First Week Living in NYC

Editor’s Note: Hey there! I’ve gotten into the terrible habit of not publishing my work, and I’m trying to change that. In an effort to quiet my own criticism and recommit to my craft, I’m shipping this newsletter in all its glorious imperfection. It’s something I wrote over Memorial Day Weekend.

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I moved to New York City.

The past couple whirlwind months have included a move back to the states from India, back-to-back events with friends and family, my own engagement ceremony, taking my dad to Europe for the first time, and a week-long surf retreat in the Basque Country.

I’m writing this at the end of my first week in New York, where I’m staying with my cousin and her husband.

At the beginning of this week I felt like any room I was in had a low insecurity floor and a high anxiety ceiling. Things were volatile, to say the least. And no matter how hard I was pushing back on these forces, I just couldn’t break through. The worries were too high that it was preventing me from feeling joy around the fact that I was finally exactly where I wanted to be: NYC!

That inability to feel positively about something I’d been looking forward to so much only made things worse. I only felt more anxious. More suffocated.

Of course, I’ve felt this countless times before. I think it’s a product of doing this thing that I come to love eventually but always hate initially: change.

Change

Especially in the last couple years, I’ve adopted this mentality to leap before I think I’m ready.

Audition before I think I’m ready.

Write a script before I think I’m ready.

Move my life halfway across the world before I think I’m ready (OG Stories by Shiv readers remember this one).

While this lifestyle has led to tons of adventure and growth, it comes at the cost of comfort, and oftentimes mental peace. But in some ways, I think the peace I was able to experience before this mindset was only a facade. A lie I told myself when I was actually just too scared to make the moves I needed to make.

In the past the only way out was through — to push through the discomfort and keep moving forward. But in this past week, even though I was doing just that, I couldn’t kick the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough.

I wasn’t moving fast enough. I wasn’t meeting enough people. What I’m working on today, I should’ve finished yesterday.

Then I had a little moment of magic.

Jeremy Strong, My Knight

I went to see Jeremy Strong in An Enemy of the People, and it hit me.

Not only did the show pull me out of my own head and worries and life, and give me the opportunity to ponder life more broadly, it also gave me a chance to observe someone who has been on a similar path to me.

Sitting there in that theater, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. With the context of the work he’s done, and for how long he’s been glossed over, and now to see him standing up in front a crowd full of people doing THE thing. Showing us his mastery. I was in complete awe.

This guy has dedicated his entire life to this craft. He’s 45. He’s been doing this since he was 10. And only now is he really getting to step into the light of the years of his work. He plays his characters with a sense of underdog — even when they may not be — because that is who he is.

I spent the rest of Memorial Day Weekend walking around NYC and catching myself thinking about him, his performance, his career. Reflecting on the time he’s spent on his craft, with this expansive city as my backdrop, I realized how long brilliance like that truly takes.

The city is so big.

It’s hard to avoid feelings of I should be meeting more people. Working on more projects. But realizing how vast this city is has been a great parallel to this profession.

The realization was that the vastness is never-ending.

No one person will ever know all the people in the city. They’ll never have tried every restaurant and visited every nook and cranny. They can’t. It’s too big even for people who have spent their entire lifetimes in this city.

But I could see myself living here for a long while anyways.

I haven’t had that feeling in a long time. That reshapes things.

It doesn’t feel like I have to get everything I want to do done in 2 years, which is the timescale I’ve gotten used to operating on. It feels like I could spend a lifetime here and still not do all the things I’d want to do.

Isn’t that just life, Shiv?

I often feel like I don’t have enough time — in the day, in the year, in general. And it’s not like my realization gives me any additional time to do all the things that I want to do. But it did give me the reminder that no amount of time would really ever be enough, I don’t think.

We all get a set amount of time to do things. To live. Some adventures we will get to take. Others we won’t. But the ones we don’t get to take shouldn’t taint the ones we do. They can’t. We don’t know what those would have been like, felt like.

Taking it day by day,

Shiv