A love letter to Los Angeles

Thank you for being a friend.

One of my favorite places in Los Angeles.

I moved to Los Angeles in August 2020.

Yes, it was mid-pandemic. Yes, I knew what I was getting into. Yes, I did it anyway.

At that time, I was looking for a change in my life. I had just left teaching, and my entire plan for 2020 was to travel for 6 months. We all know how that went.

The 5 months I spent living in my parents’ basement was lovely, but I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to start my next chapter. I had started taking some comedy writing classes to fill some time in the vast expanse of 2020. I’ve always loved to write and spent many nights as a teenager working on what was sure to be my television masterpiece. Faced with thwarted travel plans and a renewed passion for inventing dialogue, I decided I had nothing to lose. I’d move to Los Angeles to pursue writing.

When I got here, I told myself this move would go one of three ways:

1. I’d do something in entertainment and have to be here.

2. I’d not do something in entertainment, but fall in love with LA.

3. Or I’d hate both.

My first few months were trying. I was living alone in a 2 bedroom apartment because my roommate was still in Colorado. I knew two people in Los Angeles, both of whom moved to Denver two months after I got to LA. I spent a lot of time by myself wondering if I threw my life away by quitting the only thing I knew I was good at (or so I thought at the time) and leaving my family and friends.

But then, things started to change. Through some alchemy of the universe—and a musical improv podcast—I found The Jane Club. We were rapidly approaching the 2020 election, and I was craving a way to find community and take action. In one podcast ad, I found both.

The very first day I joined The Jane Club, my dear friend Shawnta welcomed me like I had been there the whole time, and I felt seen in a way I never had before. I went to a meditation, I met with members of the community from around the country (virtually of course), and I even got to hear Jane Fonda speak—yes, the first day. Suddenly, I had women reaching out to get to know me, planning zoom dates that lasted for 4 hours, people offering help in my career transition, and friendly faces to check in with daily. I had community, despite being stuck in my own four walls.

Over the next several months, that community became my lifeline in LA, providing me a space to try things, to exist honestly, to learn about myself, and to show up for others. I’ve said several times that moving to LA during the pandemic was probably the best thing for me. It seems strange, but finding community virtually through things like the Jane Club or writing classes, I made real friendships in a time where everyone’s lives were paused. No one was rushing around trying to keep up with whatever was trending in the city that week. We all were just trying to exist. So even though not everyone was in LA, there was enough of a community here that by the time the world started to open its doors again, I had friends to join the world with. Friends who knew the real me, and loved me for that. Since then, my circle only continued to grow, collecting friends from writing classes, improv, random chance encounters, co-working spaces, French classes, and so many other aspects of my LA experience.

For the last four and a half years, LA has been my playground. Having spent most of my 20s in Colorado Springs, I craved being in a city that spoke to my creative spirit, and LA did just that. I have seen countless improv or standup shows with comedians I have followed for years, attended unbelievable concerts with world-class icons, danced at musical theatre piano bars, the list goes on. I took improv classes, writing classes, acting classes, French classes—anything I could that fostered my love of art and culture, which in turn allowed me to find a love of myself I hadn’t realized before.

I spent much of my teens and 20s considering myself a charity case, assuming I succeeded because people felt pity on me and were doing me a favor. Taking control of my life and going after what I wanted in Los Angeles proved to me I was anything but. I saw myself shedding old stories about who I thought I should be to find who I am. LA revealed to me that I was never going to follow a “traditional path”, and that life has so many more possibilities than I thought it could. Being surrounded by imaginative people, who encouraged me to be creative in turn, I began to envision a life for myself that was created in the image of exactly what I wanted to do—even if that meant eventually leaving the City of Angels.

Words aren’t enough to fully capture what LA and the people here have meant to me. LA gets a bad wrap for being a city of fake people, eager to see how you can help them climb whatever ladder they are trying to ascend. My experience in LA has been the exact opposite. In LA, I found genuine friends who care deeply: about social justice, about creating art, and about the community around them.

To my LA community, thank you for being a part of my life. Thank you for the laughter, the support, the commiseration, and the encouragement. I would never have had the courage to follow my dream of moving abroad without knowing I have a soft landing spot among the palm trees.

I leave LA this morning an entirely different person than I was 4.5 years ago when I got into my packed car to drive from Colorado to LA. I got here unsure of who I was and what I was doing in my life. I leave still not knowing exactly where life is taking me, but I am 100% sure of myself in starting this next adventure.

LA I will miss you, your sunshine, your tacos, your comedy, your Hollywood history, and even maybe your traffic. But most of all, I will miss the people who made my LA experience an incredible chapter of my life. I know this is not au revoir…it’s simply à bientôt. LA, je t’aime.

Love,

Melanie

P.S. Melanie’s Musings is getting a bit of a makeover…stay tuned for a rebrand and for what is next!