I Never Meant to Enter the World of New York Media, but When I Left for the South It Was on Purpose

I was happy in New York — far happier than I’d been in L.A., certainly — but still, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and then began to slightly recede, I knew I would leave. Or, at least, I hoped I would.

feature image by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

I moved to New York in 2018 after becoming, to put it mildly, unhappy in my adopted city of Los Angeles (few friends, no partner, no real job since my writing gig at LAist had gone belly-up when the site’s millionaire owner unceremoniously folded the outlet). I told myself I’d pack it in without really packing it in; give up my sublet, come back to the city I’d spent most of my life in, live with my mom uptown for as long as she’d allow it, take a Catapult writing class, spend nights and weekends with my college friends, live off the money I was making from shadily leasing my ten-year-old Subaru to a friend in Silver Lake for $100 a week.

Then I crashed said Subaru just before my flight back to New York, emerging from the accident with nary a scar but no car in a city that more or less demands one, and my temporary move to New York became a real one. A friend generously hooked me up with a well-paid temp gig he was leaving at a moderately evil tech company that desperately needed writers, and just like that, I was employed, suddenly earning enough to move out of my childhood bedroom and into a four–person apartment in Prospect Heights.

Two months later, a Twitter mutual I’d long admired reached out to say that the Vice vertical she worked for — a biannual magazine and daily website called GARAGE that focused on fashion and art — was seeking an assistant editor. I got hired, quit the tech company, and a year after I started at GARAGE, an editor from Vogue reached out to say she’d been reading my stuff and wanted me to come in for an interview. I Googled “what not to do anna wintour interview” and wore black — just as the blogs had cautioned me not to do, but the only piece of clothing I owned that had cost more than $100 was an ebony jumpsuit, and besides, I was still trying to look thin for special occasions back then. I went in, talked about Netflix and Jacqueline Novak’s new one-woman show, and got the job.

I was happy in New York — far happier than I’d been in L.A., certainly, due to a mixture of professional and personal satisfaction I never could have imagined when I was still babysitting and threading together smart-TV copy for a living and perfunctorily dating men — but still, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and then began to slightly recede, I knew I would leave. Or, at least, I hoped I would. Austin, Texas had been on my mind ever since I’d first visited for a beloved cousin’s wedding in 2019; I’d harbored dreams of moving there, buying a used car, renting an apartment all to myself, swimming in Barton Springs, getting puffy tacos, hanging out with my cousin’s new baby, and—most importantly—talking to people who weren’t solely employed in digital media. I also wanted to live in a city I’d chosen, not one I’d arrived in by default, even if the adjustment was tough.

I was scared to leave New York, for all the typical reasons (what if I have no friends? What if I can’t drive a car anymore, not that I ever really could before? What if I fail?), but I knew if I didn’t do it soon — while I was single, childless, and more or less untethered — I wouldn’t do it at all. I wanted sources for my Vogue stories who didn’t live in SoHo, and I wanted those stories to be distinguishable from the copy that every other New York writer my age turned in; I didn’t think Texas would magically make me a more interesting writer, but I did have a hunch that leaving the city I’d been raised in might make me a slightly more well-rounded person.

When my Vogue job went remote, I hemmed and hawed for a while, then began to put the process of moving in motion. A year after I first Zillowed rentals in Austin, I was on the road in a dusty Honda Fit, driving from New York to Texas with stops all over the American South. I’ve lived in Austin for six months now, supplementing my remote job at Vogue with weekend shifts at a local restaurant, and while my outlook tends to be anything but rosy at the best of times (I made a whole sheet of financial projections before leaving about what I would do if I lost my job, which is a sadly real possibility for any digital media employee, but especially one who’s decided to up and leave the newsroom), I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever made a better investment in my own writing than leaving New York.

This isn’t to say that you can’t have an amazing and deeply rewarding writing career in New York — there’s a reason the city has been drawing journalists, authors, poets and the like for generations. But being lucky enough to have a national platform made me consider what it was I actually wanted to do with it, and I found myself no longer wanting to center my coverage through the occasionally narrow prism of my Brooklyn life.

It should be said, loudly and decisively, that Austin was in no way waiting for me, or for Vogue, to discover it. The journalism scene here is thriving, with local writers across Austin (and, indeed, the great state of Texas) amply gifted at covering the “blue oasis”’s shift toward hyper-popularity in the COVID-era real estate boom, and most of them are more steeped in local history and culture than I could ever hope to be. Still, I think of it as an extreme privilege to get to cover, say, the growth of a local natural-wine club that only delivers within Travis County, or an abortion rally at the Capitol in the wake of S.B. 8’s passing, or interview a trans teen in Temple, Texas about how she and her family is dealing with the terrifying new legislation that all but makes her out, safe existence illegal. I’m of the opinion that there’s no better way to learn about a city than by writing about the things that make it tick, large and small, and I’m thrilled to be in the position of agitating for stories that I never would have connected with if I’d stayed in Brooklyn.

Do I miss New York? Constantly; not just the obvious things, like my friends, my family, a larger and more diverse queer scene, and the ubiquity of hangover bagels, but I miss writing New York stories, too. I was lucky enough to be in town when the New York City taxi workers’ strike came to a successful end in early November, and I covered it for Vogue, but I still worry about missing things on the ground in NYC (not to mention the fact that my future as a remote employee at Conde Nast is still largely unclear as the company’s unionized shops continue to bargain over RTO, but I digress.) Still, being in Texas—even a hip, liberal enclave like Austin, which hardly needs “putting on the map”—has reminded me of the power I hold as a writer who’s left the New York media bubble, even slightly. I’m a mere hour from San Antonio, just over two hours from Dallas, and a six-hour marathon drive from the border; I’ve put myself in a position to tell stories that never would have been available to me in New York.

My ability to move to a new city when I’m not 100% secure in my continued remote employment might sound like bravery, but — like so many things in media — it’s really privilege, as I was able to save enough over my time in New York to not be in a completely dire emergency if my job does run dry. That’s why I can’t wholeheartedly recommend that others up and impulsively make the move — after all, I don’t even know how long working in media outside of New York will be tenable for me — but I can say that if you have the option of putting yourself in a new place at least once in your career (without unduly taxing your finances or torching your immediate relationships), you should probably do it. As someone said to me while I drunkenly cried in the bathroom at my goodbye party, “New York will always be there.”

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