Emerging from the Cocoon

New York City is a place defined by its shifting identities: the store on the street corner that used to sell vintage porn is now busy marketing vintage sweaters. The Broadway theatre that once housed a Disney musical is now packing seats for a new AIDS play. The friends that you used to meet for tequila shots in the Lower East Side are now spending their evenings watching Elmo’s Playland with their one-year old on the Upper West Side. Real estate fluctuates, hot spots fade. It seems no matter where you turn, the city is inviting you to become something previously unimagined.

When I arrived in New York last week to visit my east coast ‘home,’ I was initially apprehensive about re-approaching the island after undergoing such a dramatic and at times traumatic transformation. I had lived here for five years. I was a very different person then, from my tastes and style to a deeper understanding of myself. My energy was dramatically different, my understanding of the world and relationships. Most of all, what I valued was very different. The buzz and frenetic pace of the city swept me up and carried me. Returning again after a year and a half of chemotherapy, I was unsure at first whether the city would consume me and spit me out. My schedule became booked rather quickly. Apparently cancer makes you a popular guy. Sitting with close friends, many of whom I haven’t seen since before my diagnosis, I was nervous at first. How would I impart to them the magnitude and scale of these past sixteen months? Would they embrace my changes or try to hold on to an old, fixed identity.

I discovered something surprising. Life has gone on without me. Thank God. New shows, new careers, new boyfriends. More often than not, I've ended up asking a thousand questions, just trying to catch up with the pace of my friends' lives. It’s silly to have to admit, but retreating into a sort of chemo-induced cocoon, I lost sight of the world’s inherent revolution, too preoccupied—for a season—with my own. Friends are older and a little more grounded, having transitioned into a new chapter, a new awareness. But they still retain the essence of who they were before. That never left. They are just more fully realized versions of the people I used to run around with four or five years ago. I feel less intimidated by my own transformation when I step back and put that in perspective. All we are ever doing is transforming, reinventing ourselves. To be human is to change. Grace, I believe, is to understand this paradox and to allow change to move you, knowing that your essence will still be there after it’s all over.

Maybe this city is forever reinventing itself. But this morning, I saw a man urinating in the corner of the subway station. Some things will never change, thank God.