A Love Letter to Los Angeles 🌅
Another letter from the past (i.e. 2024)
This year, I spent Christmas in Los Angeles. As a transplant to the city, it feels a bit hedonistic to say out loud. I’ve always dreamed of spending a Christmas here and never have save for the forced one of 2020.
The generalized continual draw to Los Angeles throughout my adult life has been an enigma to me. It occurs to me, as I write, that it may not be much of a mystery to anyone who knows me. Better yet, to those who peripherally know me. But truly, I’ve always been half-in/half-out. Mentally and physically. The majority of the 12 years I’ve lived here (minus the brief stint traveling and living in Paris) have been spent living near the ocean or in the mountains—a good 30-45 minutes from the actual city. My relationship with it is one of love and darkness.
Yet during Christmas, my favorite cozy season, it’s the only place I want to be. The freeways get quiet. People who don’t yet call it home (and may never) return to their families elsewhere. The weather is magnificently fall-like. It’s full of all the bizarre hold-outs who dare to call this place home—including me.
It occurred to me this evening (New Year’s Eve Eve) that I love it here so much because it’s a place where self-expression is encouraged in all its forms—including the ones other cities might deem categorically uncool, unevolved, or too grossly sincere. Everyone here finds their own hip angle to being saccharine, holy, goth, academic, annoying, dirty, cosmopolitan, plastic, artistic, vain, financial, or all the above. It’s a place with no rules.
Los Angeles, when chided about its “lack of identity,” in a lovingly ironic way, turns its own joke back onto the cynical. This characteristic is its identity; its sneaky and sticky flirtation. There are few places in the world where I feel an expanse of discovery without limitations as I do in LA. Other metropolitan centers often dictate more directly a sense of “right and wrong” ways to be. The kind of right and wrong that are born out of a slew of identities of particularity, whether they be religious, cultural, locational, historical, or literally any other subset of beliefs that would cause one to label aspects of being, looks, behaviors, or proclivities as one or the other. Luckily, LA, sweet baby, has no identity to be found.
This Christmas has been blissfully exciting, enticing, spiritual, celebratory, and intimate for me. None of these adjectives are even close to what I would use to describe my typical Christmas holidays spent outside of LA.
So, this year, I’m writing to say thank you. To this absolutely weird and slippery and magnificent and creative and hopeful city.
I love it deeply and trust it to carry me through 2025–until it doesn’t. The only pull as strong as the pull to stay here has always been the pull to leave. And I think that’s why I love it so much. It’s never, ever asking me to compromise much of anything. Yet it’s always holding me, and never too tightly.
What a gift it’s been to love a place like that.
I am wishing you and yours the happiest new year, full of newly planted seeds for deeper freedom and joy. Here’s to seeing you the rest of 2025 with more poetry and adventures to share.
I’m walking into the coming year with my favorite New Year’s Day quote:
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Moving into the New Year, I’m looking forward to sharing more of the stunning creations I’m consuming at any given moment. They are the ways I rest, unwind, and tap into hopefulness for our planet. Most of them I find by way of my dearest friends. Right now they are:
Reading: Trick Mirror, more relevant now than at its publishing date
Listening to: John Legend’s album of lullabies, courtesy of my dear friend’s newborn
Movie: Wicked, because I’m on my 5th viewing and it’s still not enough
