It’s kind of weird to think about moving into a storage unit when I’ve spent the last two and a half years in New York. But here I am, doing it.
It’s weird right?
But also normal, I guess, I think considering the ‘BOOM’ market that New York City is experiencing right now… Because everyone who left during quarantine has suddenly decided to come back to the city that was ‘dead’ according to the media.
(By the way, New York wasn’t ever really ‘dead’ if you’re reading this and believed all the hype the media portrayed… We just needed a minute to recover from a pandemic that hurt more than half [read: majority] of the businesses that were here. Not to mention the close nature of this city. We’re living on top of each other. And it’s really quite unfair for the media to paint a picture of a city that was supposedly ‘dying’ when the tourists who flourished in these city streets could/should have been helping all the small businesses who supported them when they visited during the prior years. End. Rant.)
My roommate and I have been searching and searching... and I mean looking high and low, far and wide, for a decent apartment in lower Manhattan. Yes, we have standards after living in a sixth floor walkup apartment with a kitchen the size of four generously sized shoe boxes. The entire apartment is barely five-hundred square feet. (Yes, for those of you living in the south asking, it’s probably double the rent of what you’re paying.) So yes, we have some standards that need to be met. But damn, the market right now is rough.
There are apartments listed well over four-thousand dollars that don’t even have a living room. They have closets that are considered bedrooms, kitchens that are smaller than the one we have right now, and bathrooms that are considered an actual joke. It's an absolute craze. The owners of the apartment complexes, and in a way I don’t blame them, are charging more than they would have (almost twice, triple sometimes) before the pandemic. They were suffering during that year and a half we all went through, and it’s a little bit fair that they’re trying to make up for that lost income… But damn, it’s not fair to the people who stayed. The people who are trying to find something decent and not a shoe box. And not to mention, not go completely broke. So being real here, what the hell y’all? Honestly. Give your neighbors who stayed here a break.
Either way, we’re in the process of finding a good apartment in Manhattan, specifically below 23rd, and not in China Town. No grudge against that part of town, I just don’t have the desire to live that close to my office on Wall Street. So, we’ve decided to take away the pressure of finding a place by August 1st, and move our belongings into a storage unit for the month of August… In hopes of finding the ‘perfect’, or at least close to the perfect place by September 1st.
And honestly, I think that’s a smart idea.
Why is it that we rush things? There’s really no reason to rush a good thing.
Yet, I’ll be honest, I’ve had a normal amount of anxiety about not knowing where I’ll be next starting on August 31st, 2021. Earlier today, I had a crazy panic attack that sent me into my shower just standing there under cold water for a solid thirty minutes just... standing there.
But that’s normal. There are so many other wild and crazy things that clearly should have sent me there, yet I spent half an hour standing under ice cold water just trying to breathe normally and convince myself that no matter where I am on July 31st, I’ll be fine. This is absolutely a problem that isn’t fair for me to be complaining about when there’s a large portion of the world who don’t have clean water, a house of their own, healthy living conditions, and so forth.
So, should I really be complaining? Probably not. Is that normal considering my expectation of my standard of living? Yeah. Is that dramatic? Yeah, of course it is. But am I okay with normalizing that? Yeah, I am. Do I feel bad complaining about this when others are less fortunate? Yes, one-thousand-percent.
But, back to the rushing point I was trying to make earlier… We spend so much time trying to hurry up and do the thing that we want to do… But what if we just waited and let that ‘thing’ happen? I know it sounds lazy, but truly, what if we just let good things happen without pressure?
We put so much pressure on ourselves to figure things out.
I’ve spent the last year and a half in the pandemic trying to just let things happen the way that they should. Let the good things come, as they say. It’s half the reason why I’m in the current, wonderful, relationship that I am in now. And I'm very thankful that this pandemic has brought that mindset my way.
But, why is it so hard for me to accept that maybe right now, in this section of life, that my roommate and I aren’t meant to find the ‘perfect’ apartment for that August 1st move in date?
Because I’m in need of that security. We all are. We crave stability. Consistency.
Movement inevitably results in stagnation. We move to inevitably pause. Because we get tired of moving constantly. We need that stability and consistency. That environment that we come home to. The, ‘I just came home from work and kicked my shoes off at the front door, hung my keys up on the hook to the left, wiped the sweat of the day off on my forearm, and just sunk into my couch for a solid thirty-minutes to just… be.’ moments. We want a home.
We crave the solace of knowing that we can just be. Just be in our element of nothingness.
Which is why I want to find my place. The apartment that my roommate and I can call home again. And we will, I’m sure of it. I’m just truthfully impatient. And I really hope we find it soon.
But maybe, this time of uncertainty will be good for me. It’s another learning moment that I can take with me and push myself into being comfortable with not knowing what the future has in store.
So, if you’ve made it to the end of my summer rant... Welcome to my current world of uncertainty. Somehow I’m going to be okay with this, and hopefully in a month when you hear from me again (that is if I don’t take another four month hiatus from writing) I’ll be settled and comfortable in my new home.
I know the majority of this ‘article’ is a rant, and I fully acknowledge that it’s likely annoying, but this is what I’m feeling right now. This is where I’m at. And with that, I hope you appreciate that and the honesty of this post.
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