You'll never be young in a city you love again.
"It took ages to accept that my real life was quite good."
NOTE: A version of this was first published in Will & Way March 2023, before I switched to Substack.
With Mardi Gras upon us again, I've been thinking about the ten years I spent in New Orleans. I was newly 24 when I got there and almost 34 when I left. For so many of those years, I thought I'd never want to leave the city. I imagined I'd found my forever home. During that time, I started my writing career, bought my first house, and truly became an adult (whatever that means).
And yet, I got older. The things I wanted changed. As much as I'd enjoyed running into people I knew all of the time, no matter where I went, I started to feel constrained by the smallness of the city. I wanted to be able to road trip to more destinations from the city I lived, to date people who hadn't also dated five friends of mine, to grow my career in ways that didn't seem to be happening for me there.
I moved out of the city in 2018 to Santa Rosa, which is north of San Francisco, and then San Diego. While I enjoyed the hiking and outdoor options in my new state, I felt no real affinity to either of those cities. After a year and a half in California, I made the decision to be a digital nomad but—right before I was scheduled to fly to Buenos Aires for a month—a pandemic began, keeping me unexpectedly grounded in Central Texas (an hour from Austin) for about a year and a half.
In 2021, I moved again, this time choosing to stay in Texas. I've now been in Houston for almost three years.
At the moment, I love it here. It's the closest thing I've found to the way I felt in my twenties in New Orleans. The cities have similar weather. Houston has bayous. There are festivals and tall trees and city-wide parades to celebrate things. There are also things I enjoy that come with living in the fourth-largest city in the nation: easy access to world-class ballet, opera, and other performing arts. Any kind of food/fitness option/you-name-it, probably not too far from your house.
I have settled into the rhythm of living here for now, and I'm happy with my life. However, last week I found myself studying everyone's photos of Mardi Gras festivities. I checked in with myself: Did I wish I was there? Did I feel like I was missing out?
The answer was no, not really. I've traveled back for Mardi Gras several times since moving and not had the same experience I had while living there. For one, I don't drink anymore, which makes for a very different Carnival experience when you're as introverted as I am.
But there's also just the truth of it, which is that I'm different in my late 30s than I was in my mid-20s—as I should be! I don't love huge crowds anymore, the sheer volume of stuff that's thrown away at Mardi Gras gives me pause now, and I can't help but notice the ongoing effects of gentrification in the city everywhere I turn.
I don't think there's any right or wrong way to feel about this. As much as I wish I found as much joy as I used to in certain things, it's also okay to let myself change and try something new. (Also! I recently read this article on why you should change your life every 10 years, and I'm very into the idea.)
However, I don't think I'll ever forget the way it felt to be young in a city that I loved. I have found this nostalgia paralleled in books like Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and, most recently, I found it in an essay titled, “What place do you call home?”
It took ages to settle in, to accept that the real thing — my real life, not the imagined thing I’d left behind — was quite good. I didn’t know then that I’d never go back to being that young woman who only ever wanted to live in Brooklyn. Last summer I went back to New York for the first time in five years, and there it was: my old life, in those same streets, and yet I didn’t feel at home, not at all, even though it is still where I’ve spent the biggest swath of my adulthood.
This is precisely the way I feel about New Orleans and knowing that others feel that way too, about other cities, somehow makes it both easier and harder to bear.