“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
-Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
I came across this quote that is on the front page of my blog about a year ago while reading “Rising Strong” by Brene Brown. It dawned on me then that I was in my story. I was right in the middle of it. And I’m in the middle of it now. And this is the exciting stuff. The stuff where I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. The stuff where I am uncomfortable and not always pleased with where I am at. The stuff where I’m learning how to build a career, and all the beautiful and insane people I meet along the way. Where I’m working crazy jobs and going to class and lessons and auditions and rehearsals. And the stuff where all I do for a week is go to Ikea, wait for Ikea to deliver, and sit around trying to build Ikea furniture and not break it all with the new found strength my rage has given me through the building of it. I intended to start this blog about six or seven months ago, when I first moved here. And if I had started it then you would hear more stories about Ikea, like when I was at the ordering desk and had my bullet journal laid open to a page that read, in big block letters “NEW YORK I AM HERE” and the lady next to me took note and giggled to herself- well and at me. Clearly at me. Haha.
Before I got to the endless adventures of Ikea there was…. the airport.
“Every Man writes his own meaning into New York”
Or something like that. The words painted on the airport wall as I arrived through customs into the city. What better words to prepare me for this phase of my life? Everyone wants to tell you what New York life is like. Especially if they have experienced it and then left.
“The winter is cold and bitter.”
“Everything is gray it’s awful being outside.”
“The summer is so sticky and sweaty. It smells like rotting garbage everywhere you go.”
“The summer’s are glorious! The first day of summer everyone goes outside and harmoniously begins to think ‘Let’s have a baby!’”
“My first summer was amazing. It will be the time of your life.”
“My year in New York City was the hardest year of my life.”
“Go to New York as quickly as you can before you burn out, get burned out, then move somewhere else”
“Everything is different in New York”
“Waitressing is different in New York.”
“Everyone is pushing to be in the same place. People will physically walk all over you.”
“It is dangerous. I left after someone was raped in my lobby building. I was tired of waking up at 4am to work in a bakery and then go audition.”
But the thing in my heart, the louder thing, “I’ve got to go to New York. I’ve got to be there.”
The things I have heard about this city up to this point range far and wide. And none of them are my story. Now that I am finally here it is like a deep part of me has calmed down. The part of me that said “You need to go here” The part of me that feared “You’re not good enough to be here.” The part of me that ached “You won’t be happy here.” Well. I am here. And so all of those voices have quieted. And I am left with what is. What my story actually is. And so far, I feel as big as the mountains I came from here; in this beautiful, terrible, thriving, starving, ugly, harsh, life-giving city.
Here is me in Colorado, as a youth. Here is me now. In the city. A little bigger.
And here is my friend and roommate Josh at Ikea. Because I know you were dying to dive more into that reality.
