How I Moved from New York to Los Angeles in an Attempt to Escape My Problems.
(And why it didn’t work.)
I grew up in Flushing, Queens. (Like ‘The Nanny’)
As a born and bred New Yorker, my adolescence was a lot different from those who grew up in small towns or suburbs. Instead of drinking Smirnoff Ice in someone’s basement, I spent my early teens zipping back and forth from Middle Village to Long Island to see pop punk bands in VFW halls and church basements. On the weekend, I would venture into St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan where I would drop what little money I had on a new piercing or a fresh pair of bondage pants.
When I was fourteen, I went door-to-door to every tattoo shop in the Lower East Side begging someone to give me a nautical star tattoo on my hip. I was promptly shooed away from every establishment once I opened my mouth to speak, revealing the treacherous metal braces that lined my top teeth. After hours of searching for a morally corrupt tattoo artist, I found myself in front of Generation Records on Thompson Street where I spent all of my tattoo fund on albums from bands like the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion and The Act. My favorite find from that day was a rare, live album from Green Day with liner notes that included a photograph of Billie Joe Armstrong’s genitals. I found a hiding place for the suggestive album the minute I got home, least my mom discover the rockstar dick pic and mistake it for pornography.
I fell in love with New York City as a teenager and by the time I was 17, I was convinced that there was no where else I would rather live. Eight years later, I was singing a very different tune.
By the time I was 25, I’d been living in Manhattan for only two years and already carried myself with the tough, weathered exterior of a middle-aged sanitation worker counting down the days until retirement. I complained about everything from my job to the piercing noise ambulances made as they sped down 2nd Avenue every 15 minutes. My rent was equivalent to what most people in the midwest pay for their mortgage, yet I was cramped in the smallest of three bedrooms in a fifth floor walkup. One day, a rat the size of a small possum emerged from under my couch. As I let out a blood curdling scream, the rat glanced back at me lazily with a look that said, “Can you not?”
My growing hate of the city I once loved was incongruous with those around me. In the last two years, I had immersed myself in New York’s indie comedy scene which was mostly comprised of young adults who just recently moved to the city. I watched enviously as they fell deeper in love with a city I was starting to viscerally hate. I envied them for their ability to choose New York whereas New York was chosen for me.
Living conditions aside, there were a couple other things going on in my brain that I was successfully repressing with copious amounts of alcohol and a jam-packed work, comedy and social calendar. Anytime I felt overwhelming sadness, I quickly downed 2–3 vodka sodas and went to an open mic. Most, if not all shows I did were followed by a visit to the bar where I would get drunk enough to forget how I flubbed up a line in my standup set or didn’t commit hard enough to a character I initiated during an improv performance. As I heavily pursued my comedy while barely trying at my day job, I adopted a vicious inner monologue that constantly rang in my head both on and offstage, “I hate you, you suck, nobody likes you.”
While my love of New York steadily dwindled with every cockroach sighting or delayed L train, the true source of my unhappiness was much deeper than that. After convincing myself that New York was no longer the place where I would live out the rest of my life, I did what every jaded New Yorker thinks about doing at some point in their life. I moved to Los Angeles, California.
I chose Los Angeles for several reasons, the first and foremost being that it was warm and as far from New York as I could get without leaving the continent or going to Canada. Secondly, as someone who identified herself as a comedy writer, I figured Los Angeles was were I could truly realize my dream which was, and currently is, to write for film and television.
I idealized Los Angeles. Having only visited there to party and go to festivals, I naively expected it to immediately provide me with an easier and happier life. I quickly realized that putting 3,000 miles between myself and my problems wouldn’t make them go away, just throw them off course for a couple weeks.
After the novelty of California wore off, which was about a week, life started to suck quite a bit. I came out here without a job (despite all the advice I got to the contrary) and within two weeks, my boyfriend started a job where he worked no less than 12 hours a day. During the day, I frantically applied to any position I was remotely qualified for as I anxiously crunched the numbers in my bank account.
I was lucky enough to collect a few odd-end jobs my first few months here. If there’s one thing I can say about Los Angeles, it’s that there are assistant jobs a-plenty and boy, did I assist! I assisted in marketing for a large restaurant group, I assisted in casting for a wonderful casting director and I assisted as a camera op for a small, yet successful production company. I also ‘assisted’ in the setup and execution of parties, making me a real-life bonafide cater waiter for the second time in my life. The first time, I was 18 and in college, a point where working as a cater waiter “made sense”. Now that I was 26 with a degree and 4 years of work experience, I couldn’t help but think that somewhere, something went wrong.
Despite all my assisting, my bank account balance was still rapidly depleting. Every night, I tossed and turned thinking about how much time I had left before I had to make the dreaded phone call home requesting a one-way ticket back to New York. The worst part about my situation was that I had worked myself into such a deep self-hatred spiral that I was no longer performing. One of the main reasons I ventured out to Los Angeles was to work on my comedy and comedy was the last thing on my mind.
Being separated from my family, my friends and my social networks for the first time in my life exacerbated the problems I tried to suppress in New York. My fear of failure and inability to be vulnerable had me keep everyone at arm’s length least they discover who I really was; a fraud. By isolating myself mentally and physically from those around me, I descended deep into a depression that I was convinced I could overcome if I just had one, tiny bit of success in this new city. My only saving grace was that I lived in a bustling house with three stupidly adorable dogs and one incredibly supportive boyfriend turned fiancée, who rubbed my back and told me everything was going to be okay whenever I descended into a blubbering lump of cry, which happened, on average, once every six weeks.
My decision to move wasn’t only a little haphazard, it was completely unplanned and stemmed in something more serious than wanting to “make a change” or “escape the city”. I came to LA without a job, three months rent and the naive assumption that a writer’s assistant job would be handed to me along with my California ID, a medical marijuana card, and a renewed sense of self worth.
Around the six month mark, I swallowed my pride and accepted that a steady job in ‘entertainment’ wouldn’t come as easy as I hoped. I resigned to take a job at a tech start-up so I could at least get my finances in order and start performing again. Around the same time I got placed on a sketch team with some amazing writers and performers who helped me remember that life is funny and full of joy.
Performing helped bring me back to almost normal. I was productive and happy to be working on projects that I cared about. However, it wasn’t long before the negative self-talk began to resurface. This time, I was telling myself that I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t doing enough live shows, I wasn’t putting myself out there enough, and that I was wasting too much time on frivolous things like cooking, spending time with friends and just straight up chillin’.
Do you see the problem here?
While a good chunk of my sadness was remedied by re-engaging with my creative outlet, I was still trying to motivate myself through negative self-talk and fear. You know, a tactic commonly found in emotionally manipulative and abusive relationships.
This story doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, or an ending at all. I don’t know if LA is my final destination and I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of this year, but none of that matters. All that matters is that I start to show myself the same amount of compassion and kindness I extend to my friends, my family, my fiancee and literally, every dog that I meet. If I don’t do that, it won’t matter where I live, who I’m with or what I achieve because I’ll always be miserable and being miserable is something I do not want to be.
TLDR; You can’t run away from your problems, go to therapy, learn to love yourself more.
