half a new yorker: reflections on a decade of life

pov ur me trying to sum up 10 years of my life in 1600 words or less

march 27, 2025.

today marks 10 years to the day since i got accepted by nyu. a decision that ruined my life (complimentary).

last month i went to visit my best friend katrina in seattle. my freshman year roommate. the chill socal girl and the neurotic canadian kid.

we realized, in that visit, that it was our tenth year of knowing each other. we are no longer new friends to each other. we are regular friends. parts of each other’s lives. she a character in my story and i one in hers. college is no longer a novel experience in my life. it’s just a thing i did. i think covid forever brainwashed me because it’s what happened in the great Before. all our lives are forever divided in two by the pandemic. and my immediate before was my new york life, much of which was my college life.

i don’t know what else to say about the matter.

i can still picture it. the day i got in. my mom and i were sitting in the mall food court after buying my first macbook from future shop (rip). i had just gotten rejected from barnard and so i opened my email app to re-read my queen’s acceptance as an ego boost. in doing so, my inbox refreshed and an email appeared at the top with the subject line “Your NYU Admissions Decision.”

first line: Congratulations.

my mom got so excited she dumped her coffee on herself. i’m pretty sure we both cried.

and the rest is sort of history.

as with all things in the past, i paint my time at nyu with the rose-coloured glasses of a four-year-year-round-summer-camp on the adult playground that is the island of manhattan. washington square park was my jungle gym. four loko and vanilla coke my jungle juice. (not actually mixed together, i’m not that crazy). my carnival food of choice was sammy’s halal on sixth avenue and pommes frites on macdougal and schmackary’s on west 45th that were frankly way better than insomnia cookies despite the campus obsession with them. probably money laundering.

i was an idiot the entire time.

i also developed a love of forced-hyphenated-terms while working at the campus newspaper much to the chagrin of my editors. until i became one and left them in the final edits of my articles :) campus newspaper insider trading alert! if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! corruption! deceit! alert the media!

i’m not naive enough to think college was the best four years of my life.

i think i am in a constant process of living those.

my time at nyu and in new york was not without its woes. tears shed over homesickness and boys who didn’t like me back and the stress of a 15-page paper that felt like it would never get written. somehow they all did. by me, even, rumour has it.

there were semesters (most of them) where i overextended myself and didn’t prioritize sleep or my mental health but i was also an 18-to-22-year-old in drama school in new york. not exactly the bastion of “time to practice good sleep hygiene and daily wellness practices.” there were also friends i thought would stick around that didn’t. professors i thought i’d stay in touch with whose five-year-old emails are still sitting somewhere in the depths of my inbox. boys i thought would work out that didn’t. nights i promised i was “just going to close my eyes for a second before i finish that paper” to wake up hours later with my laptop safely put away by my roommates. plays i said i’d see before they closed but the days just got away from me. classes i meant to take and skills i meant to learn but just never got around to.

there was also the baggage (to put it mildly) of the 2016 election that served as the backdrop to two-and-a-half of my four years of university.

my years at nyu were imperfect but meaningful. they made me. it’s still crazy to think i’ve been out of college longer than i was in it. there are people who really truly felt like i’d know them forever who i haven’t talked to since 2020. i’m still not famous (yet). i still haven’t been back. i’m scared to shatter the illusory new york of my memory. memory, of course, is a fallible thing.

it was my first taste of independence. an 18-year-old goody two shoes girl from the canadian suburbs plopped right smack dab in the middle of the greatest city in the world. what could go wrong? so much. but thankfully so much could also go right. the little accidents of life. of a random roommate assignment that is now a decade-long best friend who thankfully just moved two-and-a-half hours down the highway. yes, across that border, but still. better than the continent that used to divide us. worse than the five feet across our dorm room that used to divide us, but methinks that was not entirely sustainable. of the theatre program that i reluctantly applied to, not thinking myself worthy but luckily the woman who watched my overacted charlie brown monologue disagreed. of the newspaper meeting i stumbled into that changed the course of my life. of the fact that my room number for junior and senior year was literally 604. of the loose ends of life that didn’t make this list.

new york taught me how to dream. it taught me who i was. after 18 years of conditioning told me one story, i dared to write my own. literally and figuratively. i’m not above a heavy handed metaphor.

some days i still mourn what could have been. the big new york sendoff i imagined for myself in august of 2020 where i invited everyone i had ever met to a picnic in central park and then a bar crawl through manhattan, ending the night-turned-morning at veselka —as was our custom — and then, for the strong of heart, going to the eastside to watch the sunrise. the bucket list tour i had planned of a city i got to fall in love with for four years and a half years. sometimes i think i’ve never been in love. other times i think leaving new york was the greatest heartbreak of my life. sometimes i think i’m being a little dramatic about the whole thing. but i literally studied it in college so i’ll give myself a pass on that one.

i’ve still never been to the cloisters.

they say it takes ten years to earn the moniker of being a new yorker. i got half of that. maybe the universe knew something i didn’t. maybe year seven i would’ve gotten hit by a car while jaywalking, a habit i’ve brought back with me out west. maybe year eight i would’ve had a devastating break up with the guy i met the tail end of year five. maybe by year 10 i would’ve been ready to leave anyway. i’ll never get the chance to know.

i’m grateful for the bonus years i’ve been given in vancouver. they were a blessing that came out of a curse. they gave me friendships i can’t imagine my life without. boy problems i couldn't have conceived of. career moves i couldn’t have fathomed. the sitcom friendgroup i always wanted. and while i did just apply to grad school, my vancouver years have been the mfa in life i needed.

so.

it’s been 10 years today since i got into nyu. i’ve been in seven plays. i’ve had covid twice. mono once. i’ve house sat 10 different cats in six different homes. i’ve been in one pizza commercial. i’ve had sex with 10 people. i’ve had two grandparents die. one cousin. one great aunt. one god parent. i’ve been to one friend from university’s wedding. one from childhood. two cousins. but those are the big things. there were also thousands of hint of lime tostitos consumed. probably the same for cans of coke. cups of earl grey tea abandoned on my nightstand shortly after being poured. tears shed. dollars spent on therapy. cover letters written for jobs i didn’t actually want. and some i actually did. stand up sets performed. audition tapes sent in for roles i knew i wasn’t right for. minutes turned to hours spent on facetime with the friends i made in college, now reduced to 6” digital likenesses telling me about their lives every few weeks or months. i’ve seen jill and jake and katrina and jessie and max and goodness since. many more i haven’t.

i liked math in high school so numbers have always stuck out to me. the difference now is that i always see the story in them. i used to look for the answer. well i still do sometimes. i’m trying to remind myself that in art and life there is no answer. there is no one meaning. the meaning of life is that you live it. sometimes it’s hard to remember that in every 24-hour period when you work three jobs and have 15 creative side hustles and love your friends so much it hurts and want to catch the sun set at 7:34 but there’s no good west-facing sightlines from where you are and you won’t make it to the beach in time and goddammit if i had only planned better.

but you can’t plan your life to death. well you can, but it will do just that. you can’t engineer joy. you have to feel it. the body keeps the score, allegedly. (my body would like to confirm the allegations.)

sorry i haven’t written in a while, i’ve been busy living mine.

love u (probably)

xoxo,

rach