please note: this post was also published on substack where I will mostly be sharing posts moving forward. I will be keeping this blog as a lovely artifact of my time living in Budapest. If you would like to continue following my writing/ life/ messiness you can subscribe for free on substack
At the end of 2025 I hit my ten year mark of living in New York City. I had a lot of thoughts about it and for a while I felt like I’d keep them just that- thoughts. Mostly because whatever I was going to write about New York City had probably already been written. How many heartfelt essays have I read about people moving to the city or leaving the city or learning to love the city or falling out of love with the city or conquering the city or being conquered by the city and so on and so forth until all the possible feelings have been felt and expressed.
But this ten year marker combined with having just turned 35 is making me reflect in a way that I haven’t in awhile. It feels both insanely impossible and completely inevitable that I would end up where I am. I’m still here ten years later and yet I’m not doing anything I thought I’d be doing.
In her essay about leaving New York “Goodbye to All That” Joan Didion wrote, “It’s easier to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends”. So I will write about the beginnings of living in New York because I feel like I can see that so clearly now and maybe through looking at the beginning the end will materialize.
I moved to New York City at the perfect time in my life. I was young and naive and I had enough stupid confidence to think I could do it. I had $700 in my bank account and instead of that number inspiring panic attacks it just motivated me to work harder. Things don’t work out for me now like they worked out for me when I was 24 and I don’t know if it is because I simply don’t ask for audacious opportunities anymore or people can now sense my cynicism and age and retreat.
I knew the only way to be able to move out of the small town where I was living in Tennessee and making a salary of $36,000 (the most money I had ever made and enough to survive quite well on in TN) was to find a job that would either provide me housing or pay for me to move. This meant I had to find a job that literally only I could do. I had to find a job where I was the most essential candidate. I desperately wanted to move to New York for theater but I knew I was one in a million who also wanted to act and there was no way any arts based organization would have the funds to help me move or house me. So I quickly put those dreams on the backburner and advertised myself as the most indispensable type-a program manager that ever existed. Then the most perfect job presented itself. A live-in program manager for an ESL company that hosts winter and summer camps for teenagers looking to improve their English. Housing provided because I needed to be on call 24-7. I got the job, moved to New York on Christmas day and so began my life.
I had a really simple plan that consisted of a few key components:
-Convince everyone you deserve to be here
– Find a job and then another, and then another.
(If I’m being honest my secret third goal was to make everyone I’d ever come in contact with extremely jealous of my new life via my instagram posts)
The program manager job was only a temporary 6 week position. Something I neglected to tell anyone back home because suddenly I realized that aspects of my life were nobody’s business but mine. After the job ended I got a full time nanny job, a weekend job teaching gymnastics, and a back up job temping here and there. I signed a lease on an apartment I shouldn’t have and started my tenure of living in Brooklyn.
I took a rough looking selfie on my first New Year’s Eve. It has stayed in my camera roll on my phone for years and I look at it every now and then with such affection. I had stayed up late making spreadsheets that tracked students’ airport arrivals but as I sat in my dorm I heard the fireworks going off and the dull roar from Times Square 15 blocks away and I was so tired but I was so proud of myself. As the years ticked by I lived lives and then shed them easily moving through jobs and projects and friends until I blinked and I had made a life for myself here.
I look back on the last ten years and it feels a bit like I’m looking back on a stranger’s home movies. I know I would’ve never survived without my family up here who fed me on holidays and provided me with a sense of familiarity but I also worked so so hard to carve out a life that I genuinely liked even if that meant spending a few uncomfortable years feeling extremely lonely.
So why did I really move to New York? I’ve been asked that question a lot through the years and I find myself thinking about it more and more. I’ve given a lot of different answers.
To work in theater
To dance
To write
To be closer to family
To not be where I was
And all those answers are true!
But I kind of fell out of love with performing and stopped writing and most of my family moved away. And I sort of realized that a change of scenery doesn’t really mean a change in problems. And yet I stayed. I mean where else would I go?
I did take a year away in Budapest. But it was basically like I moved to Queens for a year and all my friends still lived in Brooklyn. In the name of not being a purist I’m not really worrying about those 11 months away. Mostly because I was still paying for health insurance in New York, still fielding calls from my dementia ridden landlord who thought I was her niece, and horrifically missed New York the entire time I was there ( I also loved living in Budapest and if it was possible to asexually reproduce myself and just glob another version of myself out of a bud that grows from my side like those ancient worms that I read about once then I would have one version of myself live in New York and the other live in Budapest and traveling the world for the rest of my life).
Something that stands out when I really think about my first years here is how much I did. I had infinite amounts of energy. I had no shame. If I wanted to write something I did and then I told everyone about it. If I wanted to go to a bar I just went and didn’t care about having anyone to go with. If I wanted to take a dance class I did and stood in the front row. If I wanted to do something I wouldn’t think twice and now I do and I don’t love that about myself. My thought process now is not without reason. I’ve thrown myself into artistic projects that left me feeling emotionally empty. I’ve bared my soul through words that were rejected by multiple publications. I’ve been so broke while working so hard on projects that I never saw a dime from that it just felt like the world is really not designed for me to chase anything I’m actually interested in. My health has gone through some pretty rough patches that have made full day treks around Manhattan a bit trickier than they used to be. I also think maybe I’m chasing feelings I had when I was 25 and I’m not 25 anymore so I am simply not going to feel the same way and that’s ok. All of that to say none of those reasons justify retreating from the world that I loved when I first moved here. There are a lot of things I love about myself (thank you therapy and SSRI’s!). My ability to create is pretty high up on that list.
So I’m going to begin creating more and in an effort to get my creative stamina up I’m going to post here weekly. If you’d like to read my weekly posts you can subscribe.
Kimberly Skoda 