“When I close my eyes I can see my life right in front of me, but when I reach for it it disappears. I don’t know why I can’t touch it.”
This letter was originally going to be about my love for California. It was going to be about how the places we’re from never leave us. I had it all planned out. I was going to write to you from a cafe overlooking the beach in Santa Barbara. While that didn’t happen, it was still a near perfect week.
So much has happened in the week since I’ve been home though—so many ups and downs, highs and lows—that I’m finding myself at a loss for words. (Something I’ve written in the past: Getting better often feels worse at first. Finding yourself feels a lot like getting lost. To make any change at all is an inherent disruption to your current flow.) Still, I feel guilty for not having written to you in so long. So I will write about California, and I will tell you the truth of this moment.
I was born in California, and even though I left it at just a year old, it still feels like the closest thing I have to home, no matter how much others make fun of me for it. My parents hated living in California though, so they moved me and my older brother back to Oklahoma where I was raised. But I grew up priding myself on the fact that I managed to be from somewhere else. It’s all that’s ever mattered to me—the distance of things.
The first time I went back to California as an adult was in 2017. It was a birthday gift to myself, a trip with a few friends. Since that week in February, I haven’t looked back. I knew then California would play an important role in my future. It was, in ways I’m still not sure I could have anticipated, a returning to something that I didn’t quite understand was missing in the first place.
I returned in 2019, this time driving through the Mojave Desert to LA and up the coast into Oregon. I loved that trip so much I went back the next year to drive the coast again. The road trip in 2020 was heavy. I was thinking through a decision I knew would change my life. I was searching for an answer to the thing that was glaring me in the face. I think I hoped California would provide me with a different answer than the one I already had, but it politely refused. It gave me the honest answer no matter how many times I begged it for something else.
In 2021, my visit to California was an escape; a chance for me to hide from everything back home and to try to make sense of things. I desperately needed a place to take a breath, and that place was by the ocean. I have little memory of that trip, but I remember catching a glimpse of clarity. I thought it might be good to start over in a new place since I was starting from scratch anyway. But whatever clarity I found while I was there was short lived. By the time I landed back in Oklahoma the weight of my reality was crushing.
And here we are in 2023. I went to California this year to hopefully finally live. I went with the intention of deciding whether I could really see myself there. And you know what? I can.
When I was young I was criticized by some for my desire to always want to go somewhere new. This criticism buried itself under my skin and to this day I still feel the need to justify the things I love. They would tell me the answer isn’t over there, but if that’s true what does it mean that I’ve never been able to find it here? Where else am I supposed to go?
I’m a different person in California. I have no past. All I can see when I’m there is future, and it is such a relief. There is sometimes an uncomfortable familiarity that comes with longstanding places and relationships, and there is a specific kind of freedom in being brand new to somewhere, or someone.
When I’m here I feel broken, and when I’m there I just feel like me.
Which isn’t to say these past two weeks have been simple. I feel like I’m drowning a little bit. I don’t often speak things out loud. I don’t get my hopes up. When something is so close to who you are as a person that you can’t differentiate where it ends and you begin, it is excruciating to watch it crumble right in front of you. And I’m terrified this will all crumble.
What do you do when things begin to fall into place? I tend to panic. The closer I get to a dream, the more inadequate I feel; the more I find myself worried it won’t happen. I convince myself that when it inevitably falls apart it will be because of some inherent flaw in me, because I deserve it, not because life is life and there are a million and one things that are out of my control.
Here it is, the truth of this moment.
It feels weird to make such a big decision that no one cares about. No one cares whether I stay where I am or whether I move to California or whether I randomly choose somewhere else to live. My decision isn’t going to affect people that much. I feel like I need to explain myself, to justify what I want to do, but when I look around there is no one here who requires it.
I feel free, and I feel alone. The mixture stirs up feelings of wanting to stay small so that I stay safe. Emotionally, I mean. I am afraid to be honest with my hope and then watch it slowly slip through my fingers. But ultimately, I believe California to be worth the risk. I am willing to look like a fool for the things I love. I’m going back to California in two weeks with a slightly optimistic but quite tender hope for my future. I will smile at the secrets it holds, and revel in what it brings my way.