Training Wheels in the Big City

Changing my life and my transportation.

Illustration by Naomi Elliott

As many who have experienced it know, living in New York can be a stressful form of existence. As the cliché wants, you work, sleep, consume overpriced coffee, commute. That last activity—commute—was what I, as a newbie New Yorker, dreaded the most. Snaking underground, two hours every day (from Gates Ave in Brooklyn to 68th Street in Manhattan and back), at the mercy of the glaring, hot breath of strangers—I dreaded the long, claustrophobic periods when the train would stop dead in the tunnel, and practiced my breathing techniques as time seemed to stand still in between stations.

I had originally moved to New York to attend Hunter College, expecting to love the busy and the crazy of everything, having lived a smaller piece of that in my hometown of D.C. But I was wrong. Not long after I moved to the city, I found myself steering clear of the subway, and soon thereafter, perhaps by virtue of the fact that I found the subway to be a near-perfect expression …