Today I celebrate living in NYC for exactly 1 year. Anniversaries in NYC are kind of a big deal because so many people come and go, staying on couches, running up bar tabs and then they disappear back to where they came from. You start to get respect the longer you stay in NYC.

Before I moved, people told me I would have this moment one day where it would just hit me. I hate New York, they would tell me I would think.

Never, I said. I never imagined it. That’s because my friends and family and strangers and whoever I told I was moving, told me that I’d get sick of the subway and the weather.

But here’s what I wished they had told me.

7 Things I Didn’t Know About Living in NYC.

People yell. All the time. Everywhere. On their cell phones. At the guy across the street. At bikers and cabbies who drive recklessly. At little girls who are just writing in their journal on the subway.

It’s loud. The sirens never stop. The screaming never stops. Just the other day, I’m sitting at my desk. It’s 10am and I hear death-curdling screams rising up to the 16th floor of my building from Fifth Avenue. There’s a summer concert outside the CBS studio. How lovely.

People get in fights. I was on the way to JFK a few weeks ago, when I’m running down the subway steps at Union Square and see 10 or 15 guys huddling around the turn-style. Great, there’s a line just to get into the subway, I thought. It was 4pm on a Thursday. Not a prime traffic hour on the subway. I get closer to the turn-style to see that the guys aren’t actually going through it, but jumping some high school kid. Blood is running out of his eyes. There’s black sh*t all over his face. Like he’d been kicked in the face. And everyone else is just swiping their metro cards through the adjacent turn-style.

It’s violent. You could be walking along one day on your lunch, enjoying the sunshine (you haven’t seen in 6 months), and thinking to yourself, I wonder what I’m going to do this weekend, it may be 70 degrees, you hope. When a school bus catches on fire to your left. Everyone starts backing away. Someone’s yelling, “It’s going to explode.” Two teenage girls come out of no-where, they’re screaming and running. The whole front of the school bus is engulfed in flames by now. You’re trying to get out of there, but everyone’s stopping to watch. You finally make it across the street to almost be stampeded by a pack of social-savvy teens with their flip cams and smart phones ready to record the whole thing. You look back and you see 100s of kids, phones up in the air, and black smoke billowing up out of Union Square.

People really get mugged. Just last night my friend and I are walking home from the bar, it’s not late, maybe 11pm. We’re in midtown. Pretty safe area. All of a sudden some guy comes running up from behind and swipes my friend’s purse. Without even skipping a beat, I go chasing after him, in stilettos, mind you, screaming, Stop that mother @#$*!! Some random guy starts chasing after alongside me. A cabbie a block back is standing with my friend saying, I gotchyur back, and he’s calling the cops on his cell. We catch up to the crook, get the purse back and both the crook and my sidekick disappear back into the night.

You never see the sun. I live on the East side. When I leave for work in the morning, there are two (yes, I’ve counted) sun patches that touch the sidewalk (meaning direct sunlight on my body). When I come home after work, the sun is on the West side. The only time I feel direct sunlight (meaning, not reflecting off a building or shining on the 16th floor of a building down the block), is on the weekends in Tribecca or when I go to Austin.

People Art. All over the place. One night I was sitting at Columbus Circle eating dinner, watching skateboarders ollie off the steps and the traffic surge up 8th Avenue. All of a sudden, to my left a gospel choir breaks out, swaying and clapping like they do. Three whole rows of African American kids are hitting the high Cs, trilling to the high heavens. And as quickly as they appeared, they were gone again. Impromptu gospel choirs happen in NY.

I wish someone had told me that the cost of having three, 24-hour drug stores a block from my apartment, a pizza place that doesn’t close up shop until 7am downstairs and a $20 wash and fold two doors down would come at the price of rarely seeing the sun, always seeing violence, and never having a quiet moment alone to just sit and think.