My 10th move in 10 years

And hopefully my last for a long, long time

10 years ago I was living in Paris, not getting paid to intern for a small international film festival, subjected to constant low-level sexual harassment by the festival’s director but otherwise having the time of my life. I’d decided to burn through some savings while gaining “film industry experience” before my college loan repayments kicked in. I rented a chambre de bonne in Montmartre and went on movie dates to gorgeous old theaters with lots of different girls before falling in fast, lesbian-y love with a fellow intern. I was the happiest I’d ever been. 

But real life loomed. I landed my first job in media, though I use “job” loosely: it was a full-time fellowship with all the hours and pressures of an entry-level staff position without even halfway decent compensation. I had to figure out how to live in New York City on a lousy $20,000 a year. My boss in Editorial Events at Atlantic Media — not my first choice of department, or my fifth — got annoyed with me when I told her I couldn’t work overtime on the weekends because I had to pick up other gigs to make rent. I paid $600 a month for the tiniest bedroom in a tiny apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which I shared with a friend of a friend and her friend of a friend. We never furnished the living room, which was really just a glorified hallway, and we kept mostly to ourselves. For a few months I slept on a full-sized air mattress that took up most of the square footage in my room; I could barely open the door. When I had hookups over we tended to wake up squished together in the middle of the half-deflated mattress. 

Then I met the person I’d go on to date for nearly five years. Like so many doomed couples before us, we were enticed by the prospect of splitting rent.