For the past few days, I have been raptly following the awful devastation left by Hurricane Sandy and while there is no way for me to really understand what my family and friends back home are going through, I can’t help but feel totally disconnected and homesick. A die-hard New Yorker, I feel like I am a sell-out for abandoning my city – my number one love – while everything is such a mess. After all, I walked over 12 miles barefoot to Westchester on 9/11, sat for three sweltering days with my best friend and two dogs in our East Village pad during the summer of 2003 blackout and even hunkered down in my ground floor garden apartment awaiting serious flooding during the non-existent Hurricane Irene.

This time, I am over 2,500 miles away and while I consider myself lucky not to be dealing with the aftermath – my apartment is downtown and clearly won’t have power for days – I also feel helpless. At first, I was jealous when all of my friends gathered for “hurricane parties,” awaiting the storm. They were posting carefree, drunken photos on Facebook and Twitter. Basically, everyone I know was bonding over the impending disaster.

Then, disaster actually struck and my jealousy turned to a different feeling – being left out and not being able to do anything to help.I text and called everyone I knew, hungry for details, wanting to feel part of it. Thoughts of exes – even a recent one who doesn’t deserve my caring thoughts – flooded me. Things just felt weird and I wished I was home.

Again, I can in no way really grasp what’s happening, but every time I look at photos or read about another terrible consequence of the storm, I find myself tearing up. I waver between feeling selfish for even thinking about myself right now and being desperately sad for my friends, my family…my city.