2012: The Year of the Dragon, of living dangerously, of Manhattan, and Me

That year I literally could have done anything. I was single, I had money, and I had grace. I was finally freshly healed from my break-up with my boyfriend of eight years. My grief had lingered two years, and then like the rain in California it just stopped.

One day I woke up, resurfaced for air, looked around and realized I was really free, free to do whatever the hell I wanted. It was March 2012.

Reading somewhere that 2012 was the Year of the Dragon, that Bruce Lee, my hero, was also born the Year of the Dragon, I took it as a sign, figuring it was my time to strike, to move, literally, to New York City, to Manhattan, in particular. It had always been my dream to live there anyway.

By October I was there, living in the bourgeois part of the Big Apple, with my oversized dreams, guided by whim and caprice. I had said “eff it” and cashed out my bloated retirement account, figured I would earn the money back cause I had time, had youth on my side.

It was a recklessly impulsive thing that a typical Aries like me would do, but I just had to follow my dream, that dragon of a year and all its power all the way to my muse Manhattan.

Forgot to mention I moved to Manhattan only six days after Hurricane Sandy, but my apartment on the Upper West Side seemed like it was in another cool world, bearing no resemblance to the devastation going on, say, down around 34th Street.

But I digress…

Took a year for me to find a good job in my chosen profession, so that retirement money came in handy, but it was almost gone right before I finally found employment; and that’s when I began to really feel like a New Yorker, because I was a high-wage earner, and the feeling was perfectly priceless.

But New York City ain’t for punks; it requires grit. Native New Yorkers are like razor blades, all up in your face, with no social distancing, interrogating who you are, demanding answers, ready to strike like vipers at your slightest movement, cutting so deep that before you bleed out you seriously question all things you knew to be true and holy before you ever stepped foot on their claustrophobic island.

And then there’s the ballet, the opera, musicals, plays, shows, museums, the culture! I spent countless hours wandering around The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMa. Swan Lake was the most exquisite thing my eyes had ever seen. Nothing was more enthralling than watching La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opéra House.

I could just walk down the street, spend no money, and feel as if I had really been somewhere I saw so much. The people-watching in NYC was like no other place I had been. So many people from all over the world, languages I had never heard before. It was a feast for my senses.

The crush of people on the subway, on the street, made me feel alive. I never wanted to be anywhere or anyone else. Power-walking around the Reservoir in Central Park for exercise was a ritual. Carrying my groceries nine blocks home and then up two flights of stairs to my apartment was a weekly chore that I actually liked. Ruthlessly fending off others for cabs, for seats on the train, for my place in line became who I was. I was home. I was a New Yorker!

So strange that the more I became a New Yorker the less I was myself. To New York I had brought with me my sunny disposition, my helpfulness, my gratitude, my love of bohemian esthetic, my good vibes and good energy. All those things made the native New Yorkers that I worked with bristle and recoil, distrust me and accuse me of theatrics.

They wanted me down in the gutter with them, to stop dressing like Stevie Nicks, to not burn incense in my office when they stressed me out, to stop avoiding conflict, and give up using words at the community lunch table like “low vibration” and “vegan options.” But I could only do so much assimilation before I completely lost myself forever, and so I had to finally choose.

My mental health was suffering, because there is a part of NYC that is soul-crushing; but I have to temper that with the fact that I actually made it there, and so henceforth I know I can make it anywhere. And the only way to find myself again was to leave my beloved, epic, wonderfully chaotic city.

Couldn’t see that maybe I just needed a break, a respite from New York and New Yorkers, that I didn’t necessarily have to throw in the proverbial towel and leave for good. But after five years, I did leave, and it has taken me almost the same amount of years to fully process why that was. Some days I’m still processing it.

I oftentimes look back at those years and wonder what would have happened had I stayed. Well, Covid, for one. I missed all that because I left in 2017.

I will always miss Manhattan, but when I left I found me again, and I can’t feel too bad about that. Manhattan is still where I live in my heart, and it’s my home, so I go back there all the time in the quietness of my mind. I like who I am where I am now. I’ve learned that sometimes you gotta get lost to be found.

I’ll never regret moving to Manhattan and being me. Regret is for punks!