Homeward Bound

As I’ve often said before, one of the coolest things about New York is that you can find just about anything here. Acupuncture, Norwegian cuisine, pizza for a dollar a slice… in fact, after I moved here, I started to get the feeling that if you can’t find something in New York, you probably won’t find it anywhere.

But let’s hope that “a job” doesn’t fall under that category.

It was incredible while it lasted. I got to experience incredible, wise people and breathtaking cultural encounters and impressive tributes to mankind. But now I’ve got a plane ticket booked for home and I’m trying to come to terms with why God might have led me out here, if only briefly. Obviously there were a lot of lessons to learn, about job-hunting and working hard and city life and what I really want for my future.

For a while, I wanted to stay. I was looking for any reason to. Especially once a lot of real friendships finally started to take root… but I think half of my desire to stay was just stemming from my fear of failure. I mean, I worked at the Olympics as a college student and then I went on to living in the very heart of New York. I never would have expected the next logical step in that progression to be, “move back in with parents.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to get home and see my family and spend time with them while I regroup. But my older sister had a paying job and a shared apartment when she graduated from college: I’ve normally never really envied her accomplishments or felt any pressure to mimic her abilities, but in this case I honestly didn’t expect anything less from myself, either. There’s a strange stigma, as a graduate, to saying that you’re living with your parents again (though to be fair, most of my accomplishments in the past have occurred largely at the generosity of family, anyway).

Still, now that I look back, if I was going to pick a place to really start gaining ground and stability, I’m not sure I would want it to be New York. I just can’t relax here: not fully. There’s too much pressure at all times, to succeed and to rise and to accomplish independence in one fell swoop (I’m sure part of that pressure is merely general adulthood, but I’ve had almost more of that than I can swallow for a while). I just want to get my feet on the ground, and to build a stronger foundation than the one I moved out here on (which, to recap, was basically financial savings, a few distant contacts, and the inflated head that comes from being a college graduate named Rica). Even if it means building from the ground up for a couple of years, at least I’ll understand what I’m doing a little better.

If nothing else, this trip has instilled in me the great fear of unemployment, which I didn’t take too seriously when I first departed from the dormitories. But now, on Day One of realizing that a one-way ticket has turned into a round-trip, I’ve already started shooting off job applications to media companies close to home. And I’ve already gotten much friendlier responses from them than from any studio here in the Big Apple, I might add.

And who knows? Maybe we booked too soon and God still has a job opportunity waiting in this city for me before that plane takes off next week. But if not, I don’t think I’ll shed any tears over it.

New York was a sort of crucible experience for me: the like of which I haven’t experienced since we moved to Kentucky right before my junior year of high school. Even after living in Kentucky for six years, I still refused to call the state “home”: I just called it “where my family currently lives” or “where my college was located”. But to be honest, I never would have even made it to the Olympics or to New York if we hadn’t moved to Kentucky in the first place.

Neither crucible was a picnic, and neither made a lot of sense for my future (at the time), but I still learned a lot. I’m sure in the years to come, I’ll look back on this experience and see how it brought me to a lot of places I never would have dreamed of.

At least I already know what that first place is: a state called Kentucky.

A place called home.