Happy five years, Philly!
New(ish) thoughts on my new(ish) city
Five years ago this week, Matt and I made the move from New York to Philadelphia.
Maybe it’s because of the way time has warped in the years since the pandemic, or maybe I still haven’t totally adopted my identity as a Philly resident (probably a subject for the rest of this post)—in any case, whenever someone asks me how long we’ve lived here, I have to stop myself from saying that it was a recent move or that we’re still getting settled.
We’ve been living here for five years. We own a home in Philadelphia. We have a child who was born and is now being raised a Philadelphian. This place has had some real staying power for us—and we have some real staying power in it.
Still, it feels inconceivable to me that we’ve been living here for five years.
I figured that this milestone anniversary for me and my adopted city deserves a moment, so let’s get into it.
First, a quick summary of how we landed here…
Matt and I both grew up in Pennsylvania—about an hour and a half away from where we live now—but neither of us spent a lot of time here when we were kids. Since we moved here, I’ve been reminded of the deep roots my dad’s side of the family has in the Philly area—and rediscovering and reconnecting with them has been super fun—but I really didn’t know much about it myself.
I always dreamed of living in New York City, and it meant everything to me to have realized that dream for so many years in my twenties. Several years into our marriage, Matt and I started having conversations about what our next chapter might look like—and it was such a tricky, sensitive discussion that it took us a long time to figure out the direction we really wanted to go. Neither of us wanted to move to a suburb, so we set our sights instead on a different, smaller city. We narrowed the list to a few prospects, and for a variety of reasons, we landed on Philly somewhere near the end of 2019. The plan was to make the move at the end in August of 2020, leaving us just enough time to have one more amazing summer with our friends in Brooklyn/New York.
You probably know what’s coming. The world screeched to a halt, so many circumstances changed, and we moved our relocation up to April of 2020. We lucked into a great rental in our preferred neighborhood (which we chose basically at random) after having only a couple of minutes to walk through the apartment as a (rightfully) nervous property manager hovered in the hallway with her face hiding in her shirt. We loved the space and immediately felt the changes to our quality of life that we’d been hoping for, but it couldn’t have been a weirder time to make such a major move. In New York, we had thriving social lives. In the move to Philly, we said goodbye to all of that (except that we couldn’t actually say goodbye to most of our friends) and more or less stayed confined to our apartment for a long time.
All in all, it was a very weird move.
Like the rest of the world during that intensely solitary time, Matt and I turned super inward—and because we’d relocated and left so many of our other familiar things behind, we had to be extra reliant on each other. In the moment, it rarely felt good, but I look back at that period now and feel mostly grateful for the chance we had to bond when there was so much uncertainty. Plus, once we were able to venture out into our new city, we did it as a totally united front, more in sync than ever about what we were looking for in our new phase and zip code.
Currently Reading: The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
So far, this week hasn’t been especially productive reading-wise, so I’ve only managed to get through the first 40 pages or so of this one—but since posting a picture of it on Instagram, I’ve gotten messages from tons of major fans of it, which makes me super excited to keep digging in.
Since then, Philly has been good to us in many ways—and I want to celebrate that this week as I reflect on the five years we’ve spent here.
We experienced a real exhale after finding our footing in our neighborhood. I miss almost everything about life in New York, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a little extra space and an easier pace hasn’t been good for us. About three years ago, I started wrestling with some new mental health issues, and I think those would have been even harder to wrestle with had we not made the move.
One of the driving factors for our move to Philly (even pre-pandemic!) was my decision to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing at Temple University. The grad school journey wasn’t anything like I imagined it would be—I did almost all of it online and while working full-time—but it still gave me everything I hoped it would… and more. I don’t think you need to have an MFA to become a published author, but in my case, committing to that kind of structure was key to reaching that goal. Maybe I would have found another path to a book deal without Temple, but we’ll never know!
Our little neighborhood of Chestnut Hill has its quirks—and if I’m being honest, I’ve soured on parts of it in recent years—but it also has a real sense of community, and I appreciate that. Because so many of our friends lived close to us in Brooklyn, that community came naturally through our social life, but there’s a real sense of place around us in Philly, which manifests in lots of friendly faces, casual run-ins, regular random street festivals (think Stars Hollow), and a general small town vibe. When we moved from the apartment we found in 2020 to the house we bought in 2022, it was such a gift to only relocate a couple of blocks down the street.
I owe so much of who I am to the near-decade I spent in New York. It’s where I really found myself away from the expectations that defined me as a younger person living at home. My New York circle molded me, and the city itself brought parts of me into the open that are still among my favorite elements of who I am. Still, coming here and starting totally fresh has given me a chance to come into my own in different ways. One of the hardest things about this move has been rebuilding a social circle (more on that later!), and while I’ve struggled to find friends, the upside is that I’ve learned a lot about who I am in this chapter on my own. That also has its value!
Speaking of friends, New York was all about found family. That community was priceless—and I do miss it literally every day. One of the challenges of those years, though, was the amount of time I spent traveling to visit family family here in Pennsylvania. Living a bit closer to family now has helped me shape new kinds of relationships with my family members. I value this even more now that we have Will in the picture.
Philly has also brought us amazing work opportunities, the chance to play a more pivotal role in national politics over the last few wild years, and a really cool mix of indoor and outdoor activities.
But it hasn’t all been good. (Not that I would expect it to be!)
For a variety of reasons—some that feel more real, others that are maybe a tad superficial (oops!)—it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around life here.
Are these factors to blame for my resistance to fully owning my identity as a Philly girl? Do I just miss New York, or feel like I have unfinished business there?
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