ok, this is bullshit–(successful) admission essay to columbia, so it’s really cliché–but the facts are in there.

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September 5, 2004: Moving day. I lug my suitcases over to the baggage check at the Amtrak station. It’s nearing 1:15 in the morning; my train, the Crescent, departs from Charlotte at 1:49AM, and soon I will be en route to New York City. In slightly under thirteen hours, my life will begin.

If, a year ago, you had told me I would be completing an application to Columbia University right now, I would have laughed. I would have been an emotional mélange of incredulity and disconcertedness. That was not the life I expected for myself; I wanted to be happy, to live young and free with no fear of the consequences. I didn’t want to go to college, to conform to the expectations of my parents and friends; I insisted on moving to New York, the city that chews you up and spits you out, and succeeding on my own terms.

Somewhere during my junior year of high school, between AP English and tap dance lessons for musical theatre productions, I started to get a nagging feeling in my stomach that something was not going right. I had no feelings; I was numb, and soon this numbness gave way to utter discontent. I started to spend every free moment–luckily, they were few–pondering my life and the fact that I was so unhappy.

The problem was, I could pick a day and write down a list of activities, and that list would be indistinguishable from any other day’s list. I felt like a robot, going to school, after-school activities, work, home, the dinner table, on the Internet, to bed. In short, I was going through the motions.

I got through the year—my grades didn’t suffer too much, amazingly—and that summer, I went on a week-long trip to Manhattan with my friend, Nick. We stayed with Nick’s brother, Zack, in his cramped Astoria apartment for the duration of the vacation. Little did I know it was New York in July, characteristically unbearable in heat and humidity. Zack’s apartment had no air conditioning. The process of drying off after taking a shower left me drenched with sweat. The trip had all the makings of a failure.

A failure, though, was not on the short list of words I would have used to describe that week. Actually, it was not on the list at all. The list was too full of words like spectacular, vibrant, and alive to even start to think of it as a failure. I felt like I was home for the first time in my life as I walked around the East Village at two in the morning, surrounded by a million diverse faces.

The train ride home was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was preoccupied with so many thoughts. I dreaded going back home, juxtaposing my week with my life thus far. I was excited. In my time in New York, I spent some time with an acquaintance/friend from North Carolina who attends the Juilliard School. He offered for me to move in with him if I came to New York. I was amazed at the fact that life existed, truly existed, outside of the only thing I had ever known. Before New York, I had gone on one trip in the entirety of my life, and I spent most of my time in San Diego at my aunt’s house.

As my senior year of high school went on, my mind remained on New York. I continued my college-bound path in academia, took AP Statistics and AP Psychology, and earned a 1370 on my SATs. I seemed set for a life in higher education.

The more I dwelled on New York, though, the more I wanted to be there. I had a job at Starbucks, one of the easiest companies with which to transfer across the country, and I had saved my wages for a year. I asked myself, “Why not just move and work towards a management position in the city?” Logistically speaking, it seemed like a sound proposal. I would not have any college loans to pay off. All I had to do was find a store and work harder than everyone else. Even if I were not there my whole life, I could easily find another retail job with my experience.

When I told people about my master plan to move to New York City, I got one of two reactions: the first was doubt. People laughed and thought I was kidding about moving across the country by myself. They were sure I couldn’t do it.

The second reaction was concern. Why would I throw away my convenient life and all of my grades and scholastic achievement to go make coffee in a strange and far-off city? Those people said I was messing up my life. They were sure I couldn’t do it.

“I couldn’t do it.” That was the common theme in every reaction that I got. Unsurprisingly, my adolescent sense of rebellion did not take that negative reinforcement kindly. Doubters be damned, I was going to do it and succeed. I formulated a plan; I created an itinerary. I was going to visit New York again in February with my friend, a veteran New York City visitor with around twenty trips under his belt. I was going to see as many sights as possible and confer with my Julliard friend to figure out what he and I were going to do.

January 4, 2006: I walked out of Starbucks in the early afternoon, having quit moments before. My manager was very unhappy as I had a board review for a promotion to assistant manager on February 1. How could I quit now after all of my hard work and progress? I told him he would never understand.

From what you have read, you might presume that I set my mind on moving to New York, moved in with my Julliard friend, transferred my job at Starbucks, and we all lived happily ever after.

I wish it had been that easy. When I arrived at the Amtrak station, I called my “friend” to come pick me up as planned. He told me there was a problem; the apartment plan fell through. He said he was really sorry, and that he could not even come to pick me up as planned because he had class. As I found out through the next month, my “friend” was a complete flake. He never said what he meant, and he never meant what he said. I had just never spent enough time with him to figure that out.

Upon hanging up with the Julliard flake, I called every New Yorker I knew or half-knew from the Internet or as a friend of friends. After a seemingly endless search, I finally found someone to stay with for a few days, but he could not have anyone over until the next day. My first night in the city of my dreams, I slept on my suitcases in the train station.

The rest of the month improved only just so. The guy I was staying with said that I could stay there until I found another place. Then, three days later he told me that I needed to leave by the next day because his parents were coming to visit. Luckily, I had gotten in touch with a few more people, and I leapfrogged from one apartment to another during the next few weeks. I stayed in the company of drug fiends and sex addicts, all of whom seemed to expect something out of me. When whatever they wanted never materialized, the welcome mat vanished. I stayed in 10 apartments that first month. I was, for all intents and purposes, homeless. I was homeless and scared.

My bullheadedness did not allow me to leave New York however. I found an apartment at the eleventh hour, only after begging my future (and current) roommate to pick me with a plea worthy of a Daytime Emmy. I worked at Starbucks (luckily, I was never jobless). I went out, sneaking into clubs with those friends who would not pick me up at the station, but would gladly take me out until six o’clock in the morning.

I became enamored of club life, as any boy from a rural town would. I went out five nights a week. I befriended many promoters, DJs, dancers, drag queens, and nightlife personalities. I started go-go dancing to supplement my food service job. Luckily, I was responsible enough to balance my work and play.

As 2005 finished in a blur, I started to feel uneasy. I thought back to that night in the train station in Charlotte, the ride up to the city, and the big dreams I formulated and finessed as I stared out the window into the blackness of the night. I had such huge plans for myself; I was going to do so many things. I was going to become a master and connoisseur of New York’s nightlife; it happened. I was going to party until the sun came up; it happened often. I was going to go crazy and do things I never would do in North Carolina; it happened, on a bar in my underwear, no less. I was going to be a big hit at my job, finding success at all costs; it happened.

Contrary to the saying of Robert Burns, I achieved my best-laid plans; I was doing exactly what I had wanted. I had made a pact with myself that I would find happiness at all costs, that I would not base my life on others’ expectations. I had packed more thrills into one year than people in Huntersville would have in their whole lifetimes.

It was the reminder of that pact that led to my recent epiphany, and led me to this application. As stated before, I came to New York because I felt numb. The irony, then, is that after achieving everything I hoped to when I arrived in that train station, I only felt numb again. After spending so much time performing menial tasks during the day and having hands stuck down my briefs at night, I had lost my construct of happiness.

I have often asked myself if I am ready to take this step, if applying to college is just a fleeting fancy. The only answer I have been able to come to is that this is indeed a necessity in my life at the moment. High school classes, though burdensome at the time, left an indelible impression on my brain, one that I am unable to further ignore.

I realized that if I were living for my happiness, I needed to accept the fact that while the intended end of happiness will never change, the parameters within which it exists most likely will…and often. I am wholly reinvigorated by the process of poring over department websites, surprised by how fascinated I am with simple course descriptions. There are a million things I would like to study, and while I do not have definite direction on where I want to go, I do know that the joy lies within the process of discovery.