I just hit the 20-year mark in Los Angeles. I never meant for this to happen.
Raised in a bucolic Connecticut suburb – church bells! horses! town squares! – I went to college just 30 minutes away, in a place that looked and felt like Hogwarts. There I studied and soared and stumbled and fell dramatically in and out of love. I burst past the suffocating limitations of high school; I found my people; I belonged.
After graduation, most of my friends moved to New York. It was the sensible thing to do. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
My roommates continued living together, their apartment furnished with our shared couch, photos from spring break trips, and other ephemera we’d collected in our years as chosen family. The city outside their walls was new, but that apartment felt like home. It made me wonder whether I was making a terrible mistake. New York was, and might still be, my favorite city. I’d grown up riding the Metro North to and from Grand Central. I’d spent summers acting in artsy plays in tiny theaters and sharing single beds with friends in East Village walk-ups. We drank cheap wine, danced ’til dawn, and got spur-of-the-moment piercings on MacDougal Street. The city had a grit and moodiness that aligned with my sensibilities. Its intoxicating perfume of rain on hot asphalt and honey roasted nuts, subway wind and cigarette smoke, got me high on possibility. I was infinite, immortal, and invincible. In New York, you can be anybody.
Except that I couldn’t. There were too many ghosts.
If I’d chosen the place that felt like home, I’d have been choosing that version of myself, too. The one unsure of what came next. The one still reeling from a recent breakup (he was there; they all were). The one clinging to an identity based on whatever accomplishments had come before, already aware that in adulthood, none of it would matter.
I’d have to begin again. And so I did. Got a one-way ticket to a place I’d never been. Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? I came to pursue acting. That part, at least, was logical. The less logical part was the fish out of water thing. Take a girl who loves darkness and rain, who finds her greatest inspiration in melancholy and longing, and pop her into a technicolor landscape where the sun shines 365 days a year. I got a job as a waitress, and on days off, my coworkers liked going to beach. The beach. The one that looked like something out of Baywatch (because it was, in fact, the one from Baywatch). No seagrass. No shadows. Nowhere to hide. Just blatant sun on blatant sand that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was all so… obvious. Does nobody want to spend their day off lurking in a coffee shop, dissecting their trauma? Where even are the coffee shops here? What is this oppressive smoothie culture? And why the fuck are people wearing rollerblades?!
I’ll spare you the New York vs. L.A. debate; people’s reasons for choosing one over the other are highly personal and always evolving. I’d also remind my coastal friends that there’s an entire country between us, one full of wonderful places to live – a fact that went largely unmentioned in these conversations until Covid thrust said places into the spotlight. I don’t know how Austin and Boise and St. Louis feel about big city transplants and rising home prices, but the friends I know who relocated there seem happy. Sort of.
The point is: I came to L.A. in the early aughts, when The O.C. was the hottest show on television and getting bottle service at Area meant you were somebody. I loathed it. I was depressed for a good three years, trying to make sense of a business I knew nothing about while navigating a sprawling city whose web of freeways perfectly illustrated my feeling about the place: there’s no there there.
On the bright side, I did find that I could be anybody I wanted to be. It’s something I love about L.A. even now. It feels uniquely fluid, like nobody’s gonna hold you to anything. Actor? Nice! Decided to pivot and start a coffee company? Dope. Living in the guest house of some big agent for reasons unknown? Cool, cool. Producer of… what, exactly? You know what? Doesn’t even matter. You do you.
While I’ll be the first to admit how much I love[d] the freedom of reinvention, I grew increasingly wary of those who contorted it into a pathology. There are a lot of them here. And to complicate matters further, this was before the ubiquity of social media. No internet deep dives. Scant research to be had. Which meant that people were who they said they were. Except that, a lot of the time, they weren’t. What binds us, after all, is the business of illusion. The very product we export is fantasy. It’s the perfect setting for someone looking to leave their past behind. Come to Hollywood and get a new life, a new name, even a new face. Anything’s possible.
It wasn’t until I found my professional footing that I began to feel less and less like a lamb who’d wandered, starry-eyed, into a den of wolves. And when I found my people, the whole city began to feel less transactional. With my nervous system regulated by hard-won financial solvency and healthy personal boundaries, my eyes could finally open to L.A.’s pink cotton candy sunsets and purple jacaranda trees. The air whispered secrets of Hollywood’s Golden Age and smelled of eucalyptus and night blooming jasmine. From the hills, the city sprawled and sparkled like a constellation. I felt rooted. I fell in love. I started a family. I felt, once again, like I belonged.
But then Covid.
And now the strikes.
It could be that these events have coincided with my peer group’s evolution into early middle age, but I’m not exaggerating when I say every conversation I have touches upon whether or not we’re living in the “right” place. The ones who moved to Gainesville and Nashville were finally able to fulfill their dreams of becoming homeowners. The ones in Cincinnati do things like go to happy hour and play golf – they’re working to live, not living to work, and it’s abundantly clear to me that they’ve tapped into something fundamental about this whole “life” thing that continues to elude me. Those of us who remain adore our fair City of Angels, but that doesn’t stop us from fantasizing about leaving. Of my close girlfriends, one dreams of Kansas City, another is waiting for her kids to finish high school so she can escape to the Northeast, and still another now spends part of her time in rural France. And me? I fetishize a quaint New England life. Quit the business. Become a novelist. Drink tea. As if anything is ever that simple.
In L.A., housing prices have soared, and there’s little to no work to be had. At least not at the moment. Neighborhoods fractured by Covid restrictions were finding their way back, budding with new life and hyperlocal pride, but the economic toll of the current professional landscape has undermined that, too. We raged all summer with anger at big corporations for paying artists a pittance. That anger became passion, and that passion became unity. But unity is different than belonging. One is about shared goals, the other about acceptance. One is tactical, the other emotional. We choose unity, but we need belonging.
Maybe the answer to our complex equations factoring in job opportunities & real estate & income taxes & safety & school ratings & access to culture & gas prices & proximity to family & air quality & weather & political leanings & general vibe & statistical likelihood of climate-related disaster (!) is simple. Maybe the answer is: a sense of belonging. It’s weighed much more heavily on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than my personal favorite: self-actualization, which – though just a tiny triangle atop the pyramid – dictated my entire young life.
Habits are hard to break.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m gonna die on this hamster wheel in the name of artistry.
Maybe it’s middle adulthood speaking, or motherhood, or just personhood in this period of unprecedented environmental and technological precariousness, but I feel my priorities shifting. Big time. A friend of mine said, over dinner some weeks ago, “It’s as if you spent the last 20 years scaling a wall, and then the wall turned to sand and disappeared before your eyes.” That’s exactly how it feels. Everything’s virtual now. You don’t have to live here to work in entertainment. And if we don’t “have” to live here, where should we live? We’ve built a life here, after all. Where do we go now?
Meanwhile, the entertainment industry, the livelihood of so many of us living here, is temporarily on pause and, whenever we come out the other side of this thing, very likely to be unrecognizable. Streaming forever altered the television landscape, reaching brilliant new heights, before falling, like Icarus, out of the sky (instead of feathers and wax, let’s say the faulty wings were made of, like, overblown budgets and market saturation), taking everyone and everything with it. I suppose the good thing about this sort of reckoning is that there’s nowhere left to go but up. I mean, things are deeply weird at the moment, but I remain hopeful – honestly I think blind optimism is a prerequisite for any actor — that SAG-AFTRA, the WGA and the AMPTP will come to a resolution and strike a fair deal. I don’t know what it will look like on the other side. Nobody does. (Except maybe ChatGPT. I bet ChatGPT knows.) In the meantime, I’ll just be here, cutting the crusts off sandwiches, searching small towns on Redfin, and explaining to my inquisitive children why I chose this — it is, after all, a choice.
“Why didn’t you choose a normal job, Mom?” one of them asked a few days ago. What do you mean by normal? “Like being a teacher or something. Why did you choose acting?” I don’t know, sweetheart. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Happy 20th Anniversary, L.A. You’re a real handful, but our time together has made me who I am, and for that I thank you.
love this and love you! Thank you for sharing. "it seemed like a good idea at the time" is a great response xoxox
Sing it sister