24

Aug

Los Angeles.

I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep

Standing on the edge of something much too deep

It’s funny how we feel so much but cannot say a word

We are screaming inside but can’t be heard

 And I will remember you

Will you remember me?

Don’t let your life pass you by

Weep not for the memories.

 

On an early morning in the summer of 1999, a yellow school bus pulled into the parking lot of Capital High School in Olympia, Washington. I sat near the back, resting my head against the seat, softly singing the lyrics to a bittersweet Sarah McLachlan song. My head was light – the result of a sleepless night spent in Seattle, celebrating the Class of ‘99 and our newly-earned diplomas – but my heart was heavy. Graduation meant that in less than two months, I’d be leaving home to attend college in Los Angeles, a city I’d visited only once and where I knew no one. The thought of chasing my Hollywood dreams thrilled me, but I was scared too, possessed of the vague but certain knowledge that soon, everything in my life was going to change.

I waited until it was safe. As soon as I was sure that the solar eclipse that had been making its way eastward across the United States had passed over Los Angeles, I got into my car. As I merged on to that familiar stretch of the 405 freeway, I thought about that eighteen-year-old girl, half a life away, who was only just beginning her story. How could she have known how it would all unfold?

My mother watched from the third-floor window of the Radisson Hotel as – sirens blaring, strobe lights pulsating – fire trucks charged down Figueroa Street. Turning to me, face drawn with concern, fear in her aquamarine eyes, she asked earnestly:

“Sar, are you sure you want to go to school here?”

I was sure. From the minute I set foot onto USC’s University Park Campus I knew that I belonged there. Its proximity to the infamous “South Central” neighborhood of Los Angeles, the seemingly never ending parade of emergency vehicles exiting the nearby fire station, the metal bars encasing every apartment and store window. . . none of those things deterred me. In fact, they only strengthened my resolve. A girl who split her childhood between Anchorage, Alaska and small towns in the Pacific Northwest should have been a fish out of water in such a gritty, urban place. But I wasn’t. I was home.

Nearly eighteen years later, that exact same feeling settled in my chest, but this time, in a different place. Walking along Sixth Avenue in New York’s West Village, my eyes found the Freedom Tower, a beacon of steel blue standing strong and stoic in the distance, and something that can best be described as hope swelled within me. Home, cried a familiar voice, sure and steady. I listened.

I checked in to the Surf and Sand Hotel just after two p.m., changed into a bikini, and headed straight for the beach. Later, sandy and sleepy, I sat beneath a large white umbrella, stared out at the Pacific, and wrote. After an early dinner of cheap tacos and expensive wine, I headed back to the beach and waded into the ocean just in time to watch a blazing sun sink below the horizon, spreading coral and tangerine across a tranquil sky. Once it was dark, I opened up two old notebooks that I’d brought along for the journey and re-read their contents. I barely recognized the person who had written them, and so, I carefully shredded their pages and deposited them into a hotel garbage can.

As I crawled beneath white sheets, a feeling of calm settled over me. What a difference from the last time I came here, I thought. It had been December of 2015, a few days after my thirty-fifth birthday, a few weeks after my grandfather died and I had returned to L.A. from a month-long stay in tiny Allyn, Washington to oversee his hospice care, only to find that the company I had worked at for eleven years had been sold, and I had a decision to make: relocate to Seattle and take a job with the new company, or stay in L.A. and face an uncertain future. I chose to stay in L.A. I chose to trust the steady, sure voice that told me I would be OK. I have never regretted that decision.

Eighteen years after moving to Los Angeles and making it my home, it is impossible to describe how it feels to leave it. When I arrived here in the late summer of 1999, I was a girl on the edge of becoming a woman. A girl who thought she knew so much, but who had no idea how innocent she truly was. I had never been in love. I had never traveled to the Eastern United States to sink my toes into an Atlantic beach, let alone crossed that vast ocean to visit (and live in) the continent on the other side. I didn’t know that terrorists could fly airplanes into tall buildings. I didn’t know what it would feel like to hold the hand of someone I loved as they died.

What would I tell that girl now, all these years later, as I prepare to once again begin my life anew? I would tell her a great many things, but mostly I would tell her that she is allowed to make her own choices. She is allowed to let two conflicting emotions reside in her body at the same time. She is allowed to love a place and leave it, and she is allowed to love people and leave them, too. She is allowed to be both brave and afraid, allowed to be both as fragile as a paper doll and the owner of the fiercest heart imaginable. She is allowed to write her own story, without knowing how it’s going to end.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I never could have imagined how much this city would change me, how much it would shape me, how much it would open up my life. Somewhere among the boulevards and the beaches, among the wannabes and the celebrities, I found myself. I made lifelong friends. And I grew up.

Moving here was the right thing. I knew it, and I did it. And now, eighteen years later – as hard as it may be – I also know that it is the right thing to leave.

Until next time, friends.

7 years ago Short URL 21 Comments

Change/Los Angeles/Memoir/New York/Olympia

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17

Mar

Putting off tomorrow.

“Procrastination is the thief of time.”

-Edward Young

Over and over and over again over these last two and a half years, I’ve reminded myself how precious time is; that it shouldn’t be wasted. After all, I’ve seen it in action: the way a mere phrase or phone call or the briefest of moments can permanently alter every cell in your body, so that afterwards you never think or dream or breathe the same way again. I don’t need anyone to tell me that all we have is this moment, this one, right now. I already know.

And yet. As I sit here, writing this to you, I am – at this very moment – procrastinating. I am putting off doing things that are important to me. Even after I resolved that I wouldn’t, I am still finding ways to stall. I am making excuses. Why?

I have a plan. It’s sort of epic. Can I tell you about it?

Ever since my mother died two and a half years ago, a story has been kicking around inside of my brain. Scenes of it play in my mind like a movie. It is a movie. Well, not yet. After mom died, I wrote the story in fits and starts – sketches of scenes, bits of dialogue. But I couldn’t really get a rhythm going because too much was happening. I was too messed up. I couldn’t see it or admit it at the time, but I was. My dad was sick, my grandmother was sick, the person I loved most in the world was abruptly gone with all kinds of questions surrounding her death, and oh, on a side note, my personal life was an utter disaster. My world had flipped upside down.

To make everything worse, I couldn’t write. I felt stupid, clumsy. My tongue was thick in my mouth. Words were stubborn, refusing to string together to form sentences. The thing that had always come easy for me, the thing I’d fallen back on when all else failed, had suddenly become impossible.

But little by little, it started to come back. I started writing again. And over the last two plus years, I have written a lot. I wrote while my life changed. I wrote through all kinds of moments – heartbreaking moments and sweet moments, laugh out loud moments and joyful moments. You see, once you get through the worst part of a trauma, once you realize it won’t actually kill you, once you realize that you still care enough to pick yourself up and keep on living, you become capable of experiencing profound joy. And it’s often joy where you wouldn’t expect it:  in small, seemingly insignificant moments that you never even realized were beautiful until you looked at them through the lens of loss. Even though you’re sadder and more broken, when you laugh you really mean it, and when you love you really mean it, and even though you wouldn’t wish what’s happened to you on anyone, your dirty little secret is that you don’t want to go back to the way you were before, because the old you was oblivious, fumbling around in the dark, while this you is awake to everything. And once you’ve woken up, you can’t go back to sleep.

But this is not meant to be a blog about loss, it’s meant to be a blog about procrastinating.  See? I’m doing it again.  OK, to get back to the point:  the story that has been kicking around in my head for the last two and a half years while I tried and failed at writing it is finally taking shape. It’s a screenplay of a movie that is based upon my life.

The story is set in Olympia, Washington, the town where I went to high school and where I plan to film the movie. That’s right, I’m going to make the movie myself. I know just enough about producing films to be terrified of how much work it will be, how much money it will cost, and how much I still need to learn. Basically, I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. Not yet.

But in allowing myself to feel overwhelmed about the filmmaking part before I’m even there yet, I’ve been putting off the step I’m on now, which is sort of crucial: finishing the script. I’m self-aware enough to recognize my own resistance, and resistance and I are currently locked in a daily tug of war.  I’ve got post it notes with motivational sayings all over my house, an accountability circle where I bring in pages of the script every week, and plans for a table read of the full script in May. But every day when it’s time for me to sit down and do my work, I’m like a petulant child who doesn’t want to go to school, looking for any excuse I can not to go.

What the hell is my problem? This story is important to me, and I want to tell it. Yes, writing it is hard. Yes, certain scenes aren’t coming out the way I want them to, at least not yet. But I’m making everything so much harder than it needs to be with my acrobatic stalling techniques. If writing this script is the thing that matters most to me, why will I do nearly anything to avoid working on it?

Maybe it’s the fear of failure thing. Maybe it’s the fear of success thing. Maybe it’s the fear that I’ll actually accomplish my goal and after all the blood, sweat and tears, I’ll get to the other side of it and realize that this process didn’t heal my life the way I’m hoping it will. Maybe I’m afraid that no matter what I do, nothing will ever change.

I think to some degree, my resistance is probably rooted in all of these things. But even though I’m scared, I’m also stubborn.  I’m going to battle through this, just like I’ve battled through everything else these last couple of years.  Because for all the challenges that lie ahead, I refuse to believe that I could have treaded through such deep water simply to give up. Our heroine battles through the worst experiences of her life, stands upon the precipice of utter despair, and then – throws in the towel. Now that would make a lousy movie.

If you’re anything like me – if you’re feeling overwhelmed by a big dream that you badly want to accomplish but don’t know where to start or what to do – this is what I suggest: start small. Break down your big dream into as many small tasks as you can, and just do one thing at a time. Do one small thing every day that keeps you moving forward. Don’t worry about what could go wrong in the future – it either will or it won’t and you’ll deal with it when you get there.  Just do what’s in front of you every day.

Now let’s see if I can take my own advice.

Until next time, friends.

9 years ago Short URL 237 Comments

Los Angeles/Me/Olympia/Opinion/Writing

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18

Sep

Olympia.

We left Anchorage on a bleak, snowy day in late November. It was just after Thanksgiving, and just before my fifteenth birthday. I remember how bitterly cold it was. I remember snow-topped Atlas Van Lines moving trucks parked in the driveway in front of our house, a stately, three-story slate grey Alaskan chateau on Hidden Lane. I remember sulking, dragging my feet, not wanting to go. I remember little else.

The Spar

Come to think of it, I can’t even remember where we celebrated my birthday that year – 1995 – sandwiched as it was between Thanksgiving and settling into our new home in Olympia, WA. It’s funny how little I remember from that time. Mostly, I remember the weather: the Alaska deep freeze, the cold Olympia rain, the ice storm that hit with a force shortly after our arrival, the tree branches that froze and crackled and splintered throughout the night, littering the road and falling on power lines, knocking out our electricity. Our new house, situated as it was at the end of a long, narrow peninsula called Cooper Point Road, and then down a private, gravel, pothole-filled path with a sign at the top that warned ‘end of county road,’ was very literally in the middle of nowhere. Which meant that when the ice storm knocked out the power, it stayed out. For days.

And then there was Olympia itself. Upon crossing into the city limits, visitors are greeted by a sign bearing a red, white and blue shield in the form of stars and stripes, proudly proclaiming: ‘Welcome to Olympia, an All-America City.’ True? I suppose so. But mostly I remember Olympia as a small-ish Pacific Northwest town with a bit of an identity crisis. A place where state-workers, government bureaucracy, federal buildings and all of the other trappings of being the state capitol came together with the dreadlocked, hemp-wearing, Evergreen State College-attending hippies, the self-consciously artsy, delightfully quirky PNW hipsters, and the more affluent, old moneyed country club set – the ones who owned boats and waterfront homes and wintered in warmer climates.

Capitol Theater

When I arrived in Olympia in 1995, from what might as well have been a foreign country – Alaska – I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I was no newcomer to the Pacific Northwest – both of my parents grew up there and I’d spent nearly every summer in Seattle or at my Grandparents’ beach house in Allyn, WA – but Olympia was something else entirely. An odd, eccentric town where all these different and distinct segments of the population intersected, amidst a backdrop of gloom and rain, of tall trees and water-facing cafes and dirt roads to nowhere. I didn’t fit in at all, and yet, strangely, it was exactly where I belonged.

I remained in Olympia for less than four years, bailing as soon as I could to attend college in Los Angeles, and choosing to return only infrequently, on random summers and holidays. And though L.A. has now been my home for many years, there is something unshakeable about Olympia. It was so different than any place I’d ever been before, and so different from any place I’ve ever been since. For the Alaska girl used to the long dark winters where Christmas lights cast a soft glow against the snow, the endless summer nights near the solstice when the sun never seemed to go down, a place where you could go ice skating in your backyard and moose frequently roamed city streets, it represented total culture shock. And for the woman who sought bright lights and bigger things, who has traveled the world, and who made Los Angeles her home – with its vast expanse of freeways and smog and traffic and unnaturally beautiful people – Olympia remains a beacon, a reminder of a more innocent version of myself, a longing for a simpler, more offbeat, more authentic life.

Zoe Bday 5

On my last few visits to Olympia, I tried my best to recapture the good old days – the rainy afternoons passed journaling in indie coffeehouses, the outdoor concerts in Sylvester Park with its gazebo strung with white lights, the treasure hunts in the epic Goodwill on the corner of Cooper Point and Harrison, 90’s music blaring over the loudspeakers, the long walks around Capitol Lake, the beautiful boys in too-baggy clothes killing time at the skate park. I’ve tried my best to recapture the Olympia of old, but the truth is, it’s no longer the same. The magic of nostalgia that held me in its grip for so many years while I slogged away in gritty L.A. has withered in the face of cancer and alcoholism and mental illness and hospice. The lighthearted teenage memories of watching old movies at the Capitol Theater and dance parties and bingeing on late night french fries at The Spar now compete with doctors’ visits and funeral arrangements and sorting through the contents of my parents’ house.

The thing about my arrival in Olympia as a fourteen-going-on-fifteen year-old at the tail end of 1995 is that it was perfectly timed. It was so easy to be a teenager there. You didn’t have to work hard to manufacture the tragic angst you so desperately clung to as part of your identity; it was already baked into the cake with the gloomy rain-soaked skies and the tall trees and the grunge music and the drive-thru espresso stands with ironic names. But the thing I didn’t realize about that time in my life – the thing that I could only realize later, with perspective – is that it was actually beautiful. That I wasn’t really as dark or as moody or as tragic as I pretended to be, that I was only playing at it. It wouldn’t be until much later, when I was touched by actual tragedy, when grown up responsibilities eclipsed the teenage worries that had once seemed so heavy and oppressive, that I would truly understand the difference. And then, more than ever, would I long for those bygone Olympia days.

Until next time, friends.

Percival Landing Statues

10 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Family/Los Angeles/Memoir/Olympia

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