Displaced

"I just feel so alone even though there are all these people constantly around me," I told my friend Perri recently. I know that it’s a cliché, like when people say "Having a child changes you" or "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," but I can’t think of a better way to put it. I don’t care if it’s clichéd, it’s the truth.

"I know what you mean," he said. "But I've been here since I was 11 so I guess I'm just used to it." There are all these people—on the street, in restaurants, in bars, at my gym--all fighting for a place, all trying to claim a space as theirs. Walking down the train platform I always think that they look like rats escaping a fire.

And here I am, amongst them, never really alone, yet feeling more alone than I ever have in my life. Rationally, I know that it's just part of moving, that everyone goes through it at some point. I know that I need to find my place and that it takes time. When I moved to Baltimore I went through the same thing. It took a couple of years, but it became home; it was me and my adopted family against the world. But people moved on, because Baltimore always seems like a place for transition, a stepping stone on the way to somewhere else. I hated doing it, but I decided to leave, too. I moved somewhere that makes people say, without fail, "Oh, I'm so jealous!"

And yet every time someone tells me how much they wish they could move to New York, how much they wish they could get out of Columbus or Dallas or Phoenix or whatever second-tier city they're in, I think to myself, be careful what you wish for. I watch programs about rural life and imagine myself leaving the city, packing up my computer and books and going somewhere easier, somewhere smaller.

But then I wonder, would I be any happier? Is it actually New York that's making me feel lonely, or something else? Do I feel like a stranger because everything is new, because everything here is so intense, or because I'll feel a little displaced no matter where I am? It's possible that I could be anywhere and still feel that hint of disappointment, that feeling that I'm not quite sure what I'm doing there.

I'd like to think that it's maybe just my age. When my friends and I turned 25 we threw something called the "quarter-life crisis party." The quarter-life crisis is something you would've heard about on Oprah, where mid-20-somethings hock the books they’ve written complaining about how hard it is to find their way in post-modern America.

We 20-somethings come to New York or L.A. chasing dreams, only to find out that there are millions of other people already here who are also 26 and from the middle of nowhere, and who have dreams just like ours that they're hell-bent on making come true. And so I lose sight of why I'm here; I get bogged down by the way the sea of people in front of me look like rats. I find myself joining them in the fight for space and getting so caught up in it that I forget why I bother: for the adventure, the excitement, the chance to make it.

And someday, whether I've made it or not, I’ll get out. I’ll move away, maybe, and raise a family. It might be station wagons and soccer practice or ballet lessons, but at least I will have done this first. So that someday, on my way home from the grocery store, I can think about the time I was 26, walking through St. Mark's Place on a windy night, the sky orange and spitting rain. When I'd just moved to New York and thought that anything could happen.