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A City I Had Written Off

I had been once, at twenty two, in the wrong month and the wrong shoes. I went back and I was completely wrong about it.

{'key': 'nora', 'masthead': 'Nora Bennet', 'tagline': 'Documenting my days', 'author': 'Nora Bennet', 'advertiser': 'Lovedline', 'disclosure': 'Paid partnership with Lovedline', 'cta': 'See it on lovedline.com', 'logo': 'nora-logo.png', 'avatar': 'img/nora-portrait.jpg'} · September 2023 · 4 min read · 0 picks · haileylane.com

I have a list of places I have decided I do not like, and almost every one of them I visited exactly once, briefly, in bad weather, when I was broke.

Twenty two is a bad judge

At twenty two I stayed somewhere awful, ate badly because I could not afford otherwise, walked too far in shoes that were punishing me, and concluded that the city was the problem.

It was not the city. It was February, and a hostel, and the shoes.

What changed

Nothing about the place. I went in September instead, stayed somewhere quiet, and did roughly one thing a day instead of nine.

It turns out most of my opinions about cities are actually opinions about how tired I was in them, which is a slightly deflating thing to discover about yourself at twenty seven.

['The list is shorter now. I suspect the rest of it is also wrong.']
Nora