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It’s weird being back in New York. I flew in yesterday afternoon, and today was my first day of class, though it didn’t feel like it because I only had one class and it was in the afternoon. I’m easing back into the grind of a new semester, but I want to make sure I do things right since I had such a difficult time in the fall.

One of my last weekends in the city before break, I went downtown and had dinner (Chick-fil-A, holla) with a couple of friends I went to middle school with who are now classmates at NYU. When you’re a sophomore in college, seventh grade can feel like a lifetime ago, and I’m pretty sure that was the last time we had been together. And now years later, here we were, living our dreams in the capital of the world. With everyday pressure and stress, sometimes I lose sight of that. How many suburban girls can say they accomplished their lifelong dream of living in New York- and by the time they’re eighteen?

Sometimes I forget that I can, because I did! I’m twenty years old, and here I am, living in New York City!! It’s be hard to wrap my mind around that sometimes. Catching up with my girlfriends was actually really inspiring, because it’s crazy how far we’ve come. (It was kind of serendipitous too, because we’ve all turned out to be aspiring journalist and occasional bloggers.) They motivated me to do better, and I’m ready to give it my all this spring. Not everyone gets the opportunities the three of us did, and I have to be grateful for that, and take advantage of it too.

People ask me all the time if I’m planning on staying in New York after graduation. The truth is, I don’t know. I have no idea where the future will take me, and that’s okay. I do know one thing: the day the skyline stops inspiring me is the day I have to leave the city.

“Of all the great cities in the world, New York is still the one that holds the biggest glittery, giddy promise of promise – the idea that if you have something to say, do, be, create, try, or conquer, you can do it here, that the romance of the self can actually be fulfilled. The young, ambitious types who set out for New York with movie-made notions of what’s to come discover that the city is in fact better than the fantasy, because there’s so much more to the place than they were able to imagine.”           ~ Roberta Myers

~ Sarah