Escape Can Look Like Ambition

Three arrivals in New York and the slow work of choosing hope.

Please consider subscribing to Memoir(ish), free subscribers gain access to all new posts and the full archive. If you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription is always welcome. It makes a real difference and helps me to continue this.

It’s nearly 10:30am and the snow is coming down fluffy and thick. Where I am in Manhattan, the snow started yesterday around noon but didn’t start sticking to the ground until about 5:30 in the afternoon. When I went to bed, it was a blanket; by the time I woke, it was a cocoon. This snow insists on quiet and stillness.

This time twenty-two years ago, I had just moved to New York for the first time. This time thirteen years ago, I had just moved back to New York.

My first run, I was twenty-one with a birthday approaching. The year my friends were walking across graduation stages, I had dropped out of college and was counting tips from a shift waiting tables, pretending I preferred Brooklyn to a diploma. I calculated subway fare while peers from home started careers. I lived in one of the gayest cities in the world and still insisted to everyone, including myself, that I was straight.

The second time, I turned thirty-one with an official title and a security clearance that suggested I had corrected course. I had finished what I once abandoned and built a political career that looked impressive from a distance. There were campaigns, ceremonies, and proximity to power. I returned to New York believing I had earned it this time. I had recently entered my first serious relationship, and when he moved in with me, it felt like confirmation – proof that I had finally figured something out.

Most recently, I came back in my early forties, single again. A stint in Los Angeles had brought bigger titles, more responsibility, and a startup that collapsed before I ever began. Then the pandemic arrived, and the architecture of achievement I had carefully assembled gave way. I moved home to Dallas to be near family, trading ambition for stability. Eventually, I chose once more the city that has never promised safety – only movement, risk, and the possibility of becoming someone new.

On paper, it all now looks like forward motion. But escape can look a lot like ambition. I wasn’t chasing success. I was trying to fix something inside me with something outside of me.

Memoir(ish) is a reader-supported publication. Free subscribers gain access to everything but paid subscribers also receive my undying love. Either way, you’re in.

I have now lived in New York City in my twenties, thirties, and forties, with other stops peppered in between. At the beginning of the road, we can never know what’s next or how things will change.

Some seasons were brutal, I don’t look back with rose-colored anything. But they remain part of me anyway. I am both fortunate and wounded; those truths live side by side. Gratitude for the past is not the same as approval – I can acknowledge what formed me without pretending it was gentle.

Books accumulate around me like emotional insulation. There are times a book may sit unread for years, waiting for the right time to be consumed, when I can truly receive what it holds.

During the pandemic, that time came for the multi-hyphenate Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. When I noticed it sitting unread, stacked on a pile in the hallway of my Los Angeles apartment, the first page soaked into me like water into a dry sponge. I was gasping for what it held at a moment when I didn’t know how to locate wisdom in what was happening around and within me. It is now littered with notes, underlining, page markers, and I return to it often.

There’s a passage from Tippett’s introduction to the chapter “Hope” where she writes:

“My mind inclines now, more than ever, towards hope. I’m consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It’s never proven wrong by the corruption or the catastrophe. It’s not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them.”

A succinct case for hope – and against cynicism – cannot be put more perfectly than that. The snow will fall no matter what we think of it. It all melts, eventually. But not always on our schedule.

Memoir(ish) is free, which means the best thing you can do is share it with someone who might actually read it. If you want to go further, a paid subscription keeps the lights on. Either way, thank you for being here.