On Living in America
The Flatiron Building, takien from my Fifth Avenue office.
Every life has an impressionable time, an era of peak suggestibility. For me, it was 1997, and I was 12.
At 12, I became convinced that Hanson was the best band in the world. At 12, a classroom bully whispered mean words in my ear that echo to this day. And at 12 I absorbed the idea that the United States, a country just 100 miles from my Southern Ontario suburb, was where I wanted to be.
That 12-year-old life had two planes.
First – things that actually happened. Schools and summers and sleepovers, and I remember just bits and snatches of those. The squeal of bare thighs against inflatable chairs. The shimmery aquamarine of backyard pools. The dank cool of unfinished basements.
Second – things I saw, watched, read, listened to. Dog-eared copies of Delia’s catalogues. The after-school TV lineup of Full House followed by Family Matters followed by Fresh Prince. Sweet Valley High books. Liner notes I slid gently in and out of CD jewel cases. It all feels, even today, stunningly vivid, layouts and plot lines and lyrics I can recall in their entirety.
Everything I consumed was imported. Every band worth listening to, every college worth going to, every brand worth buying, every city worth reading about, every goal worth aspiring to felt bound up in the gleam of the country south of me. America made the things that made my identity.
And so, the idea of American superiority burrowed deep in my brain. Not political superiority, economical superiority, or military superiority, for those things were meaningless to me at that age. Cultural superiority. Over time, the object of my affection narrowed to New York City, but it didn’t start that way. For years, I romanticized all the Americas: Pacific Northwest grunge America. Top-down-convertible California America. Blue blood, Ivy League America.
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The choice to live anywhere is a bundle of opportunities and risks, tradeoffs that reveal what you value and believe in.
For a long time, I viewed my choice to live in New York City through the lens of the city’s culture. I’d chosen a place of giant ambition, soaring scale, endless excitement. A place where everything was the best. The theatre, the skyscrapers, the food, the museums, the parks – all the best. The middling, good-enough, quick-to-settle quality that had always irked me about other places didn’t exist here.
I still believe that, and still care about that. I remain, in many ways, that 12-year-old desperate to be in the dead-center of the place where the world’s stories get written. And I’m willing to work harder, pay more, and be less comfortable for that privilege. That’s why other people’s evocations of work/life balance, cost of living, and square footage have never much compelled me.
And yet, this city is not an idyll, as the recent spate of subway attacks makes newly evident. And it’s marooned in a country that’s less idyllic still. America isn’t just #1 in cultural exports, it’s also #1 in mass shootings, mass incarceration, military spending, drug use, debt, and dozens of other shameful superlatives. Sometimes, it’s possible not to think about it. This week, it’s been impossible.
For these past few days, I’ve been doing a grim calculus. Tangible benefits against intangible evils. Romantic notions against policy realities. Today’s joys against future threats. I read headlines and think, we should go. I see our lives here and think, how could we possibly leave?
In 2018, long after we’d left Toronto for New York, two people died in a shooting just a block from our old Greektown apartment. We were living in East Flatbush at the time, a Brooklyn neighborhood where my Citizen app was constantly pinging, and it surprised me, frankly, that the ‘close call’ had happened in Toronto and not there. I held onto that fact like some kind of talisman: conflating the fact that it can happen anywhere with the fact that it happens much much more often in America. I told myself a similarly convenient story this week. School shootings, I reasoned, always seem to happen in places most people have never heard of: Littleton, Newtown, Parkland, Uvalde. At 4am this morning, I awoke with the realization that most people have never heard of Roosevelt Island, my little sliver of land in the middle of the East River. The little sliver of land where my oldest son attends preschool.
No matter where you live, there are no guarantees. Not of happiness, not of health, not even of survival. But the unknown – that gaping, bottomless, terrifying possibility of violence and grief – looms particularly large right here right now. And I’m not sure whether to be pissed or grateful that 12-year-old me – with all her big rose-colored ideas of what America meant – never anticipated this.