For the majority of my twenty-four-hour drive from Nebraska to Los Angeles, I had a new paperback perched on my lap. I remember watching the arid, monochromatic hills of Nevada roll past my car window when I read the following passage from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
Despite Didion’s painfully accurate observation, I felt enlightenment wash over me that turned the drabness of I-15 into Technicolor. No one could possibly feel the exact mix of nostalgia and grief from leaving home, and hope for my future that I experienced in that moment, driving halfway across the country to live in an unknown city for my last semester of college. Ironically, I did feel a sort of pride in my epistemic loneliness.
Of course, this newfound wisdom turned out to be as fickle as Didion said. Though the author recounts the independent days of her early twenties with fondness, the astonishment of her young self reminded me of the fleeting yet poignant memory of growing older, “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The next hundred miles to L.A. brought all of my anxiety back, probably because I was confronting the city’s infamous traffic for the first time. And yet, now, three months into my residency as an Angeleno, I still find comfort in rereading this passage about her, and now my, “mixed blessings.”
What I didn’t realize then was how thoroughly Didion would become my guide to L.A. Her writings evoked the shared experience of what it means to be young and unmoored in California and coping with an overwhelming sense of impostor syndrome. Slouching Towards Bethlehem became my handbook for maintaining boundaries in a city that constantly threatens to overwhelm, and her observations about L.A.’s contradictions—“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension”—helped me value the realm of possibilities in everyday encounters. Through Didion, every new Angeleno’s discomfort is unique and universal and every moment of enlightenment is both profound and transient.
Some of my initial L.A. experiences that feel insignificant now, after months in the city, were profoundly intense at the moment. There was that time when my friend and I ventured to the Star Wars-themed bar on Hollywood Boulevard to watch karaoke night, only to leave early after an uncomfortable encounter with an intoxicated older man. Our Uber driver made similarly suggestive comments, so when we finally got to campus, we sprinted up the stairs in our heels, laughing in both disbelief and discomfort. I remember assisting on a particularly strenuous fashion photoshoot that exhausted me physically and emotionally, only to be told that the professional boundaries I attempted to set were indicative of my fragility and naivety.
While I expected some of these interactions, experiencing them in real time felt like watching a cliché sitcom that would certainly be canceled after its first season. I felt unfit to exist among the grit and glitz of the city, woefully adrift amongst my insecurities and hesitations.
Given my origins, I suppose this makes sense. I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and spent my last three years of college at Emerson College in Boston. Since applying to Emerson as a teenager, I always wanted to be a part of the school’s Los Angeles program. When the time came to apply to spend my last semester on the West Coast, I wrote about Joan Didion, among other things, but mainly how her writing about the West fascinated and empowered me to try my hand at living in L.A.
Whatever bravado I possessed then and during my cross-country drive, dried up by the time I unpacked whatever belongings fit into my Honda Civic. While I loved reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, some of the more tragic details within Didion’s essays increased my building anxiety on the road.
Her stories about the pervasive drug culture in San Francisco and a husband-wife murder mystery in the San Bernardino Valley made me pause and consider the sort of culture awaiting me in the West. Though Slouching Towards Bethlehem recounts Didion’s Western exploits in the ‘60s and ‘70s, her narratives chipped away at my idealized version of L.A. The only time I had visited the city previously was when I was a pre-teen gallivanting about Santa Monica while my parents attended a wedding. Holding on to these blissful, adolescent memories did not convince me that what lay ahead would be the same. As Didion writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” I strived to take this adage to heart.
Coming from the polite formality of the Midwest and then Boston’s studied indifference, L.A.’s direct engagement style felt jarring. My first month as an Angeleno was spent at work, in class, or inside my dorm. Admittedly, I was put off by the brashness of people in public, whether it be someone approaching me on the street while I was walking home or casually brushing me as they passed by on a skateboard. Other interactions were more blatantly unwarranted. I had never experienced so many strangers who seemed to feel an unwarranted sense of entitlement to my time, attention, and occasionally, even my body. At a certain point, I became frustrated with myself, staying inside to avoid interactions with strangers that sapped my energy. I felt that I needed to adapt to my surroundings and develop an exterior fit for a city where poverty and excess intertwined and every interaction felt transactional.
But Joan presented me with a solution.
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent,” Didion penned in her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect,” included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
That was my problem. I was locked within myself, too concerned with work or classes, and worried about the unexpected eccentricities of those around me to truly appreciate the city. At the beginning of the academic semester, an alum living in the area espoused to us students, “There are so many different parts of LA. You can never really hate it all.” Once I pushed past my self-involvement, I began to notice the little pockets of wonder in everyday life in L.A.:
The tourists who hike the path to the Griffith Observatory and FaceTime their relatives just to show them a glimpse of the Hollywood sign.
The aspiring music producers moonlighting as Uber drivers who transport drunk bar crawlers home after a night out to spend more time with their music during the day.
Editorial and production assistants out in the wild, picking up food to take to set or rushing through FedEx to make the afternoon delivery cut-off.
I’ve found that people in L.A., regardless of their industry, are not just hard workers, they’re idealists. I saw how Angelenos embodied a nuanced sense of wonder and savvy that I’d never seen before. I like to think I’ve absorbed some of their optimism.
Perhaps most of all, I appreciate the unpredictability of L.A. Before moving, my West Coast bucket list was limited to beaches and researching the Santa Ana winds, the strong, dry gusts that can wreak havoc across coastal Southern California in fire conditions. I remember writing an AP English essay analyzing Didion’s prose on this phenomenon. She wrote that the winds “affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
My tenure as an Angeleno was always meant to be a temporary, thrilling interlude before graduation. I’ve been close to the edge all along, balancing on the precipice of true adulthood. While the actual Santa Ana winds have yet to whip up significant chaos in L.A., their mysticism embodies my time in the city. I was terrified to relocate to L.A., but now that I have righted myself from its initial gusts, the wonderment of its mutability is clearer than ever.
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