I’ve been scared to say this out loud.
A few months ago
encouraged me to share my travel and recovery stories (RE: this instagram caption). You know the push from people you admire to do the thing you’ve been putting off? (I mean, who at 28 wants to share their memoir when people are still very much alive and have high-speed internet?) I had been thinking about it, but I needed his words to find the courage to start this series I’m very excited to tell.LA was a place I dreamed of living my entire life.
I wrote this piece the day I decided I was leaving.
It was the most important decision of my life thus far.
I hope you enjoy it and ask yourself if where you’re living in conjunction with your soul too.
January 22, 2022
Today I am exhausted. I turned twenty-six on Wednesday and spent the week almost in declaration with fate that I was indeed, twenty-six now. I have lived in and out of California for the past three years (because of a green-eyed boy and an ill-fated pandemic). Almost like fading in and out of a dream state, Los Angeles feels quick and intangible. You might make a conclusion similar to the song “City of Stars” from this observation. But that’s not it. Los Angeles doesn’t feel like a movie to me. It isn’t dreamy or "too-good-to-be-true in the sense that reality could never adhere to it. It can. And it does. LA is as delusional as the people who reside within it. I think I’m coming to terms with that. I think I am far from the first to do so.
I’ll never not be a Texas girl.
I hated writing that.
But I will always have a preference of grass over concrete. Steak over chicken. Hot over mild imbedded in me. I will always desire the captain of the varsity team even though I realized I’m the coach. For my 26th birthday my dear friend from college flew in to celebrate and assist me in photographing material for the launch of my podcast. Her talent behind a camera matches her caliber of character and ethic of work: gentle and something-fierce. My friends here are not like her. And every time someone from Texas visits I notice this more. Its not so much a list of differences in hobby or attitude. It is a separation of baseline. Oil and water. In separate beakers. My old friend’s morals are not the same as my surroundings. She is good. Los Angeles tends to take that good from people’s souls. And I think I recognized in her presence that perhaps I should reconsider the soil of which I am beginning to root in.
We went to Tesse, a fine French restaurant — finer than I intended — in lieu of my pandemic and God appointed canceled trip to Paris for my birthday. Myself and my friends dined on cheese and duck and wine and I noticed the differences in conversation. My friend from college to my right; her energy exuded generosity and celebration of me. (While I am willing to say I do not typically self-appoint this, it felt warm to be celebrated). She made me feel loved. She made me feel, in a way, held. I live with three women in their mid thirties. All not married. All nothing like I ever planned on spending time with as much as I do. At twenty-six I am eating at a French restaurant in West Hollywood and it is hard to keep eye contact with anyone of the women at the table. My friend I met online is scattered and sweet, living in her own world. She ordered the chicken on the menu and my Texan friend and I ordered the delicate duck. We did not spare a penny on the wine. I am wearing tight-ish black dress and a headband. I aimed to feel Parisienne but I felt more like a woman playing a girl. Tonight I wanted to eat and drink and be merry but the monster in my head who attempts with claws and teeth to starve me since I can remember has other plans. I moved back to LA after the rehab program I was in back in Texas and living here has been an active force against my progress. Women (correction; people) here are vain. Thinner is better. Fitter is better. Beautiful is better. It’s just the law of the land, no matter who says the place is woke and inclusive. I say this because I believed this too. I don’t want to anymore. Thinking about what you look like this much is violent. Vanity breeds pain. Not satisfaction. I’ll die on that cross.
I went to the restroom two old-fashions in and saw there was acne on my cheek. I never struggled with stress breakouts until my skin lived in California.
As I was leaving the restroom one of my roommates called my name. I suppose I had been gone awhile and our food arrived. As I turned the corner to go back to the table, a peppered hair gentlemen in a grey sweater exited the same hallway. My roommate must have mentioned to him that it was my birthday because he stood in the smokey lit area and invited me and my friends to his table for a celebratory glass of wine. “Of course” I responded. Why not? My roommate and I giggled. She grabbed my hand and pulled me away.
We ate the expensive food and took photos of ourselves to post on Instagram. What else do people do in southern California? My violent habit of avoiding eating by pushing food clockwise around my plate until the waiter picks it up subsided. “Not tonight” I told myself with each glass of alcohol. The tiny voice I nurtured for a year with my nutritionist, therapist, and whoever God was to me, now whispered: “I don’t want to live in scarcity at twenty-six. I don’t want any darkness to starve my thirst for light. I want to eat.” So I ate. And drank. And my friend from home’s warmth glowed on me as we laughed and glanced at the way-too-old for us men across the room. We had no intention of leaving with them of course, but as girls from tiny-town Texas who both almost settled in the drenches of our hometowns, it was funny to flirt. A bottle of what I later discovered was extremely expensive rosé came our table. The waiter gestured to the peppered hair man. I laughed and took it.With no intentions of giving them any part of the time, mind and body I worked so hard to rebuild from the bones up, I was just enjoying being alive. Is that wrong? I guess I could tell you it is. But I refuse to give guilt a go at my throat ever again.
My friend from home paid for my dinner and hugged me. The rest of the table looked at their phones even after the check came and went. Posting or planning or wondering where they could be that is better or more glamorous than here. I could hear the hedonic treadmill humming loud and clear.
If you enjoyed reading this piece, I recommend reading my essay “On Remembering” which touches on similar themes of loss and learned contemplative memory.
You can listen to the Cageless Podcast now on Substack 🎉
Wow. I love your writing style. You are so talented. I’m from New Hampshire, and I spent so much of my teenage years trying to break free from where I grew up, only to realize that — like you are a Texan at heart — I’ll never lose what makes me a New Englander. When I went to school in NY, I got a dose of that vanity you’re talking about. I always dreamed of living out west because of its culture, but I quickly realized through the people who are from there that it’s not what it seems.