Leaving Los Angeles

a retrospective, and notes on retrospectives

I stumbled into Los Angeles in the middle of the pandemic, fresh on my feet, fawning. There were a lot of metaphors about babies and wild animals that year. The previous months I spent cleaning chicken shit out of my shoes and chain-smoking, flying blind down dirt roads had given me a sort of unshakeable confidence in the pursuit of my future with no plan.

I had learned a lot of things that summer. Like eating Bojangles three days after the Saturday butchering is too soon. The bank of the New River at 4pm is the best place to take a nap after work. There are two bars of cell service at the Dollar General ten miles down the road. On the farms, I was nobody but a pair of hands and strong legs, except for in late June, at night, when Matt and I would sit up on the hill and watch the fireflies mingle in the trees — then, sometimes, I was also pretty. I moved coops and hand-rolled my spliffs. I was constantly dirty and flat broke, performing amateur psychoanalysis on myself as I hunched over a stainless steel sink, a vacuum-seal machine, a freezer, always, inexplicably, in the world of dead chickens.

crumpler, nc

I made myself useful and grew stronger. In Kansas, there wasn’t much to do so I started singing again. I trained the goats to come sit down without chewing on me. The weeds piled up in wheelbarrows, the shovel struck solid rock and I cursed. Towards the end, poison ivy overtook my entire face and breast and thigh, and I laid humbly in my bed with the window open, apologizing for every time I had mistaken myself as a person whose job it was to wrangle the Earth.

So you understand now that when I arrived in Los Angeles, I came with a certain tenacity particular to the animals that come out wet and walking on their own. I was not strong in the way of an ox, but in the way of a foal — the heaviest thing was not mine to carry, but the profound beauty of a new world seemed ready for me, something my eyes could already take in, made of a substance I could squeeze between my fingers.

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I’m in California. Just putting that on paper feels so right. I love it here — I’ve never felt more held by a place before. I feel welcomed by the very atmosphere. Like when I wake up in the morning, it’s because someone or something wanted me to be here.
— my diary, September 2020

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los angeles, 2020

I moved into my pseudo-big-sister’s laundry shed in the back of her gorgeous, cliffside Laurel Canyon house. I knew exactly one person in Los Angeles besides her, and a week later I knew all his roommates too. In the awkward but necessary intimate arrangement of pre-vaccine 2020, I was somewhat absorbed into the house of boys as a “safe” person, especially true given that I had no other friends.

I let the back deck put indents in my stomach as I laid on the wooden slats, seventeen pages deep into indeed.com. My sister/friend/roommate had a crying breakdown about a dish that I had loaded incorrectly into the dishwasher, which of course was not about the dish or the fact that I had handled it imprecisely; our relationship was delicate and needed to be taken care of, meanwhile I was whipping about her house using all her cream and occasionally occupying her entire living room to lay face-up on her Moroccan rugs, complaining about men and money. She also complained about men and money, but it was probably more annoying when I did it, given that I am twelve years younger. Plus, it was her house.

The problem of my youth was of course what I have to thank for my optimism and tolerance of discomfort, but it also drove me a bit mad. Nineteen years old and hopped up on two years of university-level philosophy about power relations and heteropessimism and anything else I studied to avoid my intended major of Political Science, I found myself pathetic every time I would wipe the sunscreen from my eyes to see if my boys had texted me back. In the mornings I would watch the toddler shit in his diaper and tuck him in all clean and sleepy. In the evening I would wait for someone to want me around. Boys, all boys.

And, of course, we were all friends and had love for each other for being strongholds in the disassociated, plague times. On the weekends we would turn off all the lights in their house and make drinks and clear out the furniture to dance in the living room — this is where I learned that it’s okay to dance, even badly, especially if the lights are low — and between the soft glow of the television and the vague, heavy air, I felt like the only girl in the world, because I kind of was at the time. I felt how me being a girl made everything different, the jokes, and the politics of where I went to bed that night (the couch, always). The fact that I had slept with one of them years earlier and we were now “just friends” seemed cosmopolitan and evolved, even though it put a distance between me and the rest — whether or not they would see me in a sexual context had already been decided for them, had already happened, had already threatened the equilibrium, had already put a film across the person I was going to show up as in their lives. How much I wanted to be just the same as those boys, lithe and young and unencumbered with the heaviness that was about to set me down into my womanhood. And just the same, how special it was to be a girl among them.

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I’ve been feeling weird lately. Stagnant and sometimes depressed and like I should be doing so many things but I just don’t have the energy. Or maybe I do have the energy but I’m scared. Or maybe the things I think I want are not the things I really want. I’m just alone all the time
— my diary, February 2021

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In the dawn of the new year I had moved in with a new friend and started speaking into a microphone frequently enough that it accidentally became the way I made my money — there is no chic, respectable way to narrativize podcasting. When I listen back, I can hear a familiar lilt in my voice that is particular to North Carolina, where I spent my youth. When I listen back, I hear the fresh, twenty-year-old naiveté that imbued me with a sense of duty and responsibility. The air of being an unpopular teen hung around me with a force, and I loved to scroll through comments of people who said that listening to our conversation was like “being with my best friends.” I wanted to be everyone’s best friend, and that dream suspended me through the otherwise intensely isolating experience of realizing that keeping such a promise would be how I kept myself alive.

An A&R from Warner Records got in contact with me, insisting that I was the perfect person to write “smart” pop songs. He sent me a folder full of instrumental tracks made by renowned producers — including some of those Swedish ones that put crack in the songs — and told me to write on top of them. I worked constantly, tweaking and sending and re-writing. I submitted tens of songs that never made it past his desk for one reason or another. Once, I sat on a Zoom songwriting session for Justin Bieber with two men over forty who kept telling me that they “didn’t get” what I was going for and I told them that’s probably a good sign. Then I sat in silence while they wrote a chorus which ended up being too lyrically reminiscent of "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to be salvageable.

I couldn’t afford to be working that much for that little. I dropped out of contact with the A&R. I still have a folder of pop songs waiting, functionally dead, on my laptop.

I worried constantly about money and stability and the boys, still. Everything felt so tenuous, as though each day was a gift granted to me by someone who could decide to shut the sun down at any moment. Because I was beholden to no one in particular, I was beholden to everyone all at once.

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The house is perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen. I'm glad that he walked ahead of me as he showed me around, because I'm not sure I could have kept my mouth closed if I tried. I can only hope he didn't hear the smack of my lips as I mouthed "holy shit" and "oh my god" over and over and over again. 

In situations like that I almost feel it rude to comment on the beauty of everything. It's like when you run into a famous person, and you're not supposed to freak out about them being famous, because they already know that about themselves and are likely even irked by it, probably especially in the moment in which you are commenting on it. 

So instead I looked around, my pupils undoubtedly dilating at the complex gardens, the bubble-like couch, the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the way he walked around it all with monotony. 
— my diary, June 2021

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When the world finally started to open up again I took it in stride, falling quickly into a relationship with the wealthiest person I have ever met and may ever meet. It was a week or two into formally dating when he broached the subject casually: “So, I want you to know that I’d like to pay for things now that we’re dating. I hope that doesn’t make you feel weird. It just makes more sense, I think.” I thought so too.

The Los Angeles he showed me was vast and moneyed — small plate dinners, South-facing hotel rooms, standing outside a party in the hills texting him, “here!!!.” The house was more of a compound, a playground where we laid about and swam in the pool and sweat out hangovers in the sauna and roller-skated across the tennis court. It seemed like the whole world had opened up to me at once, but I was always aware: my Los Angeles was looking through the glass of doors he had the key to.

at the compound, 2021

In the mornings, I would rush off to feed my cat breakfast in the studio apartment we shared together in Thai Town. Parking was terrible and I learned not to go walking by myself at night — not even to the 99 cent shop on the corner — but the apartment was my palace, and I loved making breakfast just to eat it in any part of the place I wanted. It was all mine.

Despite being one of the more sheltered people I’ve met in my adult life, my boyfriend embodied this sense of care and knowing that I trusted. I had never experienced access to un-precarious resources or men who seemed to recognize the right kind of shoes to wear. In turn, I folded his laundry and stroked his hair and quietly sat on my emotions, which were always overwhelming for him to experience. One time, I explained to him that most people can’t buy six concert tickets at a time to any show they might want to go to. Most people go to maybe one or two concerts a year, they have to take off work, they have to find someone to watch their kids. Do you understand? I said that to him. He asked me why I was being so cruel. I wondered privately why it was so oppressive to him that I might want to be understood.

My Los Angeles was quickly becoming a place of illusions. After a few days at the compound I would begin to feel a little sick, almost like I suddenly realized that the space had been rocking me like an infant for days. My proximity to extreme wealth had made my life glide past with ease, all of the subtle discomforts of normal existence having vanished. There was little to struggle against, and little to be gained because of that. I felt increasingly uneasy in my patterns; waking up in the playground, getting my coffee, coming back to Thai Town and looking at the cat in my window, going to bed at night sensing a growing audience of faceless people who were all telling me how close they felt to me. I felt my projected self looming constantly above my real self; whatever that means, I knew it was true.

I did not feel close to anyone at all. In fact, I felt hardly tethered to this Earth, floating back and forth between the good life, my real life, and the internet. Everywhere promised me a place to stay, but nowhere offered a place to be.

I began taking punishing walks in the most unwalkable parts of the city, going to the beach and staying under as long as I could. I needed to defibrillate my body back into being and I did. When my birthday came around, I broke up with my boyfriend. I always break up with boys right after my birthday.

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Everyone is upstairs entertaining each other. I felt my social battery running out, so I retreated to the bottom level to write. I am a little drunk at the moment, which explains my shitty penmanship. I of course did come down because I had the desire to write and, perhaps, escape, but I do secretly still hope someone will descend the stairs and catch me doing it.
— my diary, February 2022

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My boys got girlfriends. I met a guy outside a show who looked like Fred Armisen. I was trying to quit smoking but I couldn’t, and I knew that if I lit one he would come over and ask me for another. The cigarette is my window to desire; I often don’t know what feeling I’m chasing until my lips are right up against the filter. The cigarette is also the window to flirtation — phallic, good for sharing.

Fred Armisen and I go on a few millennial dates through no fault of his own. I was attracted to the fact that he was thirty and didn’t mind walking the length of Koreatown when we got turned away at the bowling alley, no matter how humiliating the sentence “I got turned away at the bowling alley” would end up being in retrospect. We sat on the beach and I played manic-pixie-dreamgirl, daring him to get in the water in his underwear. He never invited me inside after we saw each other, which was always strange and vaguely hurtful to me.

I started seeing a maniacal, extremely sexy chiropractor. I adhered to a strict diet and became convinced that the closer I was to arugula, the closer I was to God. The first time I laid on his table I couldn’t stop laughing because I was so attracted to him and also I am ticklish. He is very stern and domineering and was made uncomfortable by my discomfort, did not find my girlish squirming beneath his touch to be charming or affecting in the least. My embarrassment made me more embarrassed, and I walked out with a solemn promise to follow all his rules. But we built up rapport, even a bit of a flirtation, whether real or imagined. The truth didn’t much matter to me at the time.

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 Sunday - ashamed that I can't recall what happens before he arrives
— my journal, March 2022

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In March I fell in love for real — accidentally and all at once. We spent nights lying awake trying to track the whites of each others eyes. We fell asleep on each other in the back of cars and on near-dusk beaches and in the morning, again, right after waking up together. I will write about him extensively, I’m sure, at a different place and time. I love him so I am careful with him. I love him in a way that breaks form, that makes me uneasy to narrativize him as a cog in the machine that kept me churning through the city. I love him in a way that made the pain of staying in Los Angeles dull to a surreal blur, only noticeable once I looked outside our home, which I hardly did. I don’t regret staying in a place really only because I wanted to stay with a person.

april, 2022

My last gasp in Los Angeles is a long one. I’m wanting to stay in the past tense, but I really must come to the present now. I envisioned this piece as a birds-eye retrospective of events that, while at times harrowing or depressing or even boring to live out, would be reignited as electrifying and crucial in the arc of a story. But I’ve stumbled into the place where my narrative meets my reality. It’s difficult to know how the story goes while you’re in it.

Regardless of this, I’ve told the story while I’m in it my whole life. There is something to be said for doing that, even though it makes one feel overexposed and unpolished in hindsight.

I haven’t been careful with myself or my stories. I didn’t know how to do that, still don’t know if the adjustments I’m making will feel right. But I do know that cracking myself open to an audience beginning at eighteen years old, wanting to do my best by people who began to number in the tens of thousands, and creating an atmosphere of disclosure and authenticity that quickly became impossible to promise made me ill for quite some time. I can’t get too much into it now, that story. I am still in it.

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And her heart is full and hollow
Like a cactus tree
While she's so busy being free
— Joni Mitchell, "Cactus Tree"

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It is not the fault of Los Angeles that I have felt profoundly alone here. I am very talented at feeling lonely, and am convinced I could do it most anywhere and under any circumstances. I am humble to the fact that, after becoming disillusioned with Los Angeles, to say that I am running off to New York is funny at best and pompous at worst.

But it’s true, I am. I have spent long enough being uncomfortable being by myself, I might as well see how it is to be uncomfortable around everyone else. I want to be packed into a train car. I want to trudge through snow and be made a tiny toy soldier by the weather. I want to come out swinging with the kind of naive, bright-eyed idealism that I will laugh to myself and others about later, poking fun at my foolish optimism in the narrative. But before I come back and inevitably strangle this moment into a story, I will not be embarrassed to say that I feel excited. I am not even embarrassed to quote Joan Didion.

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Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.
— Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

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I will take the void with me, undoubtedly. But there is no need to rush ahead and around corners looking for it. I am sure it will find me.