NY Year 1 Update.
Exactly a year ago today, I landed in New York. It was supposed to be a year yesterday, but I had actually missed my flight due to awful planning on my part and normally horrendous Los Angeles traffic. I ended up taking the red-eye and landing early on a Friday morning.
The day before I flew, I bought a necklace from Pyrrha, one with a butterfly and an anchor. I felt it symbolic, because my goal was to find the elusive, mythical thing I had heard about called “stability”. I had only seen the concept in Facebook posts from friends and in thinkpieces I read on the Internet.
I landed not knowing what to expect. I was literally the prodigal son returning home after two decades. (And when I say home, I mean my parents’ attic. It was probably the most millennial thing I could do, even though according to some counts, I’m not technically a millennial.)
And, like in the story of that other prodigal son everyone loves to quote, my parents really made me feel incredibly welcome and were loving, not as if that should be a shock. It was fun having random midnight debugging conversations with my mother or impromptu brainstorms with my father.
For my siblings who live on the East Coast, it had been a major year. My younger sister spoke at a dinner with Bruce Willis and Vice President Joe Biden. My younger brother became the special advisor to The Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at the Harvard Law School and helped organize an amazing inaugural event. My older brother started a new company. My eldest niece became a Bat Mitzvah.
I got to experience so much of this with them, as well as more minor things, like being at birthday parties or impromptu BBQs I would have missed in the past or the family Thanksgiving dinner and Hanukkah parties I haven’t attended in well over a decade. Even the tiny things, like randomly helping my niece with some homework late one Saturday night. Or an unplanned Scrabble afternoon with my grandmother. Only now do I realize how much I’ve missed by living so far away.
Professionally, I’m finally launching the company I wanted to start eight years ago in Tel Aviv. The comfort of living in my parents’ attic gave me the time and the resources required to really research and develop and test and iterate the platform, and moving out to Brooklyn gave me the drive to really push out the best possible version it could be.
But this wasn’t a year marked in its discovering of new relationships; in most cases, it was time spent deepening existing friendships, from different periods and places throughout my entire life. The dinners (and the cigar nights) with some of my closest friends from Jerusalem who now happen to live in Forest Hills. The woman who taught me how to parallel park a decade and a half ago now gave me my office space and so much more. People I had only known virtually have become better friends in real life. I only found my apartment in Bed-Stuy because I’m subletting it from the boyfriend of a Little League teammate from when I was 7 years old. (I recently saw my Little League coach who told me that I was the worst catcher he had ever seen, but it impressed him that I never gave up.)
In other news, New York has changed me. I now schedule my life, for the most part. I make plans more than 24 hours in advance, sometimes even more than 168 hours in advance, which is still a very odd feeling.
In Los Angeles, I’d go to screeners and premieres and just normal movies on a regular basis, and in New York, I haven’t been to a movie theater a single time. But I have lost count of the number of plays, musicals, concerts and other assorted live shows I’ve attended.
I’m really grateful for everything: the times that had me pushing the “happy” button, and the times that had me pushing the “not happy” button. The times when friendship meant getting a helping hand or good advice, and the times when friendship meant receiving unvarnished, inconvenient truths and tough love.
All in all, for a completely unplanned year with a vague amorphous goal, it turned out alright, even if not everything went the way I would have wanted, it was what I needed. Thank you to everyone who made it what it was.
8 Jan 2017