New York, I love you but you're bringing me down...

You know that song by LCD Soundsystem? New York I love you... but you're bringing me dooown... Like a rat in a caaaage pulling minimum waaaaage... New York you're safer and you're wasting my time... Our records all show you're filthy but fine... New York you're perfect so don't change a thing... New York I love you but you're freaking me out... Like a death in the haaaall that you hear through your waaaall... Like a death of the heart Jesus where do I start? But you're still the one pool I'd happily drown...

A little dramatic, fine. (Great song by the way.) But point well taken. It's how I describe this place I pseudo-call home now to friends who ask from way out west - I sing them the chorus to the song.

I've got to say, New York City is a heavy place, in all the good and bad ways. It's not a city that just lets you be, lets you breathe. It assaults you from every angle, every direction. The frenetic pace with which this skinny island of concrete, ambition, vice, and traffic moves and gathers energy is altogether intensely tiring and inexplicably uplifting. Because New York is not a city that uplifts its tired, its poor, its lonely. There is no cajoling, no gentle cushion, no steady word of encouragement. There is no break, no retreat. The city stares you straight in the face and knocks you out if you flinch, if your eyes flicker over to something warm and soft for a second too long. It is a hard city in every regard, its spirit born of immigrants' tenacity and fearlessness and sewn deep into the DNA of the millions of lives here. This is the city people flock to to escape, to be lost, to be rich, to be someone. It is not a city for the fainthearted, or for the meek, or for the lover of thoreau. This is a city that forces you to play your hand, get involved, because if you don't, you just kind of disappear. I haven't decided yet if I'm okay with disappearing.

And in the harshness of this city's reality, where the insanely rich live admist the insanely poor, where there is no pausing or breathing, and where you sense this empty, dense weight just crushing you at times, you can feel, very clearly, yourself. You can feel yourself as a very singular, very intact being, full of all the complexities and contradictions that make people people. No where else I've lived have I ever felt so strongly the conflict between my many sides, my personalities, my dreams. I question who I am and what is it that I am willing to live for more deeply here and more naturally here than anywhere else I have called home. Because there is infinitely more to see and hear and touch and feel here than anywhere else. The congestion and the collision of too much (too much of everything, of choices, of races, of bars, of buildings, of wealth, of poverty, of vice, of nations, of religions) makes this place intensely tiring, but it also breeds the kind of energy that uplifts, even in moments of doubt or melancholy. The familiar is never truly familiar, and this is exciting, energizing. Everything you can see for the first time, including yourself. And you figure it out, you are forced to come to terms with your life and to understand your mettle. You make yourself, or you disappear. I think.

A little dramatic, fine. But this is where I am in my life right now, and when I struggle to explain to my friends or even to myself if I am really happy here (because I think I am), I just don't really know how to put it. I'm tongue-tied, a little dizzy. But I can sense something deeper and more profound that lies just below the surface, and maybe I will live here until I can wrap my mind around that thing, that feeling. Until I can explain it. Or don't want to anymore. And maybe that will take six months, or six years. Until then, I suppose I'll do my best to stay sane in the big city.