The Manhattan Years

So it’s official; I missed out on the Manhattan Years. When I graduated from college, instead of moving to Manhattan along with everyone else, I moved abroad – first to Italy, then to the UK and finally to India. Four years later, I returned to New York to pursue a career change into publishing, but long before I found a place to live, I had a feeling I’d somehow traded in my mad Manhattan early twenties for the time I spent overseas. Numerous friends had already made the exodus from their UWS shared apartments to cosy studios and 1- or 2-bedrooms in BK. Now I too am freshly relocated to Greenpoint, Brooklyn and having a whale of a time. But I have, as foreseen, missed out on the Manhattan Years.

Which brings to mind the New Yorker syndrome that a friend brought up at Christmas Day brunch. If you’re doing x, you’re missing out on y – is y better?, you wonder, as you half-heartedly commit yourself to x. If you’re speaking to person x at a club, you’re missing out on meeting person y and person z, not to mention person a, who may be your future husband. Such is the heady conversation that follows a night of playing ‘musical people’ at Christmas Eve’s annual Jew Ball in NY.

Inherent to contemporary urban life is this notion of ‘missing out.’ Can we find a better job? a more spacious apartment? a higher salary? a newer restaurant? a hipper scene? better sex? a more perfect match? Shop around. Date around. Explore all your options. Don’t settle. Don’t miss out on the best deal. For every choice you make, you’re crossing off a boatload of others; there’s an awful lot of negative space in the realm of decision making. And there’s the paradox of choice, of option overload. Would we be happier with a more limited menu? Like at Le Relais d’Entrecote in Paris’s St. Germain neighborhood, where the only choices you have are: red or white, and how rare do you want your meat?

Coming back to New York has given me the chance to reconnect with old friends. Time zones and excessively busy lives made it hard to keep up, and an occasional cellular convo is no match for weekly brunch. With good friends, the comfort and camaraderie pick up right where they left off, but there are the blanks, the episodes you’ve missed out on – a lot of living (agonizing, ecstatic, humdrum) gets done in four years.

I feel like I’ve just applied to 12 MBA programs. Seeming non sequitur. A high school friend is sending off her apps in the next few days, and I offered to be the second set of eyes to her essays. Twenty essays later on professional goals, life accomplishments, significant life-changing experiences, difficult decisions, conflicting interests, true failures, 500-word self introductions, and I feel all caught up on the fours years I missed while abroad, not to mention the four years I missed while at college half way across the country.

So there are ways – some more unorthodox than others – to catch up. To not 100% miss out, to live a little vicariously and have others do the same through you. I may have missed out on the Manhattan Years, but I’ve a bevy of primary sources to turn to. I, in turn, offer the eyes and experiences of a wanderer back from the world, an expat repatriated.

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