York story I will carry with me, but what matters most is whether my being there made anybody’s life better, whether in personal relationships or by positively impacting the community around me. I hope so, and I hope I will continue to do so.
I’m leaving when I love New York the most.
I’m leaving before I can’t.
I’m leaving because life for me is always about pursuing the dreams, chasing the all-but-impossible, never giving up. And while NYC will always have more challenges and adventures, the adventure of going to make a life in a different country — especially where English is not the primary language — is a bigger one.
As excited as I am to FINALLY realize my dream of living in Spain, I felt deeply sentimental and nostalgic in the last weeks as I prepared to leave New York, busy saying goodbye and see you later to people and places and things. I know I can always return to live in NYC if I choose. Even to the West Village.
But I can’t return to the same New York City. Because this New York City won’t exist — it won’t exist and I won’t be the same person.
New York City is a different city not just for each person who inhabits it or who visits it but for different moments in each person’s life. Both because the city is always changing and the people themselves are always changing.
The NYC I marveled at at age 19 on that first visit is no more. Both because the city and its people forever changed after 9/11, and because I’ll never again be that naive, wide-eyed 19-year-old. Sometimes we gripe about changes in New York — a beloved bar or shop shutting down, a park being razed, a parking garage replacing something nostalgic. Yet the changes also make New York New York. If it weren’t for the constant inflows and outflows to the city, we wouldn’t be a city of immigrants, of migrants, of so very many rich cultures — be it 6 generations in Astoria or first-generation immigrant from Sierra Leone, as my Lyft driver 2 weeks ago, moved-to-NYC from Iowa like me or family came a few generations ago from Italy or China or the Dominican Republic.
Maybe New York will pull me back in a couple of years. Or maybe, as a long-time Spanish friend said, “me enamoraré de un Valenciano majete” (I’ll fall in love with a really nice Valenciano) and I’ll stay in Valencia forever.
So long for now, New York. You’ll always be home, even if someplace else is as well.
