I found this essay on my hard drive tonight, it was written as a personal narrative for my freshman year seminar at NYU. Four and a half years later, I look at this essay and it outlines all the goals and aspirations and feelings I still have within me. It reaffirmed that I am doing what I know and all that I can to make it work, and that I've known what I've wanted this entire time.

September 12, 2005

I look around to see the hustling of legs, the clicking of many high heels on the ground, there are cell phones ringing, and then everything hits my nose. Curry, pizza, Chinese, it all meshes together, like the people of the city. The paved street has turned to cobblestone and it is wearing hard on the soles of my tennis shoes. My mother and I are walking by street vendors of all types, who peddle to us their goods as if we had never needed anything more than we needed their cheap trinkets. And then I look up to see a grand sign, drawing my breath with anticipation. It reads, with gold inlay, “Quincy Market”. This is the city of Boston in the mid 90s, and this really isn’t even a beginning of any sort. Let’s say my life in Lake George is the Adirondack Northway. Trips into cities like Boston or New York weren’t beginnings of new roads, but exits on the life I was living. My city life and my rural life never rivaled one another, because they were escapes from each other. Too much city, and one grew lonesome for the clear lake or pine trees. Too much rural life left one sedentary and disconnected from everything.

It was always my intent to leave home for college. There is something about this will I have to keep moving that wouldn’t allow any other kind of outcome. When I chose Boston University as my first choice for college, it was because Boston knew me. The inner workings of the city and its’ layout were familiar, but foreign enough that I could fulfill the discoverer side of my brain. It was a connection that ran deep. Boston was (in my little girl eyes) the aquarium, Boston Harbor, the science museum, the planetarium… and it was all so very busy. For me, the word busy is forever synonymous with the will to forget. Busy blocked out the fact my father was getting treatment for cancer in Boston, busy canceled out the long car rides, so busy kept me happy. If my mother had just come out and said what it was that we were going to Boston for, I would’ve been a sad, melancholy depressive at age seven. Nobody really wants that, right? Something in me knows that it might’ve been a bad decision on my parents’ part, to shield something so important from my brother and I in an otherwise open parent-child relationship. Now, even at eighteen years of age, I still do not fully comprehend how ill my father was. There have been prescription bottles on his bathroom sink ever since. I still don’t ask him what it’s all for. It is without a doubt something I am reluctant to change in my mind, for fear of ruining otherwise picture-perfect childhood excursions into Boston.

New York City, December 2001. I am standing at the edge of the World Trade Center site, trying to find something. Anything, please. As an eighth grader visiting Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular in 2000, I left brimming with life. I stood a year later, as a ninth grader, completely drained. My uncle had died the month prior, leaving behind my cousin, then fourteen years old. There was a version of myself wandering aimlessly through each day, but I wasn’t involved. Feeling sort of like an over-loved toy animal that had lost most of its’ inner stuffing, I came to the site hoping the city could work its’ magic once more. That perhaps my faith in life would be restored by seeing the coming together of many people in a time where our country’s need was so great. I was trying to feel the energy coming from this hallowed burial ground or something equally spiritual. At least that’s what it was supposed to be like. Still, all I felt when I got there was the same stinging emptiness I’d been experiencing throughout that year. There was, at that point, a part of me that hated New York because it made me feel horrible all over inside, because its’ deformed skyline tore a hole in my heart. The city became a symbol for a year that should’ve been erased from my own history. For a long time, I didn’t visit the museums or go to Broadway shows. I didn’t go to Times Square or Chelsea. I didn’t have the ache to ride to Grand Central on the train from Poughkeepsie. Every time my family ventured out to Long Island to visit my aunt in Hempstead, my eyes would stay shut until we were clear out of the viewing range of the skyline. I wished in those moments that I could be busy again.

Back upstate, I fared worse. Activities that I had to do were simply autonomous motions that didn’t race through my heart. Looking at the lake, climbing trees in my best friend’s backyard, and going on hikes with my soccer team didn’t really excite me anymore. Birds, trees, sunny skies, and things that would generally make a sane person happy just made me all the more lonely and disconnected with my surroundings. Though I seldom use quotes to back up my writing, Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, says it better than I am saying right now. She writes that depressed persons have a tendency to want to adapt, to maintain a certain chameleon-like quality so that they and their surroundings blend seamlessly into their feelings.

“Occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.” Wurtzel says.

I too, am certain that I wanted everything around me to also look how I felt inside: broken, maniacal, fastidious. The rag doll needed a dollhouse with a collapsed roof. Knowing that sitting in my room depressed had made me into a bit of a reclusive homebody, I jumped at the opportunity to visit DC in the fall of 2003. The special leadership conference that I’d been invited to attend looked like the prime opportunity to test city waters once more. To the average person visiting Washington, everything seems so bleak around Capitol Hill, but it was so perfect for me at that moment. Abandoning my inner artist, I fell in love with the routine rush rush rush of these busy individuals in their suits and skirts. Before leaving the conference, I had somehow convinced myself that securing a spot at Georgetown or George Washington University and majoring in something like speechwriting, international relations, or political science would make me happy. That it would keep me busy (god, that word again) and out of the grip of my obvious depression.

Prolonged depressive states make the sufferer prone to illustrious highs, nights of mania that infuse a false sense of creativity into the body. It was during one of those episodes that I discovered political science was not for me. I was downstairs in my art studio, ripping apart newspaper and photographs into a collage. It must have been about 4 in the morning, there was George W. Bush sneering up at me in a little caricature on the front page of opinions, with a long-faced donkey/man combo kicking up some dust behind him.

“Oh no”, I thought to myself, “these are the kind of guys that will be the central male figures in my life for all my days on this earth? YEAH. I need to think… like, a lot.”

There was something that happened that night, symbolic in the ripping of newspaper. Using words to rip apart the status quo, using pictures and documents, it all seemed to fit into place. Journalism sounded like an admirable career switch. Later that month, I spent ten days touring Spain. All those Spanish cities infiltrated my soul, my camera logging over 900 pictures taken. I think what happened there was an intervention of sorts, a reminder that cities did not always have to make me fall into a routine. The energy of a good city should make you feel alive, not numb. I learned that spontaneity would last longer and satisfy my desires better than a structured fulfillment. Maybe it was crazy to do this, but when I filled out the GWU application that coming fall, it was just more going through the motions. I applied to the English Dept. because the application was shorter than the one for the Journalism Dept. My essay was half a page long.

The summer between that trip and the fall of my senior year was pretty important. I was taking art classes for credit at Skidmore College, thinking that maybe I’d like to go to art school. NYU had Tisch, and then there was Corcoran School of Art and Design, RIT, and Art Institute of Boston. For about a week, I thought I’d apply to RISD or Parsons, anywhere with a good art program. Art school just seemed logical after spending a summer covered in paint. Ultimately, I dreamed of being a photographer and though art school would get me there. I’d seen the works of Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange, photographers who changed people’s perspectives and intervened with their artwork. But of course, with just a visual arts education, I would have no cultural base upon which to create. Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 9/11” and Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” were the talked about mega-documentaries of that year. Upon noticing that these people were creative like me, while also making an impact on society, I began to really think about that night of mania I’d had earlier in the year. I found the connection between what I’d been doing that night, and what I was thinking about at that moment to be one of the most important connections I’d ever make.

Maybe I wanted to document others tragedies because I could not begin to explain my own. Back when I first decided on photojournalism, there was the sugar puff response as to why, “because I’d love to travel the world and document suffering so that others who cannot travel themselves may see it. I want to get emotionally attached to society’s problems and adopt them as my own”. To an extent, I did and still do mean part of that. Giving my heart to a cause might end up being rewarding.

European photojournalist Zana Briski lived in the Sonagachi red-light district of Calcutta among the prostitutes and their children for years, documenting their stories in the film documentary “Born Into Brothels”. Briski invested her heart, soul, and body into the project, befriending the children of Sonagachi and earning their trust. Forming this type of bond with another culture’s people is something I continue to feel strongly about doing in my lifetime. However, I wonder sometimes if I have the capacity to hold in my heart the problems of others. That’s where being in New York might aid me. The thing about New York is that you can let things affect you, but you may let other things slide by without them penetrating your skin. In the career I’ve chosen for myself, I believe that’s the most important skill one can possess.

Visits to both NYU and BU changed my irrational ideas to go to a big name art school into something a little more accessible. After BU rejected me (just because I didn’t take pre-calc, in case you were curious), I was faced with a real tough decision. I had those damned art schools, Northeastern, the waitlist at GWU (hey that’s good, I only wrote half a page!), and NYU Gallatin, which I’d applied to solely because admissions told me I could take both Journalism and Photo classes in that college. Northeastern I’d applied to because according to my “guidance” counselor, I needed a safety school. I never visited, and they didn’t even have a photography program. And so there it was, New York City, staring me down once again. So of course, I reluctantly let the city flow back into my veins, and visited three times over the course of making my decision. My teachers, my counselors, my parents… they all thought being proactive in the college process would be key. 


It turns out that being proactive doesn’t always help, because there my parents and I were, in Washington Square Park talking about how to pay for New York University. I had been so hasty trying to create my own future, my own “perfect plans to keep busy” and out of a depressive state, that my actual future had snuck up behind me when I wasn’t looking. My dad was still pushing Northeastern upon me. But he was speaking to a future New Yorker about a school in Boston. Sure, E.B White wrote an essay about three types of New Yorkers, but there aren’t three types. There are over 8 million types of New Yorkers. I am just one of them who has her own connective thread to the city. Though at some points my thread may entwine with others, it originates uniquely from my own mind, and from my own life experiences.

Which brings me to now. I have arrived home to find this sane girl looking out her window onto 10th street; across the street are apartment buildings where the stairwell is always fully lit. She can hear the shouts of her fellow freshmen returning from a trip out to the shady bars on St. Mark’s Place. The girl is making out a letter to her best friend in DC, complete with her 5th Avenue return address. Like the girl, like the street, like the park is alive, yesterday her camera was alive, and it met people without even speaking to them. That girl, she looks like me, but she breathes like I never have.