Latest news with #culture shock
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
I moved from the suburbs to New York City. The culture shock was intense, but my daughter and social life thrived.
I grew up in the suburbs, so it was a culture shock when I moved to Brooklyn as a single mom. My daughter thrived, becoming a resilient, independent city girl, but the culture shock shook me. I lost my creative spark to write, but I made many friends. Ultimately, NYC wasn't for me, though. After my divorce, I left the quiet suburbs for a small apartment in Brooklyn, where I would spend the next six years of my life in a turmoil of emotions, both good and bad. I moved to Brooklyn to be closer to family, thinking it would make solo parenting more manageable, and it did. My young daughter began thriving, and although it wasn't easy for her to move away from her best friend, she said that seeing her cousins in school made her feel like part of a community. "My people are here," she told me excitedly one day, and I couldn't have been happier for her. She became a city kid in the best sense: observant, resilient, and social. She took the city bus to school with friends on most days, and enjoyed spotting murals, food trucks, and street performers. However, while she was flourishing, I was quietly unraveling under the culture shock of it all. Living in the big city was a culture shock I grew up in a small New York town and spent most of my life in the suburbs. I used to visit the city to feel alive and draw inspiration for my writing. I'd get off the train with a notebook in my bag and an idea forming in my head. A walk through SoHo or a window seat at a café would do the trick. Living there full-time, though, was different. The same sensory overload that once sparked my creativity ended up extinguishing it. For example, we heard the train on the tracks at all hours behind our Brooklyn apartment. It made me miss my quiet suburb and sipping coffee under the maple tree in my backyard. In Brooklyn, my desk was wedged between the radiator and the refrigerator and did not inspire me much at all. I tried libraries, but they were usually jam-packed with every table taken, so I'd sit in a corner near the restrooms and try to write while people argued loudly on cellphones nearby. I eventually found a job as an office manager and hardly wrote anymore. I also discovered that once simple pleasures, like stopping for a bagel and coffee or picking up some fresh flowers, now had to be planned around rush hour or had to wait until early Sunday morning, when there was less traffic and lots of parking. No longer having a dedicated parking spot at home was also a hassle and resulted in a lot of time spent just driving around. At night, after bedtime routines and dishes, I'd sit on the edge of my bed scrolling through Zillow. I looked at apartments in other parts of the world, imagining a yard and picturing mornings with a cup of coffee and birdsong instead of sirens. One silver lining: my new Brooklyn social life was great Despite the many downsides, my social life took off quickly. After years of hiding out in the suburbs, I found myself surrounded by endless options: restaurants, music venues, parks, and museums, all just a train ride away. I spent Saturday nights out and Sunday mornings at brunch with new friends, knowing my family was nearby to watch my daughter. The city made it easy to meet people and feel connected. And it made me realize I'd been taking things too seriously for years. In the city, I noticed that people spoke their minds and didn't take things so personally. They were authentic, which wasn't rude or tactless; they just moved with the city's fast pace, leaving no room for people-pleasing or overexplaining. I began to adopt that same direct and honest style of communicating in both my business and personal relationships, and stopped second-guessing how others might perceive me. As a result, I felt freer, less controlling, and established a new level of maturity in my relationships. Like my daughter, I truly transformed from a country bumpkin to a city girl. I left New York City after 6 years and found the perfect fit I had no concrete plans to leave New York City until one day my car got towed for a parking violation I didn't notice, and I had to walk five blocks through snow and ice to see a doctor while sick. My daughter was about to graduate from elementary school, and with junior high ahead, it felt like the right moment to make a change. With the hope of finding a quieter place to live, I began reaching out to companies for copywriting work, and received an offer from a business in Florida, a state that had never been on my radar. I found a good school and neighborhood in Palm Beach, and said goodbye to Brooklyn. Arriving at the beach for the first time in a long time, I discovered a renewed inspiration to write and publish a poetry book, something I had never done before. Brooklyn grit followed by Florida calm was the perfect fit. Read the original article on Business Insider Solve the daily Crossword
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
God Knows: ‘My brother says we're not culchies. We are. If I throw a stone, I hit a cow'
I moved to Ireland in 2001. Prior to that, my family lived in Sheffield for a year, but then we settled in Ireland because my dad got a job at Shannon Aerospace. I've been here ever since. The biggest culture shock when we moved to the UK was how protective my parents suddenly became. That's not to say that I lived in the safest neighbourhood in Zimbabwe – I knew the perils of going out when it was dark in certain places – but as a kid I was lucky to have family all over the place, and I'd be able to walk to my uncle's house an hour away without needing to hold my parents' hand. In that way, moving to Sheffield was so shocking, because suddenly my parents were so protective. I think it's because in Sheffield at the time, there was a young Nigerian boy who had been stabbed. It was all over the news, and I think it was a racial attack, which just made my parents think: let's not even leave this up to chance. That all changed when we moved to Shannon. Finally we could just roam around and be kids again. I grabbed that and ran with it. Shannon was the first planned town, and because of that, it just felt so safe from the beginning. There was a real sense of innocence that the kids in the UK didn't seem to have. That said, this was around the time of 9/11, so there was a fear in the air, which did lead to discrimination and microaggressions. In Shannon at that time, a lot of people had never seen black people in the flesh before. READ MORE A lot of people used to sing Jamaica's Got a Bobsled Team or Gangsta's Paradise to me. It's because Cool Runnings and Dangerous Minds [the films in which they feature] were on TV pretty regularly. When people would sing them to me instead of saying hello, I was kind of like: Okay, nice to meet you too. But I started to get it, because the same thing happens in reverse to missionaries in Zimbabwe. People sing Sting or The Police's song to them. I think it's supposed to be a term of endearment, and anyone could forgive that. But these are the kinds of things that stick with you. [ God Knows Jonas: 'I'm 100% Irish but I'm also 100% Zimbabwean' Opens in new window ] I also got a lot of people mentioning Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president at the time, to me, even though I was just 11. There's the other side that is rarely spoken about. I think a lot of the discrimination black people faced in Ireland around that time came from the likes of ads from Oxfam and Concern. The only image Irish people would have seen of black people, or Africa, were the clips of kids with flies in their eyes. The world wasn't globalised the way it is now, where you can see a wealthy African kid do a dance on TikTok. It's the same way we see Gaza now. That kind of thing is a learned behaviour, rather than coming instinctively, so there is hope for us all. Music is a way of life where I'm from. We love music so much that we don't have a problem if someone's playing loud music next door. Music is life, because we come from a place of deep poverty, so that distraction was a very welcome and loved thing. My uncle, Cde Chinx Chingaira, was a famous musician. He was regularly number one, and in movies. He actually played Connolly's of Leap, which is something I only found out when I played recently. In Africa it's really normal to know the big songs from all the different countries. Like, even today, I can tell you the biggest songs from Nigeria, The Ivory Coast ... I find it weird that we don't know music from Sweden or Norway unless something really cuts through. My Irishness, for me, comes from pride of place. It's not based on a maroon passport, I'll tell you that now. I love being Irish. I love living in Ireland, especially the countryside. My brother was arguing with me on this recently, saying that because we live in a town, we're not culchies. But I was like, we are absolutely culchies. If I throw a stone, I can hit a cow. That's culchie. It's a compliment to me and not to him; that's because a stigma does exist. But I think everyone should love where they're from. I realised that when everybody was telling me to move to England or America because I rap, and that doesn't really happen here. But then I was like, why don't we make it like Bob Marley and those guys made Trenchtown? Or how Wiley and Dizzy make being from east London? I'm hoping that one day people get to be like, Yo, Co Clare gave us Denise Chaila, and Limerick gave us Strangeboy and Citrus and Pellador. I want people to be proud to say, 'That's my neck of the woods'. Because I think sometimes we don't embrace our own things, and we really, really should. In conversation with Kate Demolder. This interview is part of a series about well-known people's lives and their relationship with Ireland. God Knows' album A Future of the Past is out on September 26th. He plays Sounds From A Safe Harbour in on September 12th in Cork City
