My life as a hybrid

When people ask me where I am from, I usually take a deep breath and repeat the phrase I have told so many people: “I am a hybrid New Yorker.” I understand that the question asks for a location and my answer is a self-identifying label, but I feel like naming a single location doesn’t explain anything. Unless the person asking the question only wants to know if I can be trusted to dispense subway directions, I assume they want to gain a better understanding of who I am. As a means of explaining what I represent as a hybrid New Yorker, I do my best to dictate—as concisely as possible—the places my family and I have lived and how they define me.

My dad is from the Bronx and has spent his entire life trying to leave New York. My mom is from Arkansas and has spent her entire life trying to live in New York. My brother and I were both born in Manhattan, but we were raised outside of the city in an Ulster County town called Napanoch. This pleased my dad, who did not want his kids raised in the city. My mom, however, kept her rent-stabilized Central Park West apartment, which has continued to be her official residence since she first bought it in the 1970s. After I finished fourth grade, my family moved to southern Maryland to be close to our family in the Washington, D.C. area. The entire time I lived in Huntingtown, Maryland, my mom would go back and forth between the apartment and our home on the Chesapeake. I would make as many trips with her as possible because, like my mom, I always felt at home in Manhattan. Despite the fact that I spent my entire middle and high school careers south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I consider myself to be a New Yorker. When time came to apply to college, the only application I sent out was to Barnard, in the hope that I could return “home” to the Upper West Side.

It never felt important while I was living in New York State, but since leaving Napanoch my entire life has been colored by my self-identification as a New Yorker from the Upper West Side. Before college, I never lived full-time in Manhattan, but I still considered myself to be a city girl. My urban identity felt unique, especially in a place whose most notable economic activity is tobacco farming. A few other kids I knew had lived in metropolitan areas, primarily Washington, D.C., but as anyone will tell you, there is no city quite like New York.

I felt like as a New Yorker, specifically an Upper West Sider, there are certain things only I could understand. People who weren’t from my neighborhood didn’t know why it was important that each time my mom and I came back from the city we brought five pounds of dark espresso from Zabar’s with us. I was flabbergasted when I found out the high school theater class dared to have lunch at Sbarro when they visited my city. It never even seemed weird to me that my mom had me keep my pediatrician and dentist in Manhattan and that I would travel up whenever I had an appointment. I was just happy for the excuse to return. I never adapted to the point of being a Marylander.

Each visit to the Upper West Side felt like I was coming home. I noticed neighborhood changes as they occurred. One time I came to the city and Columbus Circle was all torn up. But on my next visit, the Time Warner Center was there. Suddenly there would be another shoe store that sells the same shoes as everywhere else, or another Whole Foods with the same groceries as the Whole Foods a dozen blocks away. I am very defensive about the Upper West Side. I feel like it’s always belonged to me, and yet I have no ability to control the way it changes. Even now, the addition of an Apple store makes me tense because there’s one more thing that makes it the same as everywhere else.

A hybrid is just the blending together of two or more different things. The locations where one spends any length of time will always affect the person one becomes. So I feel compelled to recognize Napanoch and Huntingtown as influences on me. I have always been a New Yorker, but those years added another dimension to my character and led me to self-identify with my hybrid status.

The author is a Barnard College sophomore.