'I moved to LA for a boy'
Of course it's more complicated than that
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I share essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing 1-2 times a month that follow the stops of my 2023 Migration Tour, and sometimes bonus snapshots from the road. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.
I’m back after my August summer break from Substack writing. When I introduce myself to people these days, I sometimes say “I just moved back to LA,” and there’s an awkward little dance of ensuring they don’t get the wrong idea…"I’m not from here, I grew up in Texas, but I did use to live here in South Pas for a few years” etc. Today’s essay explores why I moved to LA the first time, and might be one of multiple exploring the ongoing questions I have around what it means to move ‘for love’.
The last essay was about ‘a felt sense of home’. The last bonus included kitten photos.
I think it’s cute that my date lives on Hope Street. It matches her compassionate sensibilities and her slightly dark personality.
I text her that I’m here, and as I’m waiting on the porch for her to come downstairs, as I’m listening to the parrots squawk overhead like the tiny demented dinosaurs that they are, the layer cake of time collapses in on me in 2024.
Two doors down, and I’m looking up at the house on Hope Street where my ex Mike lived when I finally made it to LA in 2012 for our cross-country move after a year of long distance. He lived on the second floor of a worn house with chipped white paint, an apartment full of gabled roofs and slanted ceilings that created spots in his bedroom where he couldn’t stand up straight. I teased him about it; I thought it was cute that he had found a hobbithole to match his geeky sensibilities and his caring laidback vibes. He had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career change in concept design for movies and animation.
Or I should say: WE had decided to move to Los Angeles, so he could study concept design art. We had decided to move to Los Angeles because we were both feeling restless and our ambitions limited in our Austin lives.
But then there is also the part of the story where we had decided to move, and we had planned some apartment scouting trips in late spring early summer of 2011, and we were sitting in the shade at a round outdoor table in downtown Pasadena, comparing notes about the places we had just seen that day, joking in order to integrate the sticker shock of rental prices and the culture shock that Angeleno renters were expected to supply their own refrigerators on top of all that.
It is that afternoon — it isn’t until that afternoon — likely because we were about to sign a lease — that I announce that I had applied for and gotten accepted into a new design grad program in Austin, and that I think I needed to do it. I had done a daylong bootcamp with the program in April at the invitation of a friend, and I had fallen in love with the possibilities that this path seemed to open in me. There was an aliveness to the questions it awoke in me, and I couldn’t conceive of the person I’d be if I didn’t choose that version of myself.
It would mean me staying in Austin for another nine months, though, while Mike moved to LA on his own that summer. The couple places we had visited earlier that same day were no longer options; he would need to look for a roommate.
I don’t remember much of my and Mike’s conversations from there. I don’t know that it was completely smooth or easy, but he must have been supportive because we agreed to do the long-distance thing for just under a year.
Looking back, I’m surprised that the shock and timing of my decision announcement didn’t threaten to end our relationship. A dozen years later, I am still slightly flummoxed by the process and skillset of making big life decisions together with romantic life partners. A pattern I am more familiar with is that one or the other of us makes a decision about our own life, announces it, and then the relationship has to figure out how to shift and shape around those decisions. The thought of being in the mess of deciding a shared path forward together feels radical, vulnerable, and confounding.
The summer before his concept design classes started in LA and before my social design classes started in Austin, I would help him drive a UHaul with all our stuff packed inside across four states, and fly back to Austin to live out of a suitcase, subletting at a townhouse that my friend owned with her husband while they were away at her grad program out of state. We were all in our 20’s. We were all pursuing career shifts, personal and professional growth, ambitions that were legible and supported. Culturally, these are acceptable reasons to move, and relationship negotiations are reasonable accommodations to make.
There’s a shorthand version I use sometimes when I tell people all the places I’ve lived:
I moved to LA for a boy,
to SF for a job, and
to Oregon for my art.1
Of course, it’s more complicated than that.
My and Mike’s relationship lasts another two years and ends with another move. I was having trouble finding a job in the field I had done my grad program for (interaction design for social impact), since most of the UX design jobs in LA are with advertising firms who each had their own bread-and-butter car-company client.
Late spring early summer of 2014, I fly up to San Francisco for a job interview: a design researcher position with a company committed to doing half of their consultant work for nonprofits and foundations.
Back at our apartment in Pasadena, when I told Mike I had gotten the job, he’s happy for me. He half-heartedly suggests he could move up with me, starting to spin a ‘what if’ scenario of what that could look like, where we might live, but I stop him because we both know it isn’t really on the table at that point. He’s still taking concept design classes locally, and he doesn’t have any longterm job prospects in that field in the Bay Area besides maybe Pixar.
When I had walked the neighborhood streets of the Mission District after my job interview, I somehow already knew that I was going to be making this move alone. The decision already felt made.
Looking back, I see the cowardice of needing a move for a job to instigate a breakup that I didn’t know how to do otherwise. The decision to dissolve or end a relationship is another one of those ideally(?) joint decisions that ultimately feels more like solo decisions announced and then negotiated around and eventually, hopefully, accepted by all parties involved.
In addition to authentically supporting what was best for each of our respective career paths,2 we had already been drifting away from the emotional core of our relationship for awhile, when I surreptitiously yet naturally started looking for jobs outside of the geographic bounds of LA. There is a storyteller in my brain who says that we were never able to fully reintegrate our relationship after we had spent that long-distance time each becoming very different people during that year’s starting-over energy.
There is a shiftier part of my brain who would hide (even from myself) the fact that I had already flown to Oakland for a job interview during the last months of my grad program. A classmate at the time3 noted: Christina’s body is in Austin, her heart is in Los Angeles, and her brain is in San Francisco.
Time and history erase all the sharp edges. In telling our tales, so much context gets lost, all the complexities compressed, in order to make room for the attentions we need to pay to the present moment. In 2012, I chose my heart, and I don’t regret that. But/and I’m also trying to learn to pay attention to the differences between prioritizing my needs and sacrificing them with my choices.
In this version of the story, all the preceding, intervening,4 and subsequent years of our relationship un-elucidated to focus on these two moves themselves — in service of this project called Wandering Grace, which is exploring place and (be)longing and all the reasons why Christina moves, can move, should move, feels compelled to move, moved and keeps moving, for better or for worse.
I am aware of the power of my shorthand narratives to color and shape whole swathes of my past memories. I have told the story of “I moved to LA for a boy” for so long, that I started to believe it myself. It is only in unpacking all the complexities here that I can send nuance and compassion to the hurt parts of Corvallis Me who felt like her life partner wasn’t supportive of her life’s needs — which is just another story I tell myself…when really: when have I actually allowed myself to be supported, and when does it stop being enough? Would I ever even allow a partner to move for me? How can gender not play a role in who chooses to bend their lives toward another’s dreams? Is it luck or work or cultural programming that decides whether the story is deemed a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’?
I am aware of the power of my shorthand narratives to color and shape whole swathes of my past, and thus am wary of putting a story (just yet) onto this past year’s series of movements away from Oregon and back towards California.
I moved to LA for a boy,
and to SF for a job,
and to Oregon for my art,
and to LA for…?
Do the “for” reasons matter? Yes, because they fulfill a story itch in our brains.
Do the “for” reasons matter? No, because they can never tell the full story.
I moved to LA,
and then I moved to SF,
and then I moved to Oregon,
and then I moved back to LA.
Every single move, I was following what was most alive for me at the time. Is this version of the story more or less satisfying?
I moved to LA for my life,
and to SF for myself,
and to Oregon for my life,
and then I had to move away from Oregon to get my self back.
By saying Oregon here instead of Corvallis, I am perpetuating the same pattern I complain about wherein everyone thinks I live in Portland. But in my head at the time, I was moving to Oregon, I also didn’t know Corvallis as a place I could name, and so that story has stuck.
By using their colloquial colonial place names, and by not saying Gabrielino/Tongva land, Ramaytush land, and Kalapuyan land, I am perpetuating the erasure of the centuries of genocide that allows colonialists to rename these places at the violent cost of so much life and lineage. Regardless of whether we are immigrant or refugee settlers, we are still settlers on this land.
Ha ha, how very La La Land of us.
Also, this was years before pandemic normalized more remote jobs, and geography was very tied to your job prospects…though I would argue it’s still the case, as I lived in a college town in Oregon where we cyclically said goodbye to people who moved away for jobs after graduation, who might have stayed otherwise.
a classmate who would himself eventually move to Australia!
My graphic novella It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay tells a small part of the grief that LA and Mike were able to help hold in the year after grad school.
As always, a tender, exquisite read. Traveling in England right now and reconnecting with this other half of myself and my culture has me thinking of your project all the time.