How to Deal With Rejection in the City

For me, the design finally did it.

I lived in New York for almost eight years, all the while feeling that he didn’t particularly want me to be there. People enjoy anthropomorphizing complex cities, perhaps because it allows us to turn legitimate adversity into justifiable personality quirks.

But more than a charming, lively person, I thought of New York as a body into which I was transplanted, like, I don’t know, a spleen. Organs are rejected when the body identifies an object as foreign and thus attempts to eliminate it. For years I dug in, holding on to my little spleen fingers as he struggled to throw me out, lashing out at me with unbearable expenses, long snow walks to the laundry and closing, one by one, all my favorite bars. I could have held on, even though my bank account is dwindling and discouraged if it hadn’t come down to the luxury condominium being built next door.

You know how it happens: you work at night, and construction starts at 7 in the morning at the button. First, the excavation, which is shaking your own 100-year-old building so hard that it will crack the bricks out. Then there is the jackhammer, which I reckon lasts 36 hours a day for 120 years. You are aging much faster than expected, as you only sleep a few hours a day and hear the hammer banging in your head even on those rare moments when they are not. Once, leaving the shower naked, you see the head of a man in a helmet peeping out from under the scaffolding outside your third floor window. The process drags on and on, and one day, when you think it’s almost over at last, you go home with groceries when you see a notice posted in a vacant lot on the other side of your house: there is another apartment on its lot. By the way, construction should begin inevitably. You drop your bags in disbelief. No, not again. No.

Maybe I could move to another apartment. Maybe I could invest in a hearing removal operation. Maybe I could dig a little harder. But I couldn’t. This was the last straw. My spleen fingers were tired, and I knew it was time to let myself be pushed out — two hours later on I-95 to Philadelphia.

In a way, it’s nice. If New York is an organism highly susceptible to foreign intruders, then Philadelphia is a biohazard waste container open to anyone and everyone if they are willing to support the Orlovs. However, I was surprised to find that besides the sadness I felt for leaving my friends, I also felt something else; another type of pain, which I eventually defined as acute rejection pain. I was expelled from the club I once belonged to, and every time I thought about New York or watched it on TV, I felt a slight haze of bitterness envelop my peripheral vision. Why did I feel this way and what could I do about it?

What does it even mean to be cast out of the city?

The abandonment of the city is a phenomenon that is probably familiar to anyone who has lived – or, more accurately, filmed – in a place that has undergone dramatic socio-economic shifts. For example, rents in San Francisco have grown 49 percent over the past eight years, but it doesn’t even make the list of the fastest growing cities in the country. Of course, there are many different versions of the city’s failure – not being able to get a visa to stay in Berlin is very different from financially squeezing out of San Francisco, which is also very different from the fact that Minneapolis never felt truly accepted. But often a combination of factors makes the rejecter give up and decide on GTFO.

Kristen Gill, for example, decided to move out of New York and its rising rents to Seattle, which was still relatively affordable at the time, in the late 90s. “I am a great nature and a girl in nature, so it was very important for me to have mountains, water and a vibrant city,” she said. “Seattle is like the top three places to live.”

But as the years went by, more and more tech companies started joining the company. The huge power, of course, was Amazon, which opened its recently expanded headquarters in the urban South Lake Union area in 2007, irrevocably transforming it.

For a while, an influx of tech companies worked for Gill, who was a contract writer for startups, to fund another, less lucrative hobby, travel writing.

But when she decided to try to give up technical pursuits in order to travel and write full-time, she discovered that Seattle was no longer a place where she could afford to live. Because she traveled so often, she realized that there were fewer and fewer apartments as rents rose in the city. However, the idea of ​​quitting seemed boring. “The hardest part when I was trying to think about moving was that ‘ugh, but I have it all,” she said. But that all changed one day when she was returning from a trip to Nepal.

“I am going to the airport for this awful long journey, which will take about 24 hours, and my landlord wrote to me that ‘Your place is completely flooded and you need to take all your belongings out.’ “” – she recalled. Attached to the text was a video that showed the flow of water pouring on her belongings. She will still have to move. Why try to stay all the time? At that moment, Gill knew it was time to leave.

While financial difficulties are undoubtedly the largest structural factor in city rejection in the United States, expats to other countries face a host of other problems.

Sam Harrison moved to Buenos Aires after she graduated from college and she was really happy there for a while. She loved Argentina, but in the four years that she lived there, the economy plummeted. The value of the peso fell and inflation rose sharply; In 2018, the country accepted a $ 56 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in an attempt to lift it out of the recession.

Harrison originally assumed that once she was established, things would become easier; that getting a job, an apartment, and an Argentine bank account will ultimately mean you will feel right at home.

“I thought these things would make me calmer, but in the end, oddly enough, it made the task more difficult,” she said. The devaluation of the national currency meant that her salary was getting smaller and smaller, and it became increasingly difficult to afford a plane ticket home to the States. But along with this, Harrison found that the Byzantine bureaucracy of the place was draining her. Harrison was lucky – unlike many, she had the opportunity to leave. She intended to save money, but realizing that her salary would only decrease, she decided to leave.

Harrison had already made the practical decision to go, but knew that she had reached her emotional limit in Buenos Aires after an incident when she tried to get money from an ATM on Sunday night. For some reason, the car broke down and ate her card, forcing her to return to the department on Monday morning to pick it up.

“Ideally, it should be a simple process where someone just opens it up and hands it to you,” she said. Instead, she had to join a queue of more than 30 people, and there was only one staff member to help her. More than an hour passed before it was Sam’s turn; by the time she finally got to the entrance more than an hour later, she already had it.

“I got out of there and thought, ‘I need to leave.’ I don’t want to be the person who gets angry at the bank, ”she recalled.

Okay, but is this really a “rejection”?

The thought of being pushed out of the city from the inside is a lot like giving up to me. But Dr. Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, told me that I might mischaracterize my feelings. He explained that there is real rejection, which boils down to a sense of inadequacy, and that lack of value can mean exclusion on the part of the individual, the company and, yes, the place.

But he also explained that there is a difference between lack of value and inappropriate form. “It’s not that someone or something devalues ​​or rejects you, it just doesn’t match your personality, your values, your upbringing,” he said. “Maybe it was your financial situation. So it’s nobody’s fault. “

Some (I) argue that if an antagonist is needed to reject, capitalism plays that role perfectly. Of course, there is a big difference between the feeling of an existentially rejected city and the much more dire crisis of gentrification-based displacement, which in the United States has a huge impact on low-income and people of color . And as climate change continues to rapidly evolve from distant fears into everyday reality, these marginalized groups will be squeezed even further as living space becomes more valuable.

But beyond physical substitution and even feelings of rejection based on feelings, there is what Leary calls lack of belonging. “It’s not that they don’t fit as a person, but there is a lack of integration and connection,” he said.

According to Leary, a situation where you cannot get a visa will be considered a rejection, as if, say, your neighbors were deliberately killing your plants in order to force you to move. But in other cases, lack of belonging is more accurate. “It’s like I kind of fit and people kind of accept, but there’s something about it that I still don’t feel like I belong,” he said. “The concept you are describing is very real.”

The latter scenario took place in the case of Erica Jackson Curran, who moved to Boston after falling in love with the city over several visits. But when she finally took a step, the life she envisioned was not the life she ended up with.

“I dreamed of renting a nice apartment in Beacon Hill and getting a great, well-paid job and lots of friends. Instead, my budget forced me to rent a trashy apartment outside the city and endure long bus rides to work every day, which turned out to be a nightmare thanks to an evil boss. It was difficult for me to spend time there due to living costs and travel difficulties (due to traffic, toll roads, parking prices), ”she wrote in an email. “Basically, I felt like an outsider because I didn’t make six figures.”

But in addition to her financial worries, Curran also mentioned other, less tangible issues, such as endless winters and the fact that while most of the people she met were nice, they weren’t exactly “her people.” Would all this really bother her so much if her life were protected by a higher-paying job and the lifestyle that accompanied her? Maybe, maybe not. Money cannot always drown out a vague sense of worthlessness. But they can certainly help.

Evaluating your options

Leary says that depending on the severity of the situation, you have several options.

If the problem is how well you fit, a lot can be solved with some adjustments to your alignment. Let’s say, for example, you move to a place where public transport is heavily used, but you prefer to use your car. You might want to have a drink and buy a MetroCard as it’s unlikely the city will suddenly change to accommodate you. If you find that people are more withdrawn or harsh, you may admit that it’s not who you are, but who they are. “I think you can adjust to the challenges of accommodating, either by trying to figure out how to adjust or by rethinking what it means to fit in,” says Leary.

As for Jill, the famous Seattle freeze phenomenon definitely influenced her decision to leave, although it was a little more difficult for her than the idea that local Seattle people are just hard to befriend.

“It was more like the Seattle Squeeze, where everything I loved to do was getting more and more expensive (going to concerts, live music, restaurants, etc.),” she wrote in a Facebook post. The creative types she identified were leaving in droves and being replaced by people who were more likely to hide behind a tablet than to interact with others. If Gill had decided to bury herself in her own tablet, she might not have felt the jabs of Seattle’s changing demographics so sharply.

But this, again, raises the question of how much people have to bend in order to feel at home in one place or another. Could Jill stay in Seattle if she changed her lifestyle? Could I stay in New York if my ears were removed? Maybe. But Leary says your ability to deal with the intangible consequences of dissatisfaction with yourself (apart from being fired for purely economic reasons) is probably about the same as your ability to deal with any unsatisfactory situation. Some people will give it a few months; others will last for years. After all, Leary said that everyone has their own threshold of what they are willing to put up with.

“There is a critical component that everyone needs. We need to feel accepted. We need to feel that we fit into our environment and we need to feel a sense of belonging. And if you don’t have them, then some fundamental social motives are not being satisfied. “

“It’s a lot like a bad job or a bad relationship,” he notes. “You are in something that does not make you happy. It just won’t work, but you’ll do a little work on it. And then you try to decide how to move on. “

Accept rejection as a blessing

After all, no one wants to live in a place where they are not welcome. But sometimes the feeling of not wanting in one place is an opportunity to find another that really suits you.

For Jill, the flood in her apartment opened the doors to what she really wanted to do.

“Honestly, looking back, I feel like the universe was saying, ‘I can’t describe this in greater words,’” she said. Jill threw out everything that was damaged by water, put the rest into storage and moved to Baja California, where she already spent a lot of time at work. For her, Bach has everything that she loved in Seattle – the ocean, nature, good culture – minus the prohibitive costs. While she lacks some things in her past life, she doesn’t miss as much as she thought.

“Seattle kind of pushed me away just because it made life difficult,” she said. If the city had allowed it, she could have stayed. “But I felt it was not friendly. Finally, I thought, “Okay, Seattle doesn’t want to be my friend anymore. I’m out.”

Harrison, for her part, moved to Barcelona with her boyfriend, and she believes Buenos Aires has prepared her for the transition.

“Many things that people say will be difficult in Spain – like work permits, job search and finding apartments – are much easier than in Buenos Aires,” she said. “It’s difficult, but nothing compared to what we were dealing with.”

Curran gave Boston a year before she declared him retirement and returned to Virginia, where she is from. But while it didn’t work, Curran said she was glad she gave Boston a shot.

“I don’t regret moving to Boston because I think I’ve always wondered what it’s like to live there,” she said. “I’ve learned that sometimes our fantasies about living in different cities are simply unrealistic.”

For me, I’m learning to appreciate Philadelphia’s hospitality – the relatively cheap rent, the easy availability of cheese-smeared food, the constant presence of ugg boots, which are truly the most comfortable shoes in the world.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m still not looking at New York when planning my eventual comeback. Because being rejected by a city is not the same as being rejected by a person in one important aspect: he will always be there, waiting to give you another chance if you want to.