I am trying to dissect a certain cognitive dissonance in how I relate to New York city.

I don’t feel like I made New York home in the last two years, even though I feel at ease in it. The streets and the subways have long since ceased to seem strange, especially in Manhattan. I have my spots to get coffee, to take girls to dinner, to go get fresh air. Slices of Manhattan e.g. Flatiron, Chelsea, St. Marks, East Village, LES - have become intimately familiar. Yet the familiarity doesn’t feel nourishing like home ought to.

What Does Home Mean?

Here’s my hypothesis - I think I made SVA IxD home. In the two years I was here, a dear group of once-strangers became akin to family. I miss them already. It is hard to go from seeing your people everyday to seeing them once or twice over the course of a summer. Even the space has become dear to me. The studio feels (even now during the lull of summer) more like home than my apartment does. There’s a comforting ritual to the daily arriving in the studio, putting on the kettle, pouring out my tea, and then stretching out on the couch to read. Or my comical routine of walking down to Chipotle at 9:25pm, knowing that in less than ten minutes I’ll be back up in the studio having my $8.50 chicken burrito bowl dinner.

If home is what is familiar, and where one loves and is loved, then the studio was home. And in the months since school was over, New York actually felt distinctly less like home. This may well be the root of the dissonance. New York city was home when my cohort/family was here. Now that school’s out, the sense of home in New York is gone with it.

And so again I discover it is the people who matter after all.

Leaving Home, Making Home

So I’ve decided to move to San Francisco, to join a startup as their first designer. I started this blogpost on a train going to Brooklyn a week ago, but my brain was already starting to talk about New York in the past tense. The remembering self is already reconstructing my mental narrative of New York as a chapter that’s closing.

The experiencing self is not quite as ready. New York may not be home, but it certainly is no longer just an abstraction like it was in 2011. It is no longer easy to leave. Through these little strands of separation anxiety I am recognizing I’ve left pieces of myself everywhere in people I care about in New York. (I’m picturing strands of cheese as you pull a slice off a pizza.) These are people who have nourished my growth, and have grown with me. Classmates, mentors, and friends for whom I will carry a little mental model in the back of my head forever.

How am I supposed to find that again? Hidden in that question is the insidious assumption that a home is found. I didn’t come off the plane and found home in New York like it was sitting in a rental listing. It was through offering up myself sincerely and reaching out to people deliberately that relationships are built. Home, in this sense, is built one conversation and interaction at a time.

So here’s to new places, new conversations, and most importantly the current-strangers who will become like family in the progression of time.