New York revisited

- May 17, 2025

I’m fresh back from a short trip to New York City: my first time since 2019. NYC has been a beacon for me since I was 14 years old. On the spur of the moment, while at lunch with my extended family, I invited myself on a month-long summer trip my half-brother Michel (older than me by 24 years) had planned with his young family. Despite being just a kid, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was meant for a bigger life than the one I knew in the minuscule Swiss village I grew up in. Crossing the Atlantic felt like just the ticket for me.

That August, during the first flight that took us from Geneva to Zürich, my eldest niece Emmanuelle, not yet five years old, delightfully drank the free orange juice the air hostess kept bringing her. By the time we were up in the air, making our way to JFK on the second flight, she vomited said orange juice on my brand new shoes — pointy 7cm wedges, probably the finest shoes I would own for years. Despite the disastrous travel experiences (the shoes were saved, but I caught an inconvenient conjunctivitis, gift from a random passenger on the flight), New York was a revelation, just like I had anticipated it would be.

Every city has a smell. My first contact with the reality of this iconic urban jungle was its signature scent: a mixture of the hot dogs, grilled onions, mustard and sauerkraut distributed on those famed street carts, to the smokey steam from the subway grates, to the fumes of traffic and garbage bags piled high on the side of its streets. NYC grabbed me by the nose from my first outing. Surprisingly, while the city has changed, its odour hasn’t.

Michel had sublet a friend’s apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Said friend used to take his family away for a month every summer, running from the noisy streets to noisy beaches somewhere north.

The suffocating heat wafted through every time we opened the front door to leave our air-conditioned paradise on the 17th floor. Thankfully, we had access to an outdoor swimming pool on the 2nd floor of the complex. Now that was heaven, particularly as my younger self attracted the glances of a terribly good-looking pool boy, most likely Latin American, a couple of years my senior. Sadly, I spoke no English at the time (my German didn’t help), so communication was tough, made even more so because I looked after Emmanuelle and Muriel, Michel’s youngest, still a toddler, at times waddling away, or wailing, and causing general chaos in the kids’ pool. At night, imagine me staring out the window, listening to dreamy, saxophone-enhanced melodies crooned by George Michael, looking over the magical city skyline. I will live here one day, I promised myself, to the tune of ‘Careless Whispers.’

And I did.

My dream came true. NYC opened its arms to me in 2013, and I became a resident of Perry Street, in the West Village, for nearly three years. For most of my life, I’d covered over my 14-year-old self’s prediction. That it would work out this way is almost a surprise, although let’s be clear, I asked to be sent to NYC, taking matters into my own hands. The opportunity didn’t ‘just’ fall from the sky, but it felt like fate nonetheless, with fate and I becoming co-conspirators.

I was smug throughout the time I called New York my home. It helped that I was assigned a 917 phone number, instead of the lesser 646 (you may not know what this means, but if you know, you know!). I’m a New Yorker, I’d sing to myself. Tralalala. My experience of the city was certainly made more enjoyable because I arrived at the height of my career. Working for a famous luxury shoe company, all the doors flew open for me. New York, as a city, unlike Geneva let’s say, works hard for its residents. People make things happen for themselves and each other. Whatever you need, the city will provide — if you have cash, the city will provide even faster. New York is inherently capitalist, powered by the energy of THE American dream: here, anything is possible.

New York gave me a gift that I’d experienced in London previously. I could be that much more myself. Let your freak flag fly, so to speak. New Yorkers, whoever they are and wherever they come from, walk the streets with a flamboyance that says: go on, look at me! You wish you were me, you wish you could wear this like I do. I am fabulous!

This cult of unapologetic self-expression through personal taste bursts my heart open with joy every time I witness it. “Where has this been all my life?” I thought when I first encountered it. People of all colours, shapes and sizes wear whatever they want, all year round, at whatever time of the day and night, and boy, was it one of the first things that made me feel at home. Coming from a very straight-laced background, twin set and pearls etc, I’d envied this freedom for as long as I could travel back in time.

Last year, in Geneva, two guys in their twenties stopped me on a rainy Sunday to comment on my raincoat (camo with a flashy hot pink trim*). An old man stopped to make fun of a pair of fluffy flat mules, in the same park (he asked if they were made of my dog’s hair???). The other night, I was body shamed by a male friend, who found it hilarious to compare me to a former ballerina 15 years younger than me. In Switzerland, I can be myself, but only if I don’t stand out too much, or I will be taken down a peg or two, pointedly reminded to mind my place, one made that much smaller as a woman at midlife. Thank god I love myself enough to let these roll off my back. Sadly, I’ve seen my sartorial choices moving to colour blocking, darker shades, plain, acceptable. Some would say chic. Sort of. I’m flying lower here, inadvertently, aiming to cruise under the radar. Why can’t we celebrate each other in all our glory and differences?

New York delivers many boons. It served me with wonderful, enduring friendships that I treasure to this day. As a former colleague reminded me that the city dispenses a delicious kind of magic: with such a concentration of humans on such a small island, and dreamers coming from the world over bumping into each other in bars, yoga studios or the subway, serendipity is a function, as much as a byproduct of the city.

It holds true. Serendipity indeed fluttered its wings around me from the moment I started to prepare my trip. And how joyous that felt.

Now for the sad part. I almost did not go.

For two months, I toed and froed. The US isn’t the dreamy destination it used to be. Not just for me.

For months now, I’ve chosen to be a news recluse, only opting in to finding out about world events as and when I feel mentally strong enough to take the onslaught of worry that crashes over me, as I assume it does you. The moral, ethical and political stance of the current government is in direct opposition to my values. And as a coach, a facilitator and a mindfulness teacher, I not only know what I stand for, but I try to live in alignment with my values. It felt almost wrong to want to visit my former home, to do business there, in the greatest city in the world: nearly unethical to go look for publishing opportunities for my book project.

But. “There are good people there,” I reminded myself, just as synchronicities landed on my lap. I chose to see the good, despite the weariness. And off I went. Given the current conditions flying into Newark, I chose my timing just right.

I landed just as the tariffs debacle was kicking off and I had started to listen to the excellent book ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams (a must-read, I insist!). For a good dozen years, Facebook has given me the ick. The platform never appealed to me, even when it was a social network, rather than the unethical media empire it has become. The more the story unfolded, told in my ears by the author and ex-Facebook employee herself, the more nauseous I felt. I didn’t try to make a connection between the administration I despise and the monster-sized company that rules so much of our connections. It’s not until I got home, and my finely honed algorithms served me a TED talk by Cambridge Analytica story journalist Carol Cadwalladr, that I put two and two together.

I’ve had to grow up over the past two months, kind of like a kid who discovers her parents are “people” - something that happens when a crisis hits. There is a new world order. My fourteen-year-old self is in shock. It’s painful to watch the tearing down of what I held, and many of us held collectively, as the greatest democracy on earth. For me, America was the good sheriff of the world. Today, its government is a wayward villain, a dumb evil one, which makes it that much more difficult to bear.

Much of what makes NYC the city of dreams, which I have held in my heart since I was a kid, is the gorgeous diversity, the flamboyance, the possibilities and the acceptance of all who walk its streets to have the inherent right to be there and pursue their dreams. NYC is a beacon, and today, it still stands, but what it represents is in danger.

Some of my courageous friends don’t dare join protests. Though legally residents of the city, they are afraid of getting thrown out of the country, their lives upended. Expression against injustice comes at a cost they are not ready to pay. Friends asked me to text them upon landing and clearing passport control. They said they were deleting their social media apps if they were to travel to the USA; suggested I do the same, as if I, too, could get picked up and deported to a maximum security prison somewhere, because, let’s be clear, I’m a lifelong leftist, and I am pretty vocal. I self-identify as a potential troublemaker. Not an activist, not yet, but I’ll show up for democracy.

Grief comes in stages. Today, my heart is heavy. Other days, I’m in denial, like most of us are, pretending we can continue to live, do business, as if everything is okay. This big great democracy, crumbling into the hands of an autocrat, can you feel its shockwaves? If you do, I wonder, how much do you care?

We know better now, since the pandemic, we know that we are all interconnected.

The day I returned from that first trip to the US, back in 1988, jet lag crushed me. I couldn’t tell you what time I landed; all I remember is waking up at nearly 6 pm, staring at the late afternoon light coming from my bedroom window. There were some screams outside, some kind of panic. I got up to find the house empty, so I dressed and rushed outside. Everyone was making their way to the entrance of my village. A beautiful, ancient barn, belonging to la ferme de Merlinge, home to my brother’s best friend, was engulfed in raging flames. Everyone was fine. Yet it was such an eerie moment, I remember staring from the road, where all our people were congregated, watching the firefighters at work, our friends’ home on fire.

That burning farm transformed a familiar landscape into something unrecognisable—much like what's happening to the America I once idealised. I don’t know when I will visit NYC next. I felt a deep sense of relief when my plane touched down in Geneva. I breathed the clean air and stared at the mountains, grateful to be far away. Though I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve left a building on fire. I feel just as disoriented now as I did that day, when the world I knew was being reshaped through a painful purgatory.

What next? I'm not sure, but I do know this: understanding how we arrived here is the first step toward action. The combination of Sarah Wynn-Williams' 'Careless People' and Carol Cadwalladr's revelatory TED talk offers a critical lens on Meta's role in our democracies' dismantlement — two pieces of a puzzle that, when connected, reveal the surreal mechanisms behind the flames we're witnessing.

I invite you to explore both, then reach out. Let's have the conversations that matter, finding strength in each other's commitment to protect what we once took for granted. And if we disagree, so be it, but let’s trust that we can hold divergent views and still listen to each other.

Lastly, as I heard Melinda French Gates suggest the other day, if things feel overwhelming, look for the good in your community.

Until next time.