When you’re a student in that city, all you see around you is what you could become. It is a city of wanting—wanting to live in that neighborhood, have that view, stride through that lobby every day. Wanting to show at this gallery, eat at this restaurant, be a regular at that bar. Wanting to shop at that boutique, wear those clothes, be invited to that person’s parties. Wanting to know all the city’s secrets.

I started bicycling all over the city, and the overriding emotion I felt was a combination of wonder and hunger. When I saw a woman who seemed to have it all, I wanted to be her—the confidence, the look, the way she belonged, the casual grace and comfort she exuded just walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant. Me, I’d almost killed myself gawking at a particularly beautiful building on the Upper East Side, and a cop yelled at me when I attempted to zip through the intersection on a yellow light, which apparently wasn’t done in the Big Apple. Everywhere I went, I wondered, Who are these people? How do they pull it off? How do they make it?

I wanted to weave myself into the fiber of this city. I wanted to paint it, eat it, breathe it, own it. I wanted to be right without even wondering what right was. I wanted to live in a building with character and flair. I wanted to walk into an art exhibition and have people murmur—“Oh, my God, Sadie Frost is here.” I would be that strangest anomaly—a warm, welcoming, super-successful New Yorker who knew everything and shared everything. The parties I would throw! The students I would mentor! The love and admiration of my peers and teachers! I would be celebrated, and I would give back.

Except I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

The thing about going to art school is that you’re surrounded by talent. I might’ve been the best artist in my graduating high school class, but as I hit the end of my sophomore year of college, I started to see that I was . . . average. Skilled. We’d all started off as talented kids. All of us had different strengths. But while I’d been great at the technical aspects of art, now was the time where my professors were using words like fragility, vision, articulation . . . and they weren’t using them on my pieces.