I used to go to church every Sunday when I was young, but the first time I ever really felt like God was speaking to me was in a mosh pit at the Living Gallery in Bushwick on Oct. 29, 2022. He told me to bob my head as hard as I could. Because my body was nothing more than a body and I was 16 and in New York City.
I was born at Maimonides Midwood Community Hospital in Brooklyn. I lived on the same block, 2.1 miles away from the hospital, for 18 years straight. Then I moved to California. Since then, I’ve sort of been misplacing the spaces around me.
Maybe this is what happens when you leave a location you once thought was immutable. It continues to develop, just without you. The mythology of your supposedly forever home, New York City, collapses under the weight of ordinary renovations. Time spent in the Bay Area makes your old neighborhood move on because you stopped participating in the performance.
For most of my life, I thought that being from Brooklyn was something intrinsic about me. Not just geographically, but psychologically. Morally, even. When we were 15, my best friend and I came up with a term for this phenomenon.
Brooklyn Exceptionalism: the idea that people from Brooklyn carry themselves with a particular kind of superiority complex. A perceived cultural consciousness. We believed that the Brooklynites thought they had access to some sort of deeper understanding of the world because of where they had grown up. Maybe it was not a sense of seeing it more correctly than anyone else, but definitely in a different way.
We saw it everywhere: in young skaters with cigarettes tucked behind their ears, wearing jeans 10 sizes too big for them that probably cost more than $200; in vegan Park Slope mothers who treated the food co-op like a site of political praxis while inadvertently causing their daughters to develop eating disorders; in men leaving screenings at the Angelika convinced they were going to be alone forever because they felt too much and were too empathetic. They alone understood the emotional architecture of a four-hour foreign film because they discussed it afterward over organic IPAs and hard kombucha.
Taste in Brooklyn was never just pure taste. It was evidence — a performance of ethics disguised as aesthetics. The hipster dialectic turned into the norm, and difference soon became equivalence. The whole thing was one big joke for us.
The embarrassing part, however, was that we believed in it too.
At water polo tournaments in suburban Maryland, we would whisper to each other about how spiritually vacant everything outside of New York City felt. We thought growing up taking the Q train had made us more observant. Our commutes never included our parents driving us to school; the corner seat of the subway followed by a 20-minute walk was our shotgun.
We felt that we were smarter, more emotionally literate, more politically inclined. We knew what Bushwick looked like before it turned into a buzzword online. We spent high school weekends going to hardcore basement shows that were booked by people no older than us. We confused proximity to culture with depth.
Brooklyn Exceptionalism started as satire, but eventually the comedy of it collapsed in on itself. Like all successful ideologies, it became most powerful once it stopped considering itself one. It worked because it concealed itself in irony. We could laugh at it while still believing in it, in an almost embarrassing type of way.
I think now that what we were actually describing was not some sort of civic pride. There was more to it than that. Brooklyn had ceased to function merely as a borough and had instead become a doctrine people inhabited, a borough transformed into ontology. Existing there seemed to produce a specific type of subject — someone fluent in the aesthetics of critique.
They knew how to pronounce Kościuszko. They could reference gentrification correctly. They purchased clothes specifically designed to look as though they had been bought accidentally. They understood that capitalism was evil, but also knew which coffee shops had the best lighting.
Political awareness itself became something artistically pleasing, transformed into another consumable identity marker. Reading Karl Marx on the subway turned into the new cool. At the same time, however, young men would sneak into abandoned buildings with ski masks and crowbars, doing all sorts of alternative psychedelics before returning to their parents’ multi-million-dollar brownstones.
In retrospect, my theory of Brooklyn Exceptionalism feels deeply connected to what Edward Said describes in “Traveling Theory Reconsidered.” The way ideas mutate as they move through different contexts, accumulating new meanings while losing their original conditions. Brooklyn itself became a traveling theory. The idea of it now circulates far beyond the borough.
No matter where I go, if I tell someone where I am from, I receive a definite reaction of some sort. Whether it is a half-hearted “Oh, sick!” or a “What part? My best friend goes to Pratt,” Brooklyn is no longer a place. It refers to a mode of self-construction. It is an identity category, a way of signaling that you possess the correct relationship to culture. I am known first and foremost as a New Yorker, and not as anything else.
Maybe that is why moving to California has made me remember this. Distance exposed how much of my personality had been infrastructural. In Brooklyn, I understood myself relationally through proximity. Proximity to culture, diversity, noise, irony, art and struggle. I thought being from Brooklyn inherently made me emotionally complex. Leaving forced me to confront the horrifying possibility that selfhood is often just an accumulated environment mistaken for destiny.
Because what exactly had Brooklyn given me besides a language through which to narrativize myself into importance? I am no different than the next guy from Silver Lake. They are no different from the next guy from Maryland. Perhaps that is because capitalism has transformed modern culture into a cesspool of meaninglessness. Individuality has started to feel mass-produced.
I want to be a soul free of any spaces. I want no one to be able to figure things out about me because of where I come from. That is the embarrassing secret at the center of Brooklyn Exceptionalism. Beneath all of the irony and critique is fear. Fear of insignificance. Fear that without the folklore of New York City attached to us, we would become illegible.
Brooklyn became a coping mechanism because it offered the illusion that our lives existed within history and art, something cinematic and full of life. To be from Brooklyn was to believe, however subconsciously, that your suffering mattered slightly more because it occurred adjacent to a record store, train tracks and a recognizable skyline.
Maybe this is why leaving feels so disorienting. Not because I miss home exactly, but because I no longer know how to perform myself outside of the architecture that originally authored me. Or maybe I don’t feel a need for it anymore.
California has taken me over and stripped me down to the bare bones. I don’t need to identify myself as someone from Brooklyn anymore. I can just be a body and a soul. But I will never stop loving the New York Knicks, so help me God. And when they win their first Championship this summer for the first time since 1973, I will be proud. That is Brooklyn Exceptionalism.