Stop Pretending Toronto is More Than It Is

A kind of person I really don’t want to be is someone who lives in a city, and spends all their time complaining about how it sucks, about how things are better in other places. I fear I may be becoming that person, and it makes me genuinely uncomfortable. I want to try and talk about this here. I live in Toronto. I’ve lived here a long time. At times I have loved it, at times not. Recently I’ve been struggling with what it means to have lived here a long time, about how it has shaped and continues to shape me, and, especially, about how I go about finding the people who are here who will feel like my people. Thanks for reading Misha’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I often feel alienated by what gets described as the “go-for-bronze” attitude of this place. I miss the level of aspiration that’s more common in cities like SF and New York and LA (and probably non-American cities I have not been to yet to visit). I want to find the people who want t

A kind of person I really don’t want to be is someone who lives in a city, and spends all their time complaining about how it sucks, about how things are better in other places. I fear I may be becoming that person, and it makes me genuinely uncomfortable. I want to try and talk about this here. I live in Toronto. I’ve lived here a long time. At times I have loved it, at times not. Recently I’ve been struggling with what it means to have lived here a long time, about how it has shaped and continues to shape me, and, especially, about how I go about finding the people who are here who will feel