What my first year in New York City taught me

Arriving in America

I dared to move to the best city in the world.

September 2, 2023. I was a few nautical miles away from the East Coast of America. The sun was up, and beneath me was the bluest water I had ever seen. To my left was an old gentleman who had slept for almost the entire flight from Doha. We were about 30 minutes away from landing. On the entertainment screen in front of me, I had the map open and zoomed in, trying to figure out exactly where we were and what our landing approach would look like.

From the window, I saw a big landmass growing bigger and bigger. I could feel goosebumps running all over my body. For years, I had been roaming around Google Maps, familiarizing myself with America, especially New York City, to the point where I knew its geography so well. When a long strip of land came into view, I knew exactly what it was. Long Island! I was seeing it for real this time. I wondered how many times I had heard that name in movies and TV shows ever since I was a kid.

I knew we were finally approaching JFK!

Moving to New York

Fast forward to July 1, 2025. I was driving to New York City. This time, not just a visitor, not a tourist! I was here to make this city my home.

I had graduated from Northeastern University in Boston with a Master's degree in Business Analytics. The tales of job market horrors were now true for me. I had become one of the hundreds of thousands of applicants looking for work. I honestly didn't know what was next. My days were filled with endless LinkedIn scrolling, Twitter DMs, cold emails, and a lot of anxiety.

I had a job as a teaching assistant at Northeastern, a role I had already been doing for almost a year. It paid me enough to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. But that was not enough, of course! I wanted to put what I had learned into action.

On a random sunny day, while strolling around the Charles River, I had a thought: What if I moved to New York City? Could I survive there with the money I was making? Was it too big of a dream? I walked home and could not sleep that night. The thought of moving to NYC was ambitious, exciting, and scary.

I decided to take that risk.

A month later, I booked a big SUV, packed all my stuff into the same two suitcases I had carried from Nepal, and drove down to New York City. A friend sent me a podcast about how Walt Disney left Kansas City with $40 in his pocket and moved to Hollywood. I was inspired. And I was scared. Then I listened to another podcast about how Soichiro Honda left his village and moved to Tokyo at 15 years old. I dared to compare myself with them.

Not Disney, not Honda. This time, it was Rasil. I was doing the same! The only difference was that they knew why they were moving, and I didn't.

My first few days in the city were no less than a honeymoon. I had a front-row view of the July 4 fireworks. I was out all the time, hopping from one neighborhood to another, walking down to the West Village, and riding the Staten Island Ferry. My days were wonderful. I used to pack my lunch at home, heat it up in libraries or cafes, and munch on it wherever I could.

Days turned into weeks and then months. I went to all the places I had wanted to visit back in the day. I made the most of my Culture Pass, attended a taping of The Tonight Show, and watched my favorite movie in Bryant Park. You name it. I was living my dream.

Then came winter. The city turned into a winter wonderland. The same Bryant Park where I had soaked up the sun for hours became a magical winter village. I have always loved hosting people, so my friends from Boston and Mississippi came to stay. Those few days around Christmas and right before New Year's were some of the best I had. I knew exactly where I was: inside the screen of Home Alone and When Harry Met Sally....

The trap

But I never realized that I was falling into a trap.

Moving to New York had been the dream for so long that, once I arrived, I quietly began treating the dream as complete. I knew my way around the subway. When strangers stopped me on the street and asked for directions, I could help them. I could finally talk in avenues and streets like a New Yorker. I thought I was doing well.

But I had confused arriving with becoming.

New York made that confusion easy. I could have a wonderful, busy day and still do nothing about my future. I always had somewhere to go, but I was not going anywhere. That was the difference I had missed in the stories about Disney and Honda. They had moved with a reason. I had made moving to New York the reason itself. Once I got here, I didn't know what came next.

The hours I once spent searching for work became minutes. Applications could wait until tomorrow. Cold emails could wait until Monday. There was always another part of the city to see, and that was much easier than facing another day of job searching. It would be easy to blame New York, but I knew what I had done. I had used the city to distract myself.

On December 31, 2023, I had first arrived in New York with my sister, trying desperately to reach Times Square before midnight. We welcomed the new year standing together somewhere in Manhattan. I remember being the happiest I could be. I wrote more about it here in Before I Knew America.

Two years later, as the clock reached midnight and 2026 began, I was at home in bed, crying. A week earlier, my apartment had been full of friends. Now I was alone, thinking about every choice I had made and everything I had kept postponing.

I had moved to the city where anything was supposed to be possible, yet I had stopped believing that anything was possible for me. My sleep was a mess. I did not want to get out of bed. I watched all six seasons of Better Call Saul in less than a week. That is how 2026 began for me. I wish I could say that I woke up one morning completely transformed.

I did not.

Keeping promises

I knew I was drowning myself in the same pattern. If I kept going, I would only make it harder to get out. I had to break it. So what do people do when they have their hearts broken? You guessed it. I went to the gym. LOL.

On top of working out, I started cooking regularly and found other things to keep myself busy. None of them solved my life, but they got me out of bed. Slowly, my conscience came back. The biggest change was simple: I started doing what I said I would do. If I told myself I would do something on Tuesday, I did it on Tuesday. I stopped pushing it to Wednesday just because I could.

It made a difference. Every small promise I kept helped me trust myself again. Going to the gym, cooking a meal, leaving the apartment, and finishing something on the day I had promised to finish it. That was how I broke the pattern.

I started making friends. Genuine ones. I spent more time walking through nature and changed small habits. I finally started questioning what I actually wanted from my life and why I had come to New York in the first place. Eventually, I found an answer.

I am not going to reveal it here. I have left a small hint somewhere else on this website, and that is all I will say for now. It is enough that I finally have an answer.

That did not suddenly make discipline easy. It is still extremely hard. I stay up late, struggle to wake up early, and sometimes mess up the entire next day. Some mornings, comfort still wins. I wish I could tell you that I am disciplined now, but I am not. I am still working on it.

Where am I going?

Then July returned.

It was my birthday month and my first anniversary month in New York. On July 4, I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park for the fireworks celebrating America's 250th birthday. My first few days as a New Yorker had begun with July 4 fireworks. One year later, my first anniversary arrived beneath them too.

That month, I went to Staten Island to see the first friend I had made after moving to the city. I joined a running club and attended World Cup watch parties. On the day of the final, I stood among thousands of people on the Great Lawn in Central Park, all of us watching the same screen and reacting to the same moments.

A year earlier, I had been trying to see everything. Now I had people to meet and things I was a part of. That felt different.

I still loved the ferries, the libraries, the parks, and the neighborhoods. I still do. The mistake was thinking that living in New York would be enough on its own. I had expected the city to give me direction. It couldn't.

On September 2, 2023, during the flight that first brought me to America, I kept the map open because I wanted to know exactly where I was. My first year in New York taught me to ask a harder question:

Where am I going?

The city could never answer that for me.

But eventually, I did.