At 18, I touched down in New York City for the first time, dragging a comically large suitcase (the kind every child of immigrants gets handed down), a carry-on and a purse across the hot and humid streets of Manhattan in late summertime. New York was all mine, completely untouched, waiting to be discovered.
18 is great age to move to the city because you have no fucking clue what you’re signing up for—your wide-eyed naivety would make any late 20-something’s eyes roll (or water). You are not yet weighed down by career paths not taken, shoebox apartments, doing laundry at your local laundromat in the winter, and watching friend after friend leave the city.
I stumbled into my first, textbook nyc romance on an inflatable couch on the corner of West 4th street and 6th avenue. On our first date, he descended down the stairs to Fat Cat in the West Village (now closed) “how old do you have to be to go in there?” I asked, nervously waiting at the top of the stairs. I didn’t have a fake ID. He looked at me, horrified. He was 28. Instead, we spent the evening walking uptown, stopping into a coffee shop somewhere on Broadway before making our way to the red stairs in Times Square. There I was, 18 and in the middle of hundreds of billboards, bright lights, and blaring cabs—with a guy I had met on the sidewalk just a few days earlier.
That first romance dragged on for years as I fell back into the irresistible tug of war between intensity and emotional unavailability. I was 18 and tangled up with someone 10 years older than me, and having recently moved to the city, no one was there to reign me in. I’d walk to his apartment in the evenings, taking Fifth Avenue all the way up to midtown, looking up at the Empire State towering overhead. I reveled in the anonymity and freedom of it all. I was reckless and bargained with myself and stayed much longer than I should have.
When I scraped together $1800 to pay cash for my first apartment off campus, I had 26 cents left in my bank account. I squeezed 3 people into a tiny two bedroom apartment in the East Village. I tutored and nannied, walked all over Manhattan to avoid paying for public transport, and volunteered at 3 different schools while I dreamed of starting my own. After graduating, I landed a job at a newly founded middle school, where I worked as the assistant to the Head of School before becoming a 7th grade Humanities teacher. I loved it fiercely, but burned out fast.
Two years after I moved to the city, my mom got diagnosed with Alzheimers. Each time I went back home, she’d faded away a little bit more. What started out as minor lapses in memory turned into forgetting how to get dressed, how to use the bathroom, how to cook, how to drive, how to eat, how to speak. Eventually, we had to move her into a nursing home. I visited her there for the first time the summer after I graduated college. I walked into the locked facility where dementia patients were held and saw her sitting idly in a wheelchair, fiddling with toy blocks, her hair overgrown and gray. I sat down next to her. She smiled at me in that ever-cheerful, calm way that only she knew how. A lump formed in my throat and I turned away so she wouldn’t be able to see the tears that rolled down my cheek. She still knew my name, but to me, my mom was unrecognizable.
She died a day before my 23rd birthday and my world went gray for a while. I returned to New York and went back to work at the middle school, but it wasn’t long until I quit. I had a mother-sized hole that lived inside of me so I moved to Japan for a few months—writing, wandering, volunteering—trying to fill it.
Through all this, I was in a nearly perfect relationship. Over 5 years, we saw each other through loss, career pivots, and Covid. We moved into a brand new and ridiculously well priced one bedroom apartment in Hudson Yards—and not even a year after moving in, I blew it up. I had a hot night with a stranger that made me face what I already knew deep down—I wanted out. While whole parts of me desperately wanted to stay in that nearly perfect relationship, another part whispered: go.
So, I did.
I had just released Mixed’s first collection from the living room of our shared apartment and was nowhere near able to support myself financially in the city. I packed up my things and moved back home for a few months, taking all my inventory and work supplies with me. Some friends thought that was the end of nyc for me—I knew it wasn’t. Adele’s 30 played on repeat that fall. Now in my late twenties, having quit my job and quit my relationship, I watched my bank account dwindle down to near zero. The sparkle and excitement of a pandemic passion project creating prints and masks waned into the hard reality of trying to get a bootstrapped business off the ground. It took everything in me not to jump ship.
Today, Mixed is based in a beautiful Brooklyn studio that overlooks the Manhattan skyline. When I lift my head up from my desk and the Empire State comes into view, I think about the nights I slipped out of my dorm room and took Fifth Avenue up to Midtown. I think about the times I carried rolls of fabric through the garment district and the days I felt homesick and sat on a bench by the Hudson River. I think about the day I gave my university’s graduation speech at Radio City and the times I’ve seen strangers on the street wearing Mixed. And I suppose that gets at what this last decade in nyc has felt like—a swirl of events strung together to make a life that feels almost unreal.
Over the last decade, I’ve felt my world expand and collapse and have torn it down myself a few times. I’ve loved, I've been heart broken, broken other people’s hearts, and broken my own too. I’ve taken risks, I’ve grieved, I’ve pivoted, I’ve built something out of nothing. I thought a decade in this crazy place would earn me some right to stability, but it hasn’t. I’m in a stage of upheaval right now—the business is changing, my relationship is changing, many of my friends have left, my lease is coming to an end. To keep up in the city, you have to commit to evolution.
If there's something I've learned from living here for a decade it's this:
You don’t come to New York City to become the person you’ve always dreamed. The city has other plans. You come here, and by way of chance, grit, risk, and hard work, become someone you never could have imagined.
Here’s to another decade—let’s fucking go.
- Nasrin