If You Survived NYC’s Grit, Here’s the Letter You Deserve
To those who survived New York City —
You didn’t just come to New York — you survived New York. You rolled off that Chinatown bus or stepped out of Penn Station with legs that needed stretching and tattered luggage your mom let you have, your phone nearly dead, and your whole body vibrating from a mix of nerves and adrenaline. Your eyes were wide, ready to drink in the noise of the taxis, the businessmen on calls to the office, and the women on calls with their girlfriends back home, excited about Canal street Louis Vuitton purses and Cartier bangles. The blur excited you more than anything, and the smell of sweet trash, candied almonds, and pretzels mixed with subway steam wasn’t as bad as your cousin who visited once in the 90’s told you it would be. You walked, blindly in some random direction, praying that the city would show you some sign — something that would lead you to the room, the couch, the bed, the place you would call “home” for however long you could hold on. You weren’t sure how, but you knew, somehow, you’d make it work.
Let’s be real: New York — and New Yorkers if we’re being deadass — doesn’t care if you make it or not. It isn’t here to nurture; it’s here to take, to test, to push, to squeeze, and to transform. It will treat you like the sunflower seed shells you could barely afford in the city — it will spit you onto the sidewalk to be crushed and mixed in with some stranger’s fecal matter. And you will wonder who took a shit on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. No one noticed. No one cared.
The city devoured you on those frigid December, January, and February days when the wind rushed down an avenue and sliced through you like a knife — a dull butterknife — and you were walking without a scarf because, at the time, a scarf was an accessory — a “maybe later when I get a few extra dollars,” not an essential. And somehow, despite the odds, you were the one who lasted. You fought through those first months, those first years, when every block felt like an obstacle course and every day felt like it was designed to teach you a hard lesson.
And you weren’t alone. There were others like you, people whose stomachs grumbled as loud as yours did, whose dreams burned just as bright. People who made a game out of splitting chopped cheeses, big salads, and mimosas. People who swiped you through to the train and people who jumped the turnstiles with you and ran from police with you, too. You and them used laughter to fill rooms that could barely hold the twin bed you carried uptown on a train, let alone all the weight of your plans and ambitions. Together, you and this makeshift family held onto each other as you tried to navigate life in a place that seemed determined to keep you off-balance.
To this day, you carry that journey inside you like a scar you’re proud to have, a reminder that every late-night hustle that kept you from home til sunrise, every frosty morning that found you up far too early, every moment you wondered if it was even worth it — it all mattered. You built many parts of your character with that grit, and now you look back on it not with resentment but with pride. With a smile. Because it was all part of your story.
You’ve grown from a place that threw everything at you, and you didn’t just survive — you learned to thrive. The struggles didn’t just shape you; they became part of you. You’re the ones with the stories that matter. Stories of being swindled in Washington Square because you weren’t sure how to tell if it was good MDMA or not — not just in your first year but in your third, too. Stories of walking outside the Path station on Christopher Street and being pulled into Chi Chiz before you could catch your breath, wondering if this was the same Greenwich Village Theo Huxtable raved about.
New York is a relentless teacher. The unplanned pregnancies, watching the Chrysler building through a haze of anxiety, wondering how to make it work when you could barely take care of yourself. There were dating disasters and relationships you thought would be the real thing, only to end up heartbroken on a curb at 2am outside Fat Black Pussycat, trying to pull yourself together to walk home because you lost your money, your phone is dead, and your metro card has been missing for three days. Some of you lost job after job. And the winters deep inside your bones. That grey, cold stretch of seasonal depression where everything felt harder, when the skyscrapers loomed like reminders of how small you felt. But you kept going. You trudged through each setback, each heartache, each bone-chilling morning. Because there was something about this place, even in its darkness, that kept calling you forward.
You know why people in Harlem won’t go below 72nd and why people in Brooklyn won’t go above 14th. You found love at a club somewhere in the middle once and soon found yourself arguing about who’s taking the long subway ride to whose place. You broke up because you can’t do long distance and “Brooklyn is a world away.” You know why this poem is a love story:
I love you because
Five floor walk up
1 to the 2 to the E
Three avenues
You know the pure relief of natural light because you’ve had apartments where the only view from your bedroom window was the brick wall four feet away, and you’ll never go back to that like you’ll never go back to Jersey or Times Square.
But more than that, you know the value of people — the communities you built out of pure necessity, the way strangers became friends, became family — some became lovers — simply because you were all fighting to make it here. You’re the real tour guides, the ones who know where the city’s heart truly beats, not where the glossy posters point. You know the men in the bodegas as papa, papi, boss, my guy, or something just as lovely. You’ve found the hidden gardens and quiet places — the secret shortcuts through the city’s veins.
New York didn’t make it easy. But you were tougher than it. You were vulnerable, but you never broke. And now, wherever you are, looking back you can see the beauty in it all. The grit, the grind — they were never setbacks. They were the steps that brought you to who you are now, with a history that could never have been written any other way.
How easy it would have been to leave. Some of you had a soft place to land. Back home, there was your mama’s kitchen or grandma’s extra bedroom, where you’d be reminded of simpler dreams and softness. There was a lover somewhere who would have gladly built a life with you, no questions asked, decorating the comfortable little box they wanted to live in with you, thinking they’d saved you from a fight that seemed to them like madness. You could have packed up and applied for that job back home — the safe one you could have sold yourself on, convinced others, maybe even yourself, that it was what you wanted. It would’ve been so much easier to just go back. And yet, you didn’t. You stayed. You fought harder. You doubled down on the risk, knowing full well you might be looking at years of struggle, at the coldest winters ever, at more questions you couldn’t answer. But that city had its hooks in you, and something told you that if you left, you’d be leaving behind a version of yourself you hadn’t met yet. So, you stayed, and you kept at it.
Maybe it was the summers on rooftops with a sun that took forever to fade or the autumns in parks with lovers you’d ride through winter with. You kept at it.
So, here’s to you — one of New York’s finest. The ones who carry its secrets and scars, its beauty and bruises, in your bones. You’ve lived through nights that felt endless and mornings that felt hard-won. You’ve learned the city’s language. Not through its lights but through its shadows, its cracked sidewalks, its whispered dreams at 4am while you’re trying to stay awake long enough to not miss your stop. And now, even if you’ve left, you’re never truly gone. The city is part of you, and you, part of it — bound in a way only those who’ve survived can understand. Because, in the end, you didn’t just survive New York — you became New York. And there are few things more powerful than that.
