I moved to New York City last June with my daughter and two cats. I was 61.
I had no apartment and no job. I had an Airbnb booked for a month and a moving truck sitting in Florida with everything we owned, waiting for me to figure out where to put it. I drove up in a rental SUV with the cats in the back.
Within the month, I had a lease and a job. We moved in. For the first week we had no furniture, just two blow-up mattresses on the floor, so when my daughter and I wanted to sit somewhere that was not the floor, we sat on the fire escape. That is where we were the first night. Laughing, because we could not believe we actually lived here, and also because there was nowhere else to sit.
That is the whole story, really.
I am telling it because I think a lot of women my age are sitting with a decision they are afraid to make, and the people around them are not helping. The people around them are saying things like “are you sure” and “at your age” and “what if it doesn’t work out.” The people around them mean well and are also, often, a little afraid of what your leaving will say about their staying.
So here is what I can tell you, ten months in.
It worked out.
Not because I had a plan. I did not have a plan. Not because I am special or brave or particularly resourceful. I am a 61-year-old woman who was tired of the life she had. I got in a car. I drove north. I found a place. I signed a lease.
New York is harder than Florida in some ways. We live above a bar and around the corner from a street that never quiets down. Rent is higher. The apartment is smaller.
None of that matters the way I thought it would.
What matters is that I wake up in a city I chose, next to a daughter who chose it with me, and I am no longer organizing my days around all the things in Florida I was trying not to think about. My nervous system knows the difference. My face knows the difference. My daughter’s face knows the difference.
If you are sitting with a hard decision, I am not going to tell you to make it. I do not know your life. I will tell you this: the story of the woman who made the hard decision and then quietly, unremarkably, built a life that fit her better is a real story. It happens all the time. It happened to me.
It is not a dramatic story. That is part of why I am writing it down. The dramatic version is the one we already know. The quiet version is the one that might actually help.
