Every now and then, I have a New York day that feels different from the rest.
This weekend, I recorded a podcast in the city. We talked all things fashion and business from a recording studio in the East Village. Afterwards, I walked through Alphabet City, past an apartment I lived in during college on 5th and 2nd. I kept strolling toward Washington Square Park and found myself sitting on the fountain, replaying memories from my early twenties and thinking about how much my life—and the city—had changed since I moved here when I was 18.
I saw a girl carrying a microwave down the sidewalk and smiled.
I remember that version of New York (and myself) so clearly. Trekking across the city, finding a table on the sidewalk and carrying it home with my roommate. Doing whatever it took to make rent, get the job, meet the right people, build some semblance of a life here.
I remember that particular grind. There was a scrappiness to it, a feeling that everything was comically difficult but that I’d find a way to make it work. I love that version of me, that chapter of my life. I wear it like a badge of honor.
New York has a strange way of keeping your old lives in plain sight. The apartment is still there. Washington Square is still there. A girl is still carrying a microwave home on foot. But I’m experiencing all of it from the other side of something.
I’m no longer trying to prove that I can make a life in New York in quite the same way. My life has more ease now, more certainty, more things I once worked furiously toward. And still, I find myself romanticizing the years when everything felt harder.
I’ve always been energized by struggle, uncertainty, and the feeling that something is at stake. It’s part of why New York suited me so well, and why the earliest years of entrepreneurship felt so natural. There was always another problem to solve, another thing to prove, another way to make it work.
That gave me a very clear mission: survive.
I’m in my thirties now, increasingly aware of time passing and of the distance between different versions of my life. My business is changing too. The years of brute-forcing something into existence are slowly giving way to a different kind of work, and a different business. Some things have gotten easier and other things have gotten more complex. But there is more stability and support now.
Learning how to live inside that is its own kind of growth. It requires a different skill set than survival. A different kind of ambition. Less proving that I can carry the microwave myself, and more deciding what I actually want now that I have options.
This weekend my old life and my new one seemed to sit beside each other long enough for me to notice the distance between them.
This morning, I had a similar feeling walking through Brooklyn.
It was a slow Sunday, gorgeous out, with the slightest crispness in the air. For the first time this year, I could feel fall coming.
The season hadn’t changed overnight. It had been changing little by little the whole time.
I had just finally noticed.
xx
Nas