los angeles was fucking enough

It doesn’t feel right to post about leaving Los Angeles after I’ve left it, or even about leaving it days before I’m about to as the feelings I held back ostensibly would flow over me then, so I’m trying to mine for them right now. I’m trying to grieve this place as I live in it already, preemptively, as if it will hurt less when I am gone.

I’ve been doing this for a few months now. I made my decision to leave for New York in May (more on why later), and I wasn’t sure when the move would happen exactly. It’s now been set for a sublease that starts Oct. 1, preceded by a few days of roaming around the city with my best friend Kat as a send off to our experiences having an in-person friendship (more on that in a future post too).

Why not sooner? People asked. I made excuses that “oh, it’s because it’d be hard to find a lease that fast and I had the perfect opportunity!” due to my high school friend going off to travel the world and leaving me his Bushwick apartment for me to start my formal long term search.

In reality, it’s because I knew however my feelings were to ebb and flow in the next few months, I’d regret not setting a bottom line container of having an appropriate amount of time to grieve the four and a half years of life Los Angeles gave me. It’s been some of the best years of my life, and certainly the most formative.

But the task I set out to do — long term appeasement over short term gratification of cutting myself loose from this place I feel so tied to — is gargantuan in its own way. I feel about my inevitable move akin to how someone must feel about a terminally ill loved one. I don’t want to cheapen that the death of humans is something that is incomparable, but a faint echo of it exists in myself when I look upon the streets of Los Angeles that I loved so dearly and feel like a dead man walking. I feel I’m just watching something die slowly, something precious to me, and the screams I feel inside don’t even feel cliche — the opposite, actually. I never read about anyone being this broken up over a move and writing about and talking about it as much as I have. It felt almost foolish to devote an entire post to this and force my Substack captive audience to entertain my thoughts.

But here I am, memorializing Los Angeles. It won’t be my last post, but I guess it’s my first. My first to touch on what it’s like to be haunted even as you continue to live out your life, feeling the ghosts of every memory you made here assaulting your senses as you walk around.

I cried a lot for the first few weeks after my decision. I’m not moving for a new job, a new partner, new anything but just feeling it’s time to go. It’s time to move on. I never dreamed this day would come. I never thought the love would fade. But it has, and I’ve subsequently experienced nausea, heart palpitations, you name it. The decision itself was such a shock to my system that I felt proud I’d anticipated it because I was not okay those first few months. It confirmed that I was not going to be ready to leave too soon, or I’d risk traumatizing myself.

I felt like I had lost something and a part of me was missing, even as I was still going about my daily life here. Suddenly hearing anything about future plans in LA, even while I have a few more months here, feels hollow. The inability to plan was the first part of me that felt missing. Then I began getting rid of all my clothes, giving away books to friends, surveying my array of plushies and deciding with firm conviction I couldn’t give any of them up while wiping away tears for the things I had been letting go of. And it’s just been torture for my psyche.

I began thinking that maybe I’d made the wrong decision to wait this long. But I remembered what it was like to grieve a real, living person who I lost too soon. And I didn’t want the septic shock of letting go of LA too soon to haunt me after I had started my new life in New York, when there was less I could do to replace what I’d lost. At least right now, I could still try to hug LA in my arms even as I was watching it slip away.

This place had felt like home for so long. Like consciously building a relationship, I had to consciously tear down the attachments I had once held.

When I remembered the joy I felt about New York and the excitement of living there, I felt better. Then I’d come crashing back down to reality, experiencing the vertigo of what I’d have to give up to go out there. I’d been reluctant to because I had built my life in Los Angeles with my own hands, hand picked my routine and the house I’d lived in for longer than anywhere besides my childhood home (even positioned aptly on a street called Saturn!), dreamt about marrying boys I dated, made friends that healed me more than any place —

I’d really believed I’d be here so permanently, and it was astonishing to have the technicolor world I’d had built for myself suddenly darken and fade to black and white.

How do I feel right now? I actually really resent LA. I drive through the streets, the freeways, wake up to blue skies and sunlight pouring into my Mid-City home every day, walk around the beach, go shopping in the hipster boutiques of Silverlake, eat late night Korean food with my friends, and… feel… angry? I feel trapped at this moment in space and time, ready to move on.

I’ll just be sitting there, minding my own business, and get attacked with visions of New York beckoning me. I get excited when I open Tik Tok and see content about life in that walkable urban sprawl, and scowl when people simp over the greenery of California in the next reel on my For You Page.

But I don’t think I’m actually ready yet. I think the anger is just a manifestation of fear and trying to avoid feeling it. I know it’s probably just denial, and trying to avoid the feeling that I’ll miss this place. That there’s something to miss here.

I have to remind myself, again and again, that I came here with intention.

It’s hard to describe how I feel without describing where it came from. To be concise, I came because I wanted a taste of what a “home” would feel like.

*****

Most people in my life now didn’t know me when I was hardcore intent on becoming the best investigative reporter there ever was. I dreamed about winning a Pulitzer. I wanted to write things that swept up the collective imagination and saved democracy. I worked for the best newspapers in the country and freelanced for the Washington Post. I was set on one path from the day I set foot on the University of Missouri’s campus, and I really believed that I had what it took to make it.

And maybe I did in spirit, but not in terms of what I was ready to somatically sacrifice.

I chose this location as my first post-grad destination as an escape from being burnt out. I was not yet ready to be location-agnostic again, after I moved 6 times in 2 years and realized I had already lived in so many places before I’d even graduated — Missouri North Dakota, Indiana, Minnesota, D.C., and I’d burnt myself out on having to make friends on deadline and start over.

Then, two days before the 2016 election I was covering as a college senior, my high school best friend suddenly. I now see this has defined my life more than I thought possible. With 6 months before I was set to graduate college, I looked around at everything I’d worked for in journalism, every word I’d written, every internship I’d completed, every city I’d lived in, every tear I’d cried over my work, every triumph I’d had… and felt disgust. Disgust that for a while now, I’d been content to put my life on hold, to not think about my long term comfort in places without Asian food or a community that understood the trauma of being a child of immigrants or places where the culture felt familiar — and I realized that if I bought into this career any further, I’d be waiting for my life to start even more. I’d be in a Midwest town for another few years, waiting for my job to dictate if I got to move wherever I wanted to, and then the security of whatever I’d built there could be shaken at any minute based on the industry.

I felt like the bitch of journalism. I was sitting on the Metro in Washington, D.C., riding the train from one end of the line to another, and realizing that I’d had to take PTO from my senior year internship to be able to fly home and properly grieve my friend. There was no room for me to comfort myself even within that, and this would not stop when I graduated. I’d just be underpaid even further to do that.

At the time, I took the wager of believing that if I just moved somewhere, anywhere, and took on the risk that maybe I’d have to give up what I’d worked so hard for for locational stability, it’d be worth it.

The grief that I feel about leaving LA confirms that my 2016 self, who I guess is still alive and well in my bones in this timeline, made the right choice.

I came here with the feeling that this place was the only one that would be able to contain me. This place was the only one that wanted me, with its diversity of experiences from the people to the type of landscape to the fact that I had nothing to prove here. I could define myself how I wanted to.

Entrepreneurship, tarot reading for pay, all the friends I met — I was no longer “Crystal, with a body of work to make you respect her”. I was here to slow down and match the pace of LA like she was strolling on the beach alongside me.

And I did that. I concentrated on my mental health while figuring out career as secondary. I embraced the sun, new people to meet, new dreams to co-create together, and experienced the intensity and enormity of a big city.

Now, I have to say goodbye when I came here thinking I’d never have to.

I realize now that I came here to heal, but my mistake was thinking I’d need to forever. I came here to build an oasis for my journey of radical resting, before pop culture told you you needed it, and I became somewhat of a teacher to others in that time. But similar to how Nala shook Simba out of his slumber when he was recovering post-trauma with Timon and Pumba, I feel called to go away now and concentrate on my other dream.

The grief continues to metabolize in weird, torturous ways, but I know now I would rather drag it out than turn my back on the story I’d had here. The feeling of completion is not something to be felt in one fell swoop; it’s to be savored, held in your mouth as you watch the flavor dissolve gradually.

I decluttered so much of my possessions while honoring what they brought me, and I guess I want to “declutter” the feelings about LA with what she brought me too.

She felt like the longest relationship I’ve ever had, during an era where my closest friends were all made post-grad, and I feel like I have no home that I can call my own as I destroy this one.

I know LA will always be here for me. But even if I return someday, I will not be the same as I am now. And I think grieving my past selves properly has been the best I’ve always been able to do for me.

****

With that said, I’m not in any mood to bash LA. Some people have joked, “So it wasn’t what you thought, then?” They’re waiting for me to talk shit on her.

And to that, I say my final statement, that I know I’ll repeat daily as the only way to firmly embody the flurry of emotions I feel, is this:

LA was enough for me.

There wasn’t something she lacked. There wasn’t something I learned about her that made me like her less. There is only profound gratitude, glowing recommendations, wistful nostalgia for a time I desired her — but no regret, no sense of remorse, no thought that I could have chosen anyone but her to hold my torn up, hurting 22-year-old body who moved here wanting to claim something of her own.

LA did that for me. New York never could have back then, never could have accepted me as the person I am now.

So all these unpleasant, angry, uncomfortable, saddening feelings I’m having right now are because LA was enough. I can only feel this way because I had something to lose. And I could only have something to lose if I worked my ass off to make LA work for me and to bond with this city not to force her to be anything but herself and for me to revel in it.

I think I loved this city in a way that’s almost more complex than any singular human relationship I’ve ever had, or ever will have. My early 20’s were the most maddening, insufferable time for a personality as large as mine. And LA did a good job of making sure I not just survived, but also thrived.

How could I fault these feelings of mine, then, and see them as anything but a blessing?

I’m losing LA soon. I have less than 60 days left and they’re trickling away so fast.

I’m only counting because I don’t want to waste a single one of them.

And I haven’t ever.

Los Angeles was fucking enough. And in a way, she will always be somewhat enough, objectively. Just not enough for my future.