no. 26: to be young and in love in new york city
a love letter to third places, and another thought-sparking trip.
Upon returning from my trip to New York back in December, my routine trip debrief with my best friend started with this: “I feel like a bisexual brown woman in New York City.”
Naturally, she, very quick-witted, responded with, “Well have you considered it’s because you are a bisexual brown woman, and you were in New York City?” And in a way, she’s right. But the underlying meaning of it is that I felt more like an intrinsic version of myself being in a different place than I do at home in DC or Cleveland.
There are several reasons for this – one is that I’m surrounded by a higher concentration of brown people in New York than I often am in DC, and people who I am, in some cases, closer to, so I feel like I have more space to be a more authentic version of myself, that I might sometimes tone down or not fit with as much in my life in DC. I spend a lot more time doing brown-coded things in New York because more of them exist in New York – whether it’s the food I eat, events or things I go to, or people whose friends I spend time with.
And just on a pure population scale – the way I feel perceived is different in New York than in DC. That’s not to say that I do not get catcalled or occasionally feel unsafe, but in a city that is far more diverse, and where people exist in different iterations, it is easier to not feel as automatically lumped into the capitalist girlboss trope of the brown girl in DC, because I am not as automatically that in New York when I exist there. In the same way that diverse high schools get brown kids in every social stratum, whether it’s in arts, sports, or pure academics, bigger and more diverse cities get brown people on every social spectrum. On a weekend alone, I have been desi clubbing and sitting in a circle of brown people discussing gender theory. In DC, those diverse social spaces of brown people are far fewer and exist far less often.
I often find a trip packed back to back with an insane quantity of things – trying to see everyone possible in 5 days, going from coffee to meal to dessert to meal to drink to meal to dessert to meal. But I often end up with a little empty time, and spend almost all of it in one of three places –
Pier 35, which has big swings and a stunning view of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. This was the first place I went on the first morning of my first post-breakup New York trip in 2020, when I was doing really emotionally badly, at the start of a trip with people who would change my life. I now go back to reminisce a little, and appreciate where I am now.
The Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, often joked to be where I will end up writing a Substack if I can’t manage to overcome my anxiety to text people to make plans when I’m in the city. This is my favorite place to sit and write or read. I am happy here, I like people-watching and looking at the pretty buildings outside. It’s a soft and joking fever dream of a slightly more luxurious and bright-light life.
The Chai Spot, the most recent addition to this list back in December, when I went with a friend and ended up spending nearly 5 hours talking, reading, and writing. And then proceeded to do the same this past trip. The chai is a bit mid, and it’s always incredibly crowded, but the vibes are utter perfection. I love feeling like I’m in an Indian living room, or the back of a rug store. This weekend I texted someone to say “You know how I love this place”, and I have evidently talked about it adequately in the past 3 months because I didn’t specify a place and she knew immediately.
That last one is what inspires this Substack most – it is an explicitly South Asian-coded space, and an implicitly queer-coded one, both of which are things I rarely get in DC.
Urban planning, socialization, and community research often talk about the 3rd place – a place that is not home or work, that we can access for free, and where we can build community and dialogue and interact with others. The common citations are things like gyms, libraries, museums, and parks. For me additionally, it’s often book clubs, lectures, sports games/watch parties, and dance classes, where I get to be around people doing things I enjoy, building an active community around them, rather than doing them alone. But today, so many more of those things aren’t free, aren’t places we can easily find community, and for me, aren’t open at the hours I want them to be – usually at home, so I can be somewhere with friends that aren’t our homes, without spending an egregious amount of money.
But at its core, I think the conversation about third spaces is most frequently about the types of spaces we build to exist in, the types of communities we want to have, and how we make those spaces most develop the community we want. A conversation I think about often is one from a group of friends last summer, in which we were discussing how grassroots-driven and organic community events that we attended in New York felt, compared to DC, where a lot more seems to feel top-down, developed by government entities and corporations, a lot more rigid for a very workaholic city.
At the end of the day, it is largely about the demand for certain types of spaces to exist and the intent we create them with. The top-down or bottom-up development of community and space building. In a city where truly everything feels deeply political and a little capitalistic, it feels impossible to find novel spaces to exist for fun, that aren’t just eating or drinking.
It really is just vibes every time I say it – well I guess all conversations about spaces are frequently just vibes – but whenever I’m sitting in the Chai Spot, it feels like what my discourse around third spaces, at least for me personally, has constantly been grasping for. (And yes, I do justify spending a little too much on mid chai as rent to sit in a place that makes me happy. I’ll cope with that separately.)
What deters me most often from moving to New York is that the professional community around the type of work that I partake in is here in DC. Plus, I have a nice apartment that I don’t break the bank to pay rent for, and most policy jobs and circles just aren’t in New York the way they are in DC. My first and second spaces are comfortable and easy to exist in here, and I’m often recurringly convinced by that.
But the question I’ve found myself repeatedly chasing: is it the third place that gives us the most affinity with places we live, more than the places we live and work?
At the age of 24, almost everything I’ve thought about has led me to believe that you live in places because you work there, because the jobs in your field are there, because your opportunities for professional growth are there. If we didn’t have those questions, would we live in different places? Is it reasonable to move for the third place, and that personal cultural space instead?
There are other ways we justify where we live – I often say it’s the walkable city, being around high concentrations of people my age, not having to be reliant on a car, being so connected with the rest of the East Coast (or living in proximity to family), and having incredible exposure to opportunities for learning and experiencing culture, that I would likely get to do very few other places in the US.
It’s funny to write this because as much as I often want to, I don’t live in New York – in a way, the whole city is a third place because it’s not where I work or live, but exists purely as a place I think a little too hard, and make insanely chaotic and good memories with some people I love inexplicably deeply. Some might say I have this romanticization of the city because I’ve only spent happy time traveling there, but shockingly, I think more of my life-defining stresses have been centered around time spent in New York than they have been DC – election stress in 2020, graduation stress in 2021, navigating dating and high anxiety around jobs. And it certainly is not free like the epitome of third spaces are supposed to be – I spend far more money in New York on a weekend trip than I often do in a week or two in DC, and I know the whole thing would create a serious dent to my wallet if I moved.
But maybe somewhere in me, it’s because I feel like I need to be in browner spaces than I think I might ever find here in DC. Or at least, the joke I’ve made is that it’s the closest and most practical thing I could do for the development of my own identity short of moving to India. Even my astrocartography map, when I was shown it back in December, put my deepest personal yearning line right through New York.
Or that the person I’m evolving to want to be more, the one this Substack often represents, is enamored by questions of the people we are in the spaces and communities we exist in, so deeply driven by my own diaspora experiences. That I’m growing out of an 11-year dream of living in DC, formerly tied to a girlboss-like ambition to center my life around policy and politics, that I’m starting to feel less convinced is what I want to spend my whole life doing. Or maybe I’m just itching for change, and want to live closer to the people I love so so deeply.
Either way, hopefully at some point this is less of an irrational fever dream, and one I can justify spending the money on. But in a deeper sense, hopefully, at some point, I learn to convince myself to move away from a city where my life is so defined by the resume and LinkedIn lines, in chase of a slightly deeper pursuit of understanding.