My answer to the inevitable question changes from day to day, moment to moment.

Do I like New York City?

There isn’t a singular answer because this city isn’t a singular thing. When people wax poetic about this city – THE city – being one of the “characters” in a TV show or a movie, it’s true. The city is so alive that it rumbles under our feet, pulsing straight through us, and we lose our sense of time, and need for sleep.

We love the diversity of people. The plethora of museums. The pinnacle of musical greatness on any given night at any given venue.

And as a newbie to this city, its vastness genuinely astounds me and invigorates me every time I venture out into it. So. Big.

But for all the buildings, there is way more green space than I expected. We have even been on hiking trails. Easy trails, but trails, nonetheless.


But New York is a tough city which seems to be a source of pride. Of being able to survive. With rents as big as the buildings. And a million overly-qualified people applying for the same dream job. And weather that flips from a humid hell bath to a breathtaking, scream-inducing, icy, windy freeze.

Had I moved here 10 years ago, before living in a sunshine paradise called Tucson, my pessimism and anti-social nature would have fit right in with this city. Perhaps I, too, would be proud of my suffering through survival in this city. And maybe I would relish in my seasonal depression because I had never known anything different. Instead, we are here after thoroughly enjoying skipping winter altogether for all those blissful years as the sunshine grew me into an optimistic, semi-social, opposite-of-how-I-used-to-be kind of person.

So what do I think of New York? How do I feel about it?

I feel very strongly that I absolutely love and hate this city, equally, at the same time.