TEN

TEN YEARS IN NEW YORK

August 28, 2016. I still remember that day, because ten years ago today, I moved to New York City without telling anybody I was coming. There was no big announcement, no going-away party, and no moment where I gathered my friends and family and told them I was leaving home to chase a dream. I had actually been planning the move quietly for a while, mostly because I didn’t want anybody to rain on my parade. I knew what I wanted, but I also knew that sometimes when you tell people your plans before you’ve made them real, you give them an opportunity to plant doubt where there wasn’t any before. So I kept it to myself and worked quietly until I knew I was ready.

About a month before I moved, I had come to New York to visit my friend Laura, who I had gone to college with. At the time, George Faison had offered me an opportunity to come to New York and work with him, and I remember emailing him and saying that I was serious about coming and asking what I needed to do. His response was simple: just come up here. So I did. Laura let me stay with her, and during that visit, something about the city clicked for me. I remember feeling like I could actually see myself here, and her boyfriend, who is now her husband, happened to be a real estate broker. He told me that if I was serious about moving, he knew people who rented rooms, and that was really all the confirmation I needed.

I went back home and started dismantling my life. I had about $4,500 saved, so I sold my car, sold my belongings, and put together whatever I could to make this move possible. Looking back, it probably sounds crazy to leave everything familiar with that little money and no real safety net, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about what could go wrong. I was thinking about what could go right. And once I had everything in place, I called him and said, “I’m ready.” He connected me with a private landlord in the Bronx, and on August 28, 2016, I arrived in New York with a few thousand dollars, a dream, and this belief that if I worked hard enough, I would eventually find my way.

What I didn’t talk about much was that my mother was sick.

Around the same time I was preparing to leave, she had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and because my mother and I had always been extremely close, moving away wasn’t a simple decision. There was a part of me that wondered if I should stay with her, especially knowing that she wasn’t well, while another part of me knew that I had spent years dreaming about leaving and building a life of my own. I loved my mother deeply, but I also knew that if I didn’t go, there was a possibility I would spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had.

So I left, and almost immediately, the reality I had imagined began changing.

Shortly after I arrived in New York, my mother’s financial situation deteriorated, and eventually she had to leave the home we had been living in and move back to our hometown where we had family. Simultaneously, George’s significant other passed away, and the opportunity [outside of the initial one] that had initially brought me to the city fell through. Suddenly, I was here without the opportunity I had planned my move around, and the home I had come from was no longer really a home I could return to. I had sold my car, sold my belongings, and made the decision to leave, so there wasn’t much left for me to do except stay and figure things out.

And figuring things out was not glamorous.

I worked whatever jobs I could find, including one in a Jewish section of Brooklyn that required almost a two-hour commute, both ways. I was trying to figure out housing, money, work, and how to establish myself in a city where I didn’t really know anyone. At one point, I was scammed out of $2,000 while trying to find an apartment, which was devastating because that wasn’t money I could afford to lose. It was money I had worked and hustled to save because I was trying to build some kind of stability for myself. When it was gone, the apartment was gone too, and I ended up in a homeless shelter.

I’ve been in a shelter in New York more than once, and even now, it’s strange to say that because those experiences existed alongside everything people would eventually come to associate with my career. There was a roommate situation that fell apart after he decided to move out, leaving the rest of us scrambling to find someone to replace him, and when we couldn’t, we lost the apartment. There were moments when I simply didn’t know where I was going to live next. But even during those periods, I wasn’t sitting around waiting for my life to change. I was working, hustling, and trying to find my way forward.

Some of that hustle included selling weed & edibles, which is actually part of the strange story of how I eventually found my way back into the dance community. Someone I was involved with at the time was already doing it, and after I started making runs for him, he suggested that I get into it myself because I needed the extra money and was already around people in the dance community. So I did, and ironically, some people initially knew me as the guy who sold weed before they knew me as a dancer.

That’s how unconventional my beginning in New York was.

I also had a friend who was much more social than I was, and because I’ve always been introverted and naturally more of a lone wolf, she became one of the people who pushed me into different rooms and introduced me to different people, programs, and teams. It took almost two years before I really felt immersed in the dance community, but eventually I started taking classes and participating in programs like Urban Dance League and Rock the Industry. Little by little, I wasn’t just trying to survive New York anymore. I was starting to build an identity here.

And once I started finding my place, things began moving quickly.

By 2018, I was working at an after-school program where I became deeply invested in the kids. I was a tough coach, probably tougher than I needed to be sometimes, but I believed in them, and I treated the program almost like a Coach Carter situation because I wanted these kids to see themselves as capable of more. Eventually, that work became award-winning, and we made it to Showtime at the Apollo, where we placed second.

That moment meant a lot to me because I knew what was happening outside of that stage. I knew that the person standing there had struggled with housing, had been scammed, had worked jobs just to survive, and had spent years trying to find his footing in a city that doesn’t owe you anything. And yet, there I was, standing on the Apollo stage, with other things beginning to happen around me too. I was working with Laurieann Gibson, I made it to the final cuts for an opportunity connected to the Bad Boy Reunion Tour, I traveled to California to model for a book that would eventually win an NAACP award, and I was continuing to build myself as a dancer, model, and creative.

From the outside, it probably looked like I was making it.

But internally, I was reaching a breaking point.

I didn’t know it at the time, but all of the pressure I had been carrying was beginning to catch up with me. I was trying to maintain work, dance, opportunities, finances, housing, and the constant pressure of proving that I belonged, and eventually my body forced me to pay attention. While working on an opportunity with Laurieann Gibson, I became overwhelmed by this combination of excitement, fear, and anxiety. I was late for work and afraid I was going to lose my job, while at the same time I had made it to the final cuts for something that could have been a major career opportunity. Everything was happening at once, and after I left the class, my anxiety went into overdrive.

I took a trip to urgent care for sharp chest pains and vertigo, and ended up in the hospital for 3 days . Both they & myself initially thought I was having a heart attack, and they did extensive testing to determine why the pain wasnt going away, with everything coming back normal. It was then I discovered I had severe anxiety.

That experience changed the way I understood myself & shook the shit out of me. I had spent so much time figuring out how to survive that I hadn’t realized how much surviving was costing me until I was in the hospital scared to go to sleep. I stepped away from working with the kids and began putting more energy into my new business, Pinilla Productions, and without really planning it, I started moving from being the person trying to get on the stage to becoming the person who could create the stage.

Working on creative services gave me the opportunity to adjust to my new reality… then BOOM - the pandemic came, and the entire world stopped. Any & everything I was working on [personally & professionally] came to a screeching halt.

New York became strangely quiet, and for once, both the city & industry that had always demanded that I keep moving gave me no choice but to slow down. I was trying to get myself back together and figure out what I wanted to do next when George Floyd was killed. Something deep down in my spirit was rattled, and I felt compelled to respond so organized a protest with another dancer in the community & what happened afterward was something I never could have predicted. The protest gained national and international attention, and we were featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and other outlets.

It was an enormous moment for me, but three weeks later, the most unexpected shit happened —— my mother suddenly passed away & it just so happen to be 4th of July weekend, while she was on vacation.

And that is one of those moments that permanently changes the way you understand your own story, because there was no way to separate the two things. I was experiencing one of the biggest professional moments of my life while simultaneously experiencing one of the deepest personal losses I had ever known. The world was seeing something I had created, while I was grieving the person who had known me before I had created anything at all.

It felt surreal, almost like I was watching someone else’s life.

And after that, I knew I needed to step away from the spotlight. I needed to heal, but I also knew I couldn’t abandon art because art had been one of the few things that had remained constant through every version of my life. So instead of leaving the arts completely, I moved behind the curtain, and that eventually led me to production.

In 2022, I created Paradigm as a passion project. I didn’t initially intend for it to become what it became, but after seeing the impact of that first production, I realized that I had found another way to contribute to the art while also giving myself the space to continue healing. From 2022 through 2026, I produced, directed, organized, built, and created, and I learned how much I actually enjoyed being behind the scenes. But more importantly, those years gave me the space to start figuring out who I was outside of everyone else’s expectations.

That became just as important as the work itself.

I’ve always been an introvert, but early in my New York journey, I became connected to people very quickly and found myself in scenes and environments that I probably wouldn’t have entered on my own. Some of those relationships were beautiful, and some weren’t. There were friendships that ended and situations that forced me to look at how quickly I had allowed people into my life without necessarily knowing myself well enough to understand whether they belonged there.

So I started undoing things.

I started paying attention to who I naturally connected with, what environments felt right, what communities actually felt like home, and what I wanted my career to look like when I wasn’t allowing somebody else’s opinion to define it. And that was difficult because people have always had a vision for me. You’re a dancer. You’re a model. You’re a teacher. You’re a choreographer. You’re a producer. You’re a creative director. You’re an actor. You’re a businessman.

And the truth is, they’re all right.

I’m all of those things.

For a long time, I thought that made me difficult to understand. But I’ve come to realize that I’m simply a paradox. I’m the performer and the producer, the model and the creative director, the student and the teacher, the person on the stage and the person building the stage. And I’ve spent enough time trying to make myself fit neatly into one category to finally understand that I really don’t have to.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons New York has always felt so familiar to me, from the beginning.

This city is a paradox too. It’s beautiful and ugly as f*ck, lonely and crowded, inspiring and exhausting. It can make you feel invisible and important within the same day, and it can give you something you’ve spent years praying for while simultaneously making you wonder whether you even belong here. My experience has been the same. I’ve experienced success while struggling financially, recognition while feeling invisible, community while feeling completely alone, and moments where I thought I had finally made it while simultaneously wondering how I was going to make it through the week.

And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from these ten years: life doesn’t always happen in neat chapters. Sometimes you’re celebrating while you’re grieving. Sometimes you’re succeeding while you’re struggling. Sometimes you’re becoming someone while simultaneously losing a version of yourself.

Now, ten years later, after producing what would become my final production for now, I’m finally allowing myself to ask a different question: What do I want next? Not what should I do. Not what makes the most sense. Not what someone else thinks I’m good at. Not what someone else thinks my career should look like.

What does SHEEN want?

And I think that’s the greatest thing New York has given me—not success, not connections, not opportunities, and not even resilience, but self-awareness. Because surviving New York and knowing yourself are two completely different things. You can spend ten years surviving and still not know who you are, and I think a large part of my journey has been learning the difference.

I came here thinking I was going to make it, but somewhere along the way, I realized I was really here to meet myself. And I have.

I’ve met the ambitious version of me, the scared version, the broke version, the grieving version, the anxious version, the performer, the producer, the teacher, the student, the leader, the dreamer, and the survivor. I’ve met versions of myself that I love, and I’ve met versions I had to forgive. I’ve lost parts of myself here, and I’ve found parts of myself here too. So when I think about August 28, 2016, I don’t just think about the day I moved to New York - I think about the beginning of a ten-year conversation between me and a city that never promised me anything.

And somehow, it gave me everything.

It gave me chaos and beauty, heartbreak and opportunity, loneliness and community, failure and success. It forced me to create when there was nothing to create with, to keep moving when I didn’t know where I was going, and eventually, to stop moving long enough to ask myself who I actually wanted to be.

So, New York, thank you.

Thank you for the life I imagined, but also for the life I never could have imagined. Thank you for the stages and the shelters, the celebrations and the losses, the people who stayed and the people who taught me why they couldn’t. Thank you for giving me opportunities, but also for teaching me how to create my own. Thank you for forcing me to become someone I didn’t know I could be, and then giving me the space to realize that I don’t have to remain that person forever.

Ten years ago, I thought I was moving to New York to become somebody. But now I understand that I was already somebody.

I just hadn’t met him yet.