On Living 100 Lives; or, Why I Left New York

People keep asking me why I moved to New Orleans. They give me weird looks. Old friends can't believe it. New York, they tell me, was synonymous with me in their minds. Two in the same. Because I hadn't shut the fuck up about it since I was about 11. I don't know what to tell them. Hell, I don't know what to tell myself. I never ask myself if what I'm doing is right because I'm confident I've made the right choice, but I do have to wonder why.

I graduated in 2008 with big, lifelong dreams of moving to New York and working in magazines. Within two months I'd accomplished those dreams, and though I navigated a disintegrating economy through layoffs and freelance gigs before landing my 18-month long stint as an assistant editor for a business magazine, I was in magazines the whole time, pitching, writing, editing. It was my dream.

Until suddenly it wasn't. I wanted to go to Lollapalooza so I requested a Friday and a Monday off. They granted me the Friday but refused the Monday. It was the bitter icing on top of an expired cake with a gooey problem-filled center, and with that I left my old life, and my old ideas of what life should be, behind. "I'm 23!" I told myself. "I'm too young to have some asshole boss dictating whether or not I can see Lady fucking Gaga in Grant Park!"

The move. Peace out New York.

Overnight I accidentally became a symbol of the new 20-something life in my social circles. To my friends, I was an odd sort of hero. I'd done what we all spent four hours a day Gchatting about doing. People told me they wished they could do what I'd done. When a close friend decided to leave her unsatisfying new career behind, she texted me that she was "following my lead." Another told me we should meet up and she'd buy me a celebratory "we're living our unemployed dream" beverage.

Yes, I quit my former dream job because I wasn't ready to grow up. And I still don't think it was stupid. Then I decided, hey, maybe magazine editor isn't my dream job after all, and maybe New York isn't my dream city! There's an entire world out there, New York is annoying me, and Patti Smith told me to go. Like I was actually in the room when she said go. That's all I needed. Plans were made, cross-country moves were undertaken and suddenly, bam!, here I am in New Orleans.

This got me thinking about what it means to be a 20-something in the digital age, where we spend more time communicating with each other than any generation before us, but less time engaging in actual face-to-face contact. Where our parents told us we were special and could be anything, and where we believe it. Where optimism reigns, making just enough money to cover rent and beer is acceptable, and where "settling down" is the enemy. Who the fuck do we think we are? Who the fuck do I think I am? I don't know, but my mission is to find out.

In New York, people think they've made it just because they've moved there. They forget the reason they came — to make art, to design fashion, to act, to make films, to write — because they get so caught up in the flash sex drinks drugs distractions of the city. When I ask an aspiring artist in New York what he's working on, he stumbles through some excuse about not being able to afford supplies. When I ask a young fashion designer what she's made recently, she carries on about her job as a retail assistant manager at some trendy Brooklyn graphic T-shirt store. But when I asked these questions to strangers I met in New Orleans when I visited for a week back in May — a toe-in-the-Gulf trial week — they were wearing their creations, they were carrying their sketchbooks and drawing in them at dinner. It was inspiring, and I got drunk on that legendary New Orleans magic juice.

A Mississippi sunset. Back in the South.

So that's why I left, world. That's why I left, me. I left as a sort of representation of hope that there is something better out there than what I was doing. Not blind hope, but hope I can seek out, discover, and use. I left because I got too comfortable. I left to challenge myself. I left a lot of people behind — dear, dear people who I think about constantly and miss even more often — but the ones who get me get why I did it, and I don't give a shit about the ones who don't anyway.

People always say we only have one life and we better live it. Fuck that. I want 100 lives. So here we go on number two.