There are, rest assured, many days of living in New York City that are spent wondering about people who don’t live in New York City.

People who don’t haul their heavy groceries through crowded train cars, avoiding eye contact with crazy people as the all too familiar humidity of June announces itself through the thin layer of sweat enveloping your entire body. People who don’t fork over their life savings in rent or drop two figures on a latte or a bottle of ketchup.

It’s not hard to get hung up on all of that. But the thing that self-professed New York haters always leave out, the thing that I like to think separates me from them, is the why. Why we put up with such absolute shenanigans.

Friday night art parties at the MoMA are one—of a million—decent answers.

Every Friday, the MoMA turns into a huge cocktail party of New Yorkers who wander aimlessly through the escalating floors of galleries. When I don’t have anything to do come the end of the week, it’s the first place I think to go. Jazz music, a pop-up bar, the garden—voila!

Most things, for better or for worse, are never what you imagine. But there are whole moments within those nights, moments of catching my reflection within the glass walls, where my life in New York presents an exact copy of what I dreamed it to be.

You travel a long way away from who you were when you move somewhere alone and start anew. But you always stumble into moments of remembrance. Moments that catapult you into thoughts of, Oh my god—when did this happen? When did this become real life?

Mine happened when I stumbled into a viewing room of a piece that looked all too familiar. I quickly scanned for proof and there it was, on the plaque: the live films of Ana Mendieta. The artist who, perhaps, started the whole thing for me. The one I wrote far too long of essays about and bonded with my art professor over our shared love.

Looking back, putting all employment struggle jokes aside, I’m so glad that I spent those years studying something that mattered to me. Something I would see in the MoMA years later, and be reminded of who I was and, maybe more importantly, of who I still am.

It has surprised me just how easily the “real world” can convince you to abandon yourself in the pursuit of money, status, and power. I always thought I was immune to all that, having never given a more lucrative career path a single thought. I was happily studying Plath’s journals in the library, not grinding over some brutal degree that would land me some brutal career, and that was perfect for me.

But then I moved to New York, land of the East Coast Kids. Ivy League, had-an internship-with-the-company-when-they-were-12 and it “just kind of worked out from there,” kids.

You spend enough time around highly successful people, and it starts to affect you. You start to want to be a bit highly successful too. All that money starts to look like power and you can’t help but want it. It becomes all too easy to slip from your grounded, down-to-earth, “rich with love” upbringing, not to mention your humanities degree.

You might even find that you have fallen in love with an East Coast Kid who works 80-hour weeks like it’s nothing and then start to think that maybe you should be doing that too.

I made fun of SoCal’s laid-back attitude my whole life. I felt I was too smart and too hard of a worker for San Diego, but then found that I am not quite smart enough or hard enough working for New York. To be fair, everyone feels that way here all the time—or so they say. It’s why we hate and love it, love and hate it. Success is a constantly exhausted topic in this city.

But then I go to the MoMA on a Friday night and gallery hop in Chelsea all Saturday afternoon and I am completely and totally reminded of who I was before New York. Before comparison and stress and falling into the kind of love that makes you think about a mortgage and that constant, nagging feeling that you’re never doing enough. Young adulthood, as it’s called.

New York has irrevocably changed my life for the better. But all of these things can be true.

So I go and I see Ana Mendieta’s work glowing in a gallery and remember how much the art world was allowed to mean to me when it was the only one I lived in, the only one I ever thought about.

It reminds me how I still feel so new in New York. So clearly not from here, so clearly in awe of everything. So new to my jobs and to being a “real adult”, and to being in a healthy, committed relationship. There are so many things that I am still folding into the fabric of my reality.

But art, seeing and thinking about and feeling art, has always felt just the same. I know what I am doing when I step into the MoMA or David Zwirner. I know why I work several artsy jobs instead of one big corporate one. I know that success, to me, has never been about money or fame.

I know all these things in those moments.

For more on Ana Mendieta or the MoMA’s scintillating art parties, peruse these at your leisure:

• A Night at MoMA: New York’s Exclusive Art Party
• Who Was Ana Mendieta?

And, alas, enjoy some photos as of late!