I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

Sometimes I think leaving New York was the best choice I ever made; still others I’m convinced it’s the worst.

There was a time not long ago in moments but forever ago in my mind when I believed I would stay in New York forever. I lived in SoHo then, in a NYU dorm just a few blocks from the best shops on Broadway, and would walk up Mercer Street on my way to class. Even while living it I had the very distinct feeling that the experience was special, that only a handful of kids in the universe would be able to brag later in life that their daily walk to class consisted of glimpsing celebrities smoking outside the Mercer Hotel or spying models trying on size 00 dresses in Phillip Lim. I developed a cultivated cockiness also adopted by my fellow NYU friends but easily recognized and despised by everyone at home. I wore a lot of jewelry and smoked a lot of cigarettes and dressed always as if I’d just had sex, my rumpled demeanor screaming: I live in New York now, [insert well-practiced exasperated sigh/eye roll combo and flick of cigarette ash], I am special. I was an asshole but so was everyone around me so ok cool whatever! Even if they were angry or mean it seemed like everyone in New York was alive all the time. Even while sleeping they moved and breathed in a way that crystallized their undeniable aliveness. I wanted to be just like them.

There is a sense, particularly on the first warm nights of spring when girls pull their thinnest dresses from the closet and the umbrellas of West Village restaurants are hauled from storage to create outdoor seating, that New York is the only city in the entire universe. As young kids in Manhattan, we believed this about our lives, and we conducted even the smallest of daily activities with an inflated sense of self-importance, because modern culture, American history, the dude at the bodega even, dictated that by virtue of living in New York, the world revolved around us.

Didn’t it, though? When something happened in our neighborhood it was not uncommon for the incident to attract national or even international attention. Much to my chagrin, I was actually quoted in the New York Times when Heath Ledger died, because it happened a block from my apartment and I accidentally stumbled on the paramedics wheeling away his body on that casual walk home down Mercer Street. “He looked just like any other scruffy New Yorker,” I told the reporter shyly before darting away, embarrassed. Later that night it dawned on me: we were worlds apart but somehow of the same breed. Even this celebrity, dead and wrapped in a dressing sheet in the back of an ambulance, was something I was, too: a New Yorker.

That feeling of importance can be very addictive. I am guilty of Gchatting the following phrase more than once: “If it didn’t happen in New York, it didn’t happen.”

It’s not true–it never was–but at 18,19, 20, I would have died by that statement.

In the folds of my brain, a memory of San Francisco, those spectacular hills dotted with box houses and the delightful trickiness of summer fog, blinked like an air traffic tower. But even after throwing my graduation hat in the air at Lincoln Center and writing my first rent check for a small, dark room in the Mission, even after I sat down on the plane that took me to San Francisco, something in the back of my mind whispered that I wasn’t just leaving New York, I was leaving the world. Things would happen to me, but because they did not happen to me in New York, they wouldn’t really happen at all.

Of course this is not true; some of the best (and worst) things have happened to me in San Francisco. I began my first “adult” job at a start-up (there are jobs outside of New York!); I swam in the Pacific and stared into the arms of Redwoods and got silly-drunk in SoMa bars (there are adventures outside of New York!); I met and fell for someone I love with unchecked ferocity (love, too, exists elsewhere!). We don’t get to choose our beginning, but we get as many first starts as we’re brave enough to take.

A lot of my friends have graduated recently, and it has me feeling contemplative and nostalgic. I suppose, in some way, this is all just to say to them: don’t ever be afraid to leave New York. In the backseats of cabs and in parks beneath bridges and in dimly lit Alphabet City bars god is it hard to remember, so I will say it in case you forgot: there is life outside of New York!

There is, and it can be very beautiful and rich and important-seeming, if it is the life you want.

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