On leaving NYC for a small beach town & pretending to be someone you're not.
How my time as a young founder impacted something as simple as moving apartments.
Today’s letter was initially about moving from Brooklyn to a small beach town about an hour’s train ride outside of the city… but as I wrote it evolved into a reflection on being a young founder and how the mistakes I made trying to masquerade as someone else. It’s not what I thought I was writing, but it’s maybe better, at the very least more honest. It is a little long, so click here to read in browser so it doesn’t get cut off! Hope you enjoy. xx
There’s that cliché that New Yorkers don’t get a lot of nature, and while I’ve always lived walking distance to a park, I found that truism to be spot on. A ten minute walk under an overpass and wading through ankle deep pits of garbage in order to get to a park with an approximate 10 trees is not exactly nature. (If you’re a New Yorker who can afford to live on Central Park, hats off to you. You’re living everyone else’s dream.)
These days, I start my day off by taking my dog to the beach most days. We’re still working on teaching her not to eat sand or drink ocean water— she gets sooooooo excited— but it’s been a beautiful ritual nonetheless. I bring two bags in my pocket, one to collect shells and one to collect any garbage or detritus I find that I can keep out of the ocean.
When the sun was going down at 4:30, I blocked my work calendar at 4 most days so I could walk my dog again on the beach before the sun goes down. Living on the East Coast means no sunset over the ocean (I don’t think I absorbed this fully until now as a Californian!) but the sky, the light and the water are still breathtaking in a completely different way every single day, without fail.
So yes: the nature has already done something huge for me, physiologically even. And being able to walk to it in under 90 seconds— not a long walk, certainly not a drive!— is the game-changer.
Sometimes the way people talk about “the nervous system” gives me a bit of an icky feeling. If I’m honest with myself, it feels really nuts to be talking about trauma in the nervous system as someone privileged in every sense of the word, mostly just by the nature of when and where and to whom I was born.
I also feel gross talking about my nervous system needing to heal when for almost all of time until just this century, life was a lot scarier, more gruesome and violent. And it still is for a lot of people right now. In Iran— where my family is from, Gaza, Sudan, so many places.
Mixed feelings about the “nervous system” rhetoric aside, there’s an undeniable and very physical difference in the way my body functions and reacts in a quiet house overlooking the ocean compared to a loud, sometimes scary city that is covered with garbage! And this is not NY slander— I loved it until I didn’t, I don’t intend to yuck anyone’s yum. The fact that it is loud, sometimes scary and covered in garbage is simply that, a fact.
By the end of my time in Brooklyn, my body was beyond eager to get out of there. I was never not stressed and miserable amid my surroundings. Slogging onwards because we couldn’t agree on where to move for a few years after I knew NYC was no longer for me just built up more and more of anxious energy in my body— its release has been life-changing.
Living here has begun to feel a lot returning home to a parent’s house for the holidays: warm, safe, always with a comfortable place to sit and the knowledge that I’d probably eat something good later.
This was a goal for us after spending the summers out here and whiling away long August evenings at someone’s mom’s house, draped across a patio chair or standing around a kitchen counter sharing bites of leftover pizza. We’d drive home and share our desires to live somewhere like that— cozy, inviting, lived in, peaceful.
And while we are still missing a few bits of furniture, not all the art is hung, and organizing the pantry is a jigsaw puzzle I’ve yet to solve… here we are. It’s warm, cozy, inviting, serene, and not at all fussy. Or maybe I’m overreaching and it’s just that our new place’s finishes and the decor have all been very Nancy Meyers adjacent.
The even-keel pace of life in a beach town, living off of a no-car street just for walkers, bikers, runners, and dogs on their daily stroll certainly has its perks. There’s a consistency in the rhythm of things. I like that I see the same people all the time, and we smile or wave at each other, or better, stop to chat! This can exist in Brooklyn too, for people in the right headspace— I just haven’t been in it for a long time.
But most of all, I think that there’s something to the idea that life in our early-to-mid thirties is starting to feel cozier and safer because we feel cozier and safer within ourselves. I know and like myself pretty well now, and I’m not too worried about being anyone else. I’m not too worried about trying to present as something or someone I’m not.
When I moved into my last place at 27, I was ALL ABOUT presenting as someone I wasn’t! I was 6-8 months into being a founder and I wanted to be a publicly successful founder soooooo bad. This meant cosplaying as the female founders I saw doing really well on Instagram and making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, most of whom were:
Thin
White
Stereotypically attractive by modern Western standards
Inexplicably able to afford things like: $10,000 vintage Italian couches, the $800 High Sport pants, expensive art, an assistant, an interior designer.
I follow a lot of these founders on Substack still! They are great and smart women who were and are a lot more successful at this game than I ever was. They had tangible consumer products launched at the right time after the right amount of experience at sexy brands like Glossier and Away. They raised real money. And then their brands put up real numbers, earned real money. Still do. Their influence is justified.
They are also the kinds of people who have really nice furniture and don’t own TVs and would certainly never wear baggy stained sweatpants while they shovel dinner down their gullets.
In contrast, I moved into my last place straight from my Covid-stint at my parent’s house, I was deeply uncomfortable in my own body which had changed quite a bit during the pandemic, and I was on an Old Navy budget. My business had not raised millions and had not made millions. I was desperate for the legitimacy that could be lent to me by being successful at fundraising, on social media, as the kind of founder that some publication would do a home tour of…