The story of me leaving LA and deciding to move to New York
It seem like you can change your life when you're 39
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I am a very slow writer—I started writing this just before New Years’, when I thought people would be thinking about changing their lives. I wanted to write about getting out of a bad situation that felt hopeless, giving up on a plan that had been worked on for many years, and starting over at an age, 39, when it feels embarrassing not to have even the most basic elements of life in place: where you live, what you do for a living, who you’re close to. And I wanted to tell you, from the other side, how almost unbelievably well it’s worked out. I have been in New York now for 16 months, and at around Month 4 I started saying “every month has been better than the last.” I did not expect I would still be saying that at Month 16. I know it has to plateau at some point—plateauing after the first few months would have been totally acceptable, actually! That’s all I needed! I just didn’t want to be in hell!—but for now, it’s still getting better. This is maybe what it looks like to be where you’re supposed to be, around people you’re supposed to be around, in a job that suits you, in a place that plays to your strengths. I never knew!
I do want to write up my current life in New York more, but I’ll mostly have to leave that to future posts—this post ends with me at my parents’ house in Kingston. For now though, I’ll just say that in moving here an old screenwriting saw finally clicked into place—the one about differentiating what a character “needs” from what they “want.” Maybe this is embarrassing to admit, but I never understood that distinction before; I just didn’t have anything to map onto it. Now I do. I pursued ‘moving to New York’ as a shiny object, a symbol of status I understood only the movie version of, the place-from-which-Ladybird-calls-her-mother-and-looks-back-at-Sacramento. A desire, especially for a shiny object, is maybe by nature unfulfillable—these are just drives we have, to want things, and we all know hitting goals and getting shiny things doesn’t make us happy. On the other hand, as I’m thinking about it, something you “need” is probably just something lower on the Maslow hierarchy, and maybe it’s something you’ve gone without for so long that you haven’t really had a choice but to pretend like you don’t need it. Maybe something like community, maybe people you feel understand you; maybe something like love.
Since moving to New York, I’ve met some people who aren’t happy here. Especially when I first got here, fresh off four years of six-month stints in quite different cities around the world, I would rant at people about how they didn’t have to live here if they didn’t like it—there are a lot of places to live! Many of them very different from New York! And I still think that’s true, but I understand how hard it is to drop your whole life and move—especially if you’re, say, in your mid-30s or later. I guess I just want to say that places are really different from each other, the values and status hierarchies and vibes are really different, and I want to submit my story as evidence that it can actually work out if you pick up and move to a new place.
Having said that, of course I understand there are limitations—unfortunately, picking up and moving to a new city definitely wouldn’t work for any of my New York friends. They have to stay :(
File under: give up sooner; iterate faster; FAFO; you can probably make big changes in your life at a later age than you think; find your people; passion counts for a lot; play to your strengths.
Here’s the story.
1/11 — SILVER LAKE DESPAIR
On the night of July 1st, 2022, I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and went into my living room and sat at my electric keyboard that looked down on the massive bougainvillea bush in the alley across from me, lit starkly by the one streetlight down on Berkeley Avenue. Under my reflection in the black window, I played a few chords in a loop, and started singing a song, or kind of more like a chant—the single lyric was “lay me down into the pond my son”—which to me, was about my father dying. I was close to as lonely as I’ve ever been. I wrote some things in an email to myself, and one of those things was “I want to be around people I love.”
I had been unemployed for two months. The next day, I completed a week-long work test as part of an application for a job I would not ultimately get. In the evening, as the sun set behind the hillside estates, I walked around the dirt path of the Silver Lake Reservoir, alone. I was 39. I started thinking ahead to my 40th birthday, and what I would want it to look like, the people I would want to see there. Eventually I thought: whatever it is, it’s not in LA. I need to move. And then, thinking about the night before, I emailed myself again:
And what is the force of a revelation? That “I want to be around people I love”? How much weight does it carry? How much power does it have to steer my actions?
And if my conscious revelations aren't steering my actions, what is?
2/11 — WHAT LA WAS LIKE FOR ME
I had been living in Los Angeles for almost exactly one year, since June 26, 2021. I had moved there to try to make a living as a screenwriter. I had not made much progress, and I was not happy. I had polished a Rick & Morty spec script (they crash-land in a TikTok hype house during covid), but hadn’t sent it to anyone, mostly due to depression, but also a fairly acute lack of time and energy—I was working long, unpaid overtime hours as a junior web developer, making, pre-tax, the equivalent of USD$32k, after two raises, and I would crash on the weekends.
I liked nothing about LA. A clip came out two days ago of Chloë Sevigny on Los Angeles. She doesn’t like it!
The last place I wanna live is Los Angeles. I feel like there’s a lot of driving, I feel like it’s very isolating. I find it very bright, I find the sunshine monotonous. I don’t like how dry it is, I don’t like how hard the water is. I don’t like that it’s a town built around the industry that I work in, it makes me feel very self-conscious and uncomfortable in my own skin, I don’t like the terrain, I don’t like the vegetation.
I agree with all of this, but would go further, in that, in general, I didn’t like the people. I had a realization about how America works: unlike smaller countries with a single metropolis, the US is multipolar—the Bay is for tech; finance, New York; politics, DC; film, LA; etc. This is a great thing about America, and means there are many different ways to be ‘at the top’. However, it also means that if you’re in the wrong place, you’re really in the wrong place. Every American with sufficient optionality can choose to live wherever they want from a very young age, and this means that a place like LA is filled with people who have chosen to live in LA. (Canada, for reference, does not work like this. Industries aren’t specialized geographically in the same way.) I was shocked at what that entailed—the stereotypes were so much more true than I was expecting: pretty much everyone watched a lot of TV and went to the beach and didn’t read books. Even those who ‘hated it’, like a woman I went on a date with who grew up there and talked caustically about the vapid Hollywood aspirants who flooded her city, had no vision for a different ‘good life’—she was in real estate and depressed. Another woman I went on a date with who talked shit about LA—and I was not encouraging this! I was still hopeful about my dreams there!—was a reality TV producer who had a specialist come to her house to give her IV injections when she had hangovers. Even these LA people who hated LA were so much more LA than anyone I’d ever met outside LA. It’s really hard to opt out of a system you live in.
I did have some friends I liked there, mostly writers and artists and academics who I was connected to through my MFA or my networks in Toronto and New York—but because LA is not the place for (prose) writers and academics, being in that scene felt like being a member of a put-upon minority group—the overall vibe was sour, struggling, depressed, hopeless, people vaguely aware they’re living the wrong life, and not really sure how to change.
I made stabs at meeting ‘industry’ people, but those I met seemed not especially excited to meet me, and I didn’t feel especially compelled to be around them. Perhaps the most successful ‘industry’ person I encountered I met completely by accident: he was a friend of a friend at a beach in Malibu, where I’d gone with some Canadian artists to experience the rolling hills and hang out on the beach for the day. This industry guy was also Canadian. He had TV money now and a wife and two kids, and he talked about how surreal it would be, with his Ontario roots, for his kids to grow up going to Malibu High School. He might be a perfectly nice person, but at the time I couldn’t imagine anyone more bland. He had moved to LA in his early 20s, and now was a staff writer on a show. He seemed like the kind of guy who had just slogged it out, drifting up the ladder by simply refraining from having a psychic break in the Lassens parking lot for many years in a row. He and I and our mutual friend treaded water in the turquoise waves while talking about Wim Hof and dietary supplements while the girls nibbled health snacks in their bikinis on the shore.
3/11 — MY HALF-HEARTED EFFORTS, 2010-2022, TO BECOME A SCREENWRITER, WHICH WAS A THING I DIDN’T REALLY WANT TO DO BUT WHICH NONETHELESS SEEMED LIKE THE ONLY OPTION AVAILABLE TO ME
Moving to LA was the culmination of a very long plan to become a screenwriter that had started in 2010, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, when I was 27. I had moved down there to do a creative writing MFA with the idea that the default career path would probably be “creative writing professor.” When I arrived, however, I’d been shocked at what a low quality of life even the tenured professors seemed to have—compared to the life I’d just left behind. In Toronto, I had been managing an illegal DIY art venue (Double Double Land) with three of my funniest friends, throwing multiple events a week at the epicenter of a community of the best artists in the city, while in one of the most fecund writing eras of my life (almost all of my best short stories were written in 2008 and 2009 and the first half of 2010). We regularly hosted our favorite artists and musicians from across North America, and occasionally Europe. Our first event was a book launch for Eileen Myles, who I considered a top tier writer by any standard. I was in a relationship with a woman I loved. My life was really good, and I knew it.
My professors, by contrast, were living in a small college town that appeared to offer exactly none of the things I liked about life, in one of the poorest, most dilapidated states in the union, whose major events were football games and the gatherings in the parking lots before those football games. And these professors were the winners of the famously competitive academic job market. I immediately decided ‘writing professor’ was not the career path for me.
What, then, was the next best thing, if I wanted to make a living doing a kind of writing that was even remotely interesting to me?
My solution was to become a screenwriter.
So, I started trying to force myself to work on screenplays. At graduation—four years later—having made almost no progress in any screenplays, mostly because I still thought I’d be able to be a hobbyist novelist, so I spent all my free time working on novels—I couldn’t figure out a way to stay in the US, and I returned to Toronto.
In 2014, at the age of 31, expelled from my country of choice, working for minimum wage as a popcorn popper at the circus, I hatched what in retrospect was a stupefyingly onerous plan. It had 3 parts:
Move to LA to become a screenwriter.
In order to do that, qualify for a visa, which, since screenwriting credits seemed impossible to get, would require me to become a journalist, which is something I was already adjacent to.
Acquire enough money to live in LA, which journalism wouldn’t provide, so figure out some other job to do on top of that.
Slogging through these steps took up my next seven years. In order to ‘become a screenwriter’, I followed what seemed to be the consensus advice of the handful of people I knew even remotely familiar with the industry: make a web series. I started plotting what would become Miss Misery in early 2016, wrote it in 2017, shot it in 2018, and released it in 2019. In order to become a journalist and thereby qualify for an O-1, I quit the well-paying restaurant job I had by 2016 to pitch magazine editors on stories like “Maddi of #ImNotKiddingMaddi opens up about Hillary, Bernie, and Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’,” for which I would be paid, if I was lucky, the equivalent of about three hours of server wages. And in 2020, in order to be able to afford Los Angeles rent, I enrolled in an online coding bootcamp and became a web developer.
By the summer of 2021, I finally had enough money to move back to America, and a CV with enough stuff on it to qualify for an O-1. For the entire second half of this 2014-2021 era I’d been living out of a suitcase, in France and London and Oslo and Athens and occasionally in New York, but in the spring of 2021 I had returned to Canada to get vaccinated, and was back in a 3-month sublet in a Soviet-style concrete block where immigrant families packed into one-bedrooms in Toronto’s St. James Town.
I still didn’t have the O-1 in June 2021, when I left for LA as a tourist, but I knew I wouldn’t have the motivation to go through with the months-long favors-begging marathon if I wasn’t physically in the United States. I was approved for the visa in December 2021, and officially ‘moved’ to the US in January 2022. But by that time, the few friends I had in LA were already starting to abandon the city, leaving at a rate of about one a month. As it turned out, I was not the only one having a bad time in LA.
4/11 — LAID OFF; AT LOOSE ENDS; LEGALLY REQUIRED TO WRITE FOR A LIVING
Just before I left for the US, I was laid off from my my coding job. This was good for me, ultimately. It forced me to try harder to do what I wanted to do. When I got a coding job ten days after graduating from a web dev bootcamp in January 2021, after 14 years of trying and failing to write a novel, I had a wholly unexpected epiphany: it might actually be better to succeed in an area you don’t care about than fail in an area you care about, because not feeling like a total failure and loser is one of the best feelings in the world.
However, as it happened, when I got laid off, I felt immense relief, because then I could give up this life I knew to be false and go back to trying to do things I actually wanted to do. In any case there were other factors at play: it’s true I had enjoyed some feelings of competence and achievement and financial security while coding, but I wasn’t supposed to be doing that kind of work in America on the visa I was on, which was specifically for writing work, and so my time as a coder came to an end, and I started applying to writing-related jobs—things like writing for news shows in Hollywood, writing a blog for a crypto company, and so on. There were no obviously good options, but I’ve always been pretty good at getting jobs, and I was looking around.
5/11 — SASHA CAME TO VISIT
In April, my friend Sasha came to sleep on my couch for ten days. His marriage was ending, and we talked about a lot of things during that time. Sasha’s visit had two important effects for me:
He got me to look more seriously at effective altruism, which I’d been vaguely aware of (I would sometimes recommend the 80k website to friends looking for work) without really understanding what it was, and this has influenced a lot of my life since, both socially and professionally. The day after Sasha left, I spent 5 weeks in Salt Lake City, where I read The Precipice, Strangers Drowning, The Scout Mindset, Expert Political Judgment, Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Righteous Mind, 30% of a tedious history of the concept of existential risk called X-Risk, and many EA forum posts. I applied to jobs I saw on the EA forum, and when I returned to LA, I went to the June LA monthly meetup, where I met the man people affectionately refer to as “tofu guy.”
The day before he left, as a thank-you for letting him crash, Sasha took me out to dinner at Bar Restaurant, a “neo bistro” on Sunset Boulevard, after which we walked from Silver Lake to Echo Park, along Sunset. As we crossed the bridge over Alvarado Street we stopped, and Sasha waxed lyrical about his marriage ending, and how his romance with his soon-to-be ex-wife had had an early era in Echo Park, and how also, funnily enough, the first time he’d visited LA had been for a girl he’d met while bartending in Toronto who’d invited him out to Echo Park. And so much had happened since then, and it had all culminated, he said with some disbelief, in him living out in the California desert with no one but his wife for the past year. He looked at me and said, “My life is so weird, Steve.”
We talked about next steps. He said he didn’t really know his own; he might go to Mexico, or maybe it was time for a “European arc.” Then he asked what I would do, now that I’d lost my job.
I said I didn’t really know, but one thing that had been brought into sharp relief by spending ten days in a row with one of the best friends I’d ever had—him—was how empty my life was in Los Angeles, and how thoroughly my plan for this city was failing.“What exactly was that plan?”
I told him about my multi-year many-step Rube Goldberg-esque screenwriting plan that I was never even enthusiastic about, I just thought it was my only chance of having a job I’d like, with maybe a marginal chance of having my stories and autofictions, whatever their medium, worming their way off the bench and into the zeitgeist.
This is when Sasha said something which has probably affected my last two years as much as effective altruisim: he said he never thought more than a year in advance. “I basically navigate the world by vibes, smelling out opportunity, people, places where I’m wanted.”
Later, after I’d moved to New York and my stock response to being asked why I’d done so became “because I felt like it,” this philosophy is actually what was behind that answer. In truth, I had tried really, really hard to do something, and I had failed—I didn’t even come close to not-failing. And furthermore, and more importantly—I actually didn’t want my plan to work. I don’t think it’s too controversial to say I had talent for screenwriting—I think Miss Misery’s awards are evidence of that—but I didn’t have enthusiasm for it, and everything about the associated lifestyle, at least as practiced in Los Angeles, made me want to kill myself. So, when I heard Sasha advocate for a more vibes-forward approach to decision-making, and saw how well it had been working for him (all things considered), I finally abandoned what had seemed to me to be the only viable path to an artistic career, which I’d been grinding away at unhappily for a very important decade of my incoming-generating years, and set about looking for a life—any life—in which I might be happy.
6/11 — I DECIDED TO SPEND A WEEK IN NEW YORK
After May in Utah, I spent June back in LA. Mid-June, a friend I know through old Kingston friends, Dustin, told me he was taking a trip to London, did I want to stay in his New York apartment? I declined the offer initially. I had to work! I had to apply to jobs! But then two weeks passed, two more weeks of applying for jobs, jogging around the reservoir, incanting to myself songs about my father dying with 40th birthday looming—and on July 3rd, I reasoned I was already flying to Newfoundland for a wedding, I could just leave a week early, and I could apply for jobs in New York too. As it happened, I told Dustin I’d reconsidered literally 30 minutes before he had to leave his apartment to get to the airport, giving him just enough time to drop his keys in a little lockbox at the bodega around the corner. On July 6th, 2022, I flew to New York.
7/11 — I BECAME HAPPY
I became happy while standing on the hardwood floor of Dustin’s narrow 35-foot-ceilings Facebook-money loft above a Buddhist temple in the neighborhood of Manhattan called Dimes Square while listening to PJ Harvey’s “We Float” and drinking a takeout coffee from the little bakery around the corner which I purchased the first morning I woke up there—July 7th, 2022. I gave myself an hour to lounge and loaf and watch the video of Adam Driver in-character singing “Alive” from the Stephen Sondheim musical Company about five times, and then I watched the Dean Jones version from 1978, Original Broadway Recording, and, after a long period of dormancy in Los Angeles, my imagination returned to me, and I imagined a closeted gay man who lived in Syracuse in 1978 driving to what would be his first musical through the snow with his pregnant wife and he is planning on telling, or thinking of telling his wife he’s gay, when they get in an accident on the icy road and his wife goes into labor, and he never gets to see the Sondheim, which he knows a lot about, and he watches his wife give birth there in the dark on the side of the road amidst the neon jackets of emergency workers in the snow and the flashing lights, halfway between New York City and nowhere, and he knows he will never break out of his lie of a life, but he is happy to have a son.
8/11 — I NOTICED THAT I HAD BECOME HAPPY
And I had so rarely been happy, and this felt important to notice. Certainly in the year I’d been in LA, I’d been really exceptionally miserable. And in general—awful to say, awful to think about, awful to think about saying in view of people I shared life with during that time—I was not particularly happy between 2010 and 2022. In 2010, at the age of 27, leaving Toronto for Alabama, I had abandoned every aspect of one of the best lifestyles anyone has probably ever had—to ‘grind’. My grind was this: trying to move to America, so that I would have even a fighting chance of having a writing career.
Whoosh—that grind obliterated the last three years of my twenties plus almost my entire thirties.
9/11 — THE REST OF MY WEEK IN NEW YORK, INVOLVING A GAY WEDDING UPSTATE AND A FATEFUL PARTY IN EAST WILLIAMSBURG
That week in New York, I Zoom-interviewed for jobs in Dustin’s Dimes Square apartment, saw a couple friends, and was invited, last minute, by Candystore, an MFA friend, to their wedding upstate, 45 minutes up the Southeast corridor of the Metro-North. I had my wedding clothes with me anyway, so I rode the train up. It was at a charming old ramshackle farmhouse. There was no actual ceremony; the couple had actually eloped a year earlier. But it had been covid, and not time for a party. I talked to some very sweet gays and sang Jewel’s “You Belong To Me” on a piano on a makeshift stage on an old upright piano that was half out of tune and wheeled out of the barn for the occasion. People sang along. Lena Dunham was there. It was sweet.
At what point did I decide to move to New York? It had been the frontrunner for a while, at least since the previous December, when my friend Dara left LA for New York and I’d said “I’ll probably see you there in six months.” But it certainly picked up certainty points as the week progressed. The day after Candystore’s wedding—July 10, 2022—I went to a for-me very fateful party in East Williamsburg at a coliving space not unlike my own Double Double Land called Fractal, back when they used to have Sunday night dinners, open to whoever was plugged in enough to know about them. I didn’t know a soul—I just knew these dinners existed because of Twitter. That was typical—most people, when asked, said they were “from Twitter.” There were at least 60 or 70 people packed into that apartment, and a counter overflowing with black plastic takeout trays of matted pad Thai. That night, I met Dmitri Brereton, a charismatic 25-year-old who invited me to something he was starting with James Quiambao that they were calling the Olive Tree Writing Club, which I would end up at a lot in 2023, and that same night I also witnessed Daniel Golliher, squatting on a tiny stool in the living room of that McKibbon Loft, deliver a three-minute lightning talk about a class he was starting called Maximum New York, which I enrolled in that fall and is where I met my friend Uri, and through him, many of the people I’m currently closest to.
I also (probably) got covid for the first time at this party.
10/11 — Extricating myself from my LA sublet
On July 16, I flew from New York to Toronto, canceled what was supposed to be my first in-person meeting with Eli Speigel, a guy I’d never met who had made a short film out of my book of short stories, because I was feeling sick, and the next morning, after telling the groom I felt sick but being cajoled, I flew to Newfoundland to attend the wedding of my old friend Oliver. I learned (or it became obvious) I had covid pretty much as soon as I got off the plane, and spent three days in Oliver’s basement.
As I wrote in “Life of Zengo”:
in that cool quiet basement, hearing the sounds of women and children thud and shriek throughout the house—Oliver had four or five kids, and was about to marry their mother—my heart, though sick, was distinctly full, and this made me realize how deliriously unhappy I’d been waking up alone on that broken bed frame in Silver Lake, the physical toll the sadness had been taking on the hollow muscular organ in my chest. My ambition, I felt, was murdering me, and I should not let it. I arranged to sublet the McCollum house on a week’s notice from a lawn chair on Oliver’s wraparound porch in Paradise, Newfoundland, beside two large white styrofoam coolers of leftover wedding beer, and after that I only went back to Los Angeles to pack up my things.
11/11 — BACK IN THE BIOME
I flew back to Los Angeles on July 22, had one last beer with Patty, my last friend in the city, on the narrow second-floor porch of 1632 McCullum Place, sold all my stuff, went to another wedding real quick in Utah July 30-31 (my fourth of five weddings that summer), drove from Kanab to LA with MFA friends on July 31, and the next day, Aug 1, I flew to Toronto, and a few nights later, I got a bus to Kingston, where I slept in the guest room of my parents’ house which is on a leafy street a stone’s throw from the sea-like shore of Lake Ontario.
For four weeks I applied to jobs and looked for apartments. I hadn’t worked in about four months and had burned my savings down almost to zero, but in those four weeks I got two short-term writing contracts: one with an effective altruist org, and another, through a friend, with an ed-tech company. This would be enough so that I could be sure of about two months of living expenses. Good enough for me.
On August 20, I went for a walk on a dark and cloudy afternoon down to the water, beside the lake that looks like an ocean, with heavy storm clouds crushing the lake and white seafoam frothing the waves and wet rocks, and I thought, this is what beauty and truth is, not a sunny beach. There’s no God on a turquoise beach, no immanence in Malibu. And I knew I was back in the biome I was made for, and ten days later, September 1, 2022, I was in a bedroom of an AirBnB share house in Jersey City, which for the purposes of this story I am calling New York.
Loved this post. The comments about the miserable life of writing professors were so apt.