Moving On

An essay on recognizing when it's time for a change of scenery.

When I moved to New York City at the age of seventeen, I had no plans of ever leaving. I was going to hustle my way through the hard times and lean into the fun ones, working long hours, attending college, and “making it” in the concrete jungle. But, as the saying goes, plans are just something from which to deviate.

Toward the end of my second year of living in the Big Apple, I began to run out of steam. I was nineteen and working 10-12 hours a day at an unpaid (but thoroughly enjoyable) internship for NBC’s flagship local news station, NBC New York. I’d leave the internship and head to my low-paying retail job, followed by a class or two each evening at CUNY’s downtown community college. The days were long but the weeks were short.

I’d exhausted myself at the news station in lieu of working for actual money that would help pay actual rent. I didn’t want to drop out of college, but I was willing to do whatever it took and then figure out the rest later. Burning the midnight oil each day would pay off, I told myself.

Young, naïve Adam knew nothing back then.

An AI-generated image of a rainy day in New York City, allegedly.

When the make or break moment came in December 2011, I’d decided that if NBC didn’t want to hire (and pay) me, then I would leave New York and try something else. If it was meant to be, it would be.

On my way out of 30 Rock one afternoon, the assistant news director, talking on her cell phone in the middle of the lobby in what looked like an important conversation, dropped the phone by her side and grabbed my arm to stop me. “I have a job that pays $40k a year,” she said. “It’s yours if you want it. Just let me know.” She let go of my arm and walked off, resuming her phone call as I walked out onto 6^th Avenue the happiest man in America. I think I started crying, but those tears are lost to history.

I went home, applied to transfer to a college in the city, and then celebrated at home, alone. Knowing me, I probably had a beer, ordered a pizza, and watched Law & Order: SVU. Comfort delights for the soul.

The next day when I walked into work, having paid the $40 application fee to apply for school, more broke than ever, she walked by the news desk and said, “Adam, I didn’t realize you hadn’t graduated from college yet. We can’t hire you without a degree.”

But…I…

Mouth agape, lost for words, I didn’t know what to say. Thoughts raced through my mind instead.

“You’re more than welcome to stay on as an intern here for as long as you want. We’d love to have you,” she said. “We just can’t pay you.” Yes, I’m sure every company would love to not pay their hardest workers. But alas, rent must be paid and we must eat.

I tried to square what she had said the day prior with what I was hearing now. At the time, I had a friend who was my age, working for the financial news arm of the company. He wasn’t even in college, but they hired him anyway. He was good at his job. The lack of a degree didn’t matter.

I left work early that day, trying to figure out what everything meant. Could I afford to still live in this city? Would NBC ever pay me? Was it time to leave? And if I did leave, had I actually “made it”?

Those questions played on a loop in my head for a couple of days while I figured out whether this was a hard time I could survive. I had quit my retail job, run out of savings, and devoted every ounce of my energy to a company that held no allegiance to my hard work and dedication. Policy was policy. The joke was on me.

So I did what every self-respecting, unpaid intern with no street credibility would do: I emailed the head of human resources for the parent company and asked for a meeting. This predicament, I firmly believed, could be solved through discussion by sensible adults. So naïve, young Adam. So naïve.

HR, as they always do, took the side of company policy. They shut me down. I didn’t have a degree yet, and I wasn’t getting a job. Ignore our star anchors on-air right now without college degrees. They might’ve made us into the company we are today, but they don’t count. You need a degree. It was a fun conversation. And not sarcastically, I’m still grateful she gave me the meeting. Turns out, my street cred was the only reason she did allow the meeting at all.

I decided that day that I was moving back home. New York had won, and I was drained. I needed sleep and real food. Those buttered bagels from the Jewish deli near my Brooklyn apartment weren’t much fuel for a full work day.

“New York will be here whenever you want to come back. It’s not going anywhere,” my boss and current friend said to me at the time. I’ve never forgotten that advice.

Many, many years later, I’m preparing for a move back to New York City. The excitement is building, and though I’ve visited every year, sometimes a few times a year, since I left, moving back to the city that never sleeps feels different this time. But it took a lot to get to this point.

Over the last year or two I’ve been thinking about timing. When is the “right” time to do anything? Is there even such a thing as “the right time”? And if there is, how do you know? To stop everything you’ve grown accustomed to doing each day and try something new? To say: how about something different?

Since leaving NYC, I’ve changed apartments or jobs every one-to-two years. I’ve lived in Alabama, San Diego, San Francisco, South Bend, Indiana, Newport, Rhode Island, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego again, and now in Honolulu, Hawaii. I like moving (on). I know how to do it. Though, I’d compromise by saying that I do it too much. But when do you know it’s time?

Among my jobs, I’ve held unpaying jobs, well-paying jobs, and jobs that look incredible on paper but ultimately mean nothing to me. That job, the one that meant nothing to me, ultimately set me on the course that I’m cruising down now. The course that’s leading me to chase a long-held dream I’ve had to write and teach.

It’s ironic that I left the well-paying job to take an unpaid role as a volunteer on a presidential campaign. I did open this essay with a diatribe on unpaid work. But here we are, dear reader. Irony at its finest.

You’ll also be just as surprised as me at the time to learn that only a couple months after leaving New York, NBC announced they’d start paying all of their interns going forward. Oh, the heartache.

The truth is, there is rarely a “right time.” There certainly is a “wrong time,” but this is not the wrong time. The good days make it difficult to decide, the tough days make it obvious.

I would encourage you to weigh what’s in front of you with what’s missing from your life. Back when I decided to join the navy, I told myself that I wanted to do something that would force me to carry on through the bad days and the long weeks when I decided I’d had enough. So I did. I pushed through the hard times, again, which is where I am now, deciding that it’s time to move on.

The trick is, that unless you consciously make the decision to move on – unless you decide that you want more out of life, that there actually is more to life – then it will never be the right time. You’ll find yourself stuck on the proverbial sidelines waiting on someone else to decide for you.

Until the next move.