I got the job, y’all – in New York City! I’ll start my new health sciences librarian position in about a week.
I’ll be doing a lot of the same things I did at my previous job – consultations, teaching, presentations, resource development – but I’ll be doing more research and writing, and I’ll be on the faculty.
Why the new job? It was time. I had gone as far as I could in North Carolina – but I knew I could go further, so I took a leap. A BIG one. I am a little scared but very thrilled. New York City has been at the top of my Need to Live There list for a long time. I’m six days into my move and making the most of the honeymoon phase of this adventure before the snow and ice set into my middle-aged bones.
Working one job while interviewing for another; ending that job while preparing to start the other one; moving from the South to the mecca of Northern urban meccas; packing up; setting up house – none of it was easy, and I’m so glad I did not have to do it all alone. It has truly taken a village to get me to this point: family, friends, former and soon-to-be colleagues, and all the well-wishers who are just happy to see me doing something big.
Two other things that helped me: a long film and a thick book. While watching PBS’s New York: A Documentary Film, I learned how labor, activism, politics, and architecture shaped the city, and I saw the broad, complicated contours of the historical river I’m flowing into. I’m over halfway through Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration – a masterpiece I should have read long before now, but that I’m glad to be reading right now, because it deals with African American people leaving their homes in pursuit of their dreams. The migrants in Wilkerson’s book carried their dreams from the South up to the North during times much more dangerous than the ones I’m living in. Still, I feel a sense of connectedness with them. I know it will not be long before I start to feel the same longings that they felt: for Mama’s cooking; for lazy, slow time; for familiar laughs and hugs. This is what Change is, thrill for the new and longing for the past, all bundled up together. For now, the New is getting all my attention. I am looking forward to making memories in this new place and sharing them with you.
Stacy Torian 