Instead, I fished a Xanax from my purse and took another surreptitious photo of the dog. I added “Hour 2” in purple text and a GIF of a small, yapping dog before uploading it to my Instagram Story. Almost immediately, comments from my million-plus followers appeared:

Safe travels!

That dog looks like he has it in for you!

Hang in there, Audrey!

The tension that had ratcheted my shoulders up by my ears began to melt, and I finally relaxed into my seat. Comments from my followers were hands down my favorite part of living my life on the internet. My former roommate (and former best friend) Izzy used to say that was because I was a narcissist, but Izzy was the one who couldn’t pass a reflective surface without checking herself out, so, you know, glass houses and all that. Anyway, it wasn’t a love of myself that kept me sharing my world with my followers—it was my love of connection. With a million friends at your fingertips, how could anyone ever feel truly alone?

I started responding to comments about my clothing, nail color, and music in my headphones, but not the one query that kept reappearing: Why are you leaving New York?

Good fucking question.

It was the question that was raising my cortisol levels, the one that had me chewing benzos. I mean, I loved New York. It was the most vibrant city in the world, the most exciting and unquestionably best place to live. For almost as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed about living there. I’d even collaged my childhood bedroom walls with images of the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and dozens of other landmarks.

But now, seven years after I thought I’d found my home, I was speeding away from it on the Amtrak while my belongings simultaneously made their way south on a moving truck. I used to imagine that if I ever left New York, it would be for someplace almost as glamorous: Paris, London, Tokyo.

Washington, DC, had never made that list.

I fingered another Xanax and wondered whether I was making an enormous mistake.

You’re doing the right thing, I told myself. How could taking your dream job be anything other than the right move?

Because the truth was that I had aspired to work in a museum even longer than I had wanted to live in New York. I’d graduated from college with a degree in art history and planned to take a year to work in galleries in New York before applying to graduate school for a museum studies degree—but one year turned into two, and then I kept finding reasons not to apply. I put it off even as I watched the plum museum jobs I coveted all go to candidates with master’s degrees, and so I was stuck working part-time in a couple of privately owned art galleries and volunteering at museums like MoMA and the Whitney.