My love-ish letter to Los Angeles. Part 1 of 3
Note: I’m a few days behind. This was supposed to be my Saturday post. No excuses, I just didn’t get around to it. Sorry. I’ll try to be better at it.
Saturday, September 19, 2020–31 Days to 40
From November 2004 until May 2010, I called Los Angeles home. When I think about that time in my life, I feel... a lot. Lots of things in one container all at the same time. Like a parfait of emotions. It’s heavy layers of joy, melancholy and nostalgia with a big scoop of “what if’s” and a couple dozen sprinkles of “things happen for a reason” on top.
My time in LA was a little less than six years of my life. That’s only 15 percent (thanks percentagecalculator.net!) of my life, but those years in Los Angeles feel far more impactful than that.
I’m trying to keep these posts short, but writing about my time in Los Angeles could really fill up a book. And I would definitely write that book. If you’re a publisher with buckets (or just one, single bucket) of money to throw away on 200 more pages of whatever this is, hit me up. Instead of writing about such an important time period of my life in one just one short blog post, I’m going to spread it out over the next three posts, and I’ll do that by giving some insights into the three layers of that parfait I described in the opening paragraph. We’re going to start with joy, and then go to melancholy and wrap it up with nostalgia and the toppings. Here we go!
Joy
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened. — Not Dr. Seuss, someone else.
Smiles and absolute joy often come to me when I think about those six years in Los Angeles. While there isn’t a magical Hollywood ending to my LA story, it does have quite a few feel-good moments for me, including the amazing friends that are remain in my life, and the things I saw and did that would only happen in Los Angeles.
When you’re moving across country to a very big, very spread out, city like Los Angeles, it’s important to have friends who have your back. I was fortunate to have friends who were already there and happy to help support me in this move. It would’ve been impossible to do it alone. I know this because I was trying to do Boston practically alone prior to my move to LA. I stuck around after college and found myself looking like that gif of Will Smith walking around the empty house wondering where everyone went. My last year in Boston was rough.
I won’t get into all the reasons why that was one of the low points of my life, but I will give you this — my commute to work at a very low-paying first job out of college consisted of standing at a bus stop in Cambridge for 25–45 minutes on cold New England mornings waiting for a connecting bus to drop me off a block away from my office. Shout-out to all the folks who rode the 70 bus in the early ought's like me!
Much of the joy I feel comes from knowing that LA gave me a fresh start. I got out of the darkness and into the bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard the and sun-soaked beaches of Santa Monica, Venice and Manhattan Beach. On the other side of that darkness was a couch in a three bedroom apartment at Pico and Beverly and a friend who let me rest my head there until I eventually figured it out. And I did eventually figure it out, sort of. I think.
There’s joy in knowing I was able to escape a forgettable time and place in my life and into one of the most desirable places to live while also in my 20s, at a time when you have the irrational confidence to try new, really big things. It seems like that fearlessness goes away by the time you reach your 30s. But there’s also joy from the personal and professional accomplishments I had during my time there.
I know things didn’t go exactly as planned, if they did I’d be sitting by one of three pools, shining up one of my Oscars while sending emojis to a group text that consists of my good friends Questlove, Brad Pitt, Bill Murray, Billy Zabka, Bun B, Aubrey Plaza, Roy Choi, Mindy Kaling, Jason Mantzoukas and The Rock. Even so, I can still say I got a lot done but I definitely could’ve done more.
And that leads in perfectly to part two — Melancholy.
Tim Hammill is a communications professional in the nonprofit sector. He’s turning 40 on October 20, 2020. He’s writing about the final stretch to this milestone age in 40 Days to 40, a collection of stories, thoughts, reflections and whatever else comes to mind each day. In addition to writing a blog, Tim has also decided to donate his birthday to This Is My Brave, an organization he very recently learned about that brings stories of mental illness and addiction out of the shadows and into the spotlight. If you’d like to support Tim’s birthday fundraiser, go here.
Additionally, there are three other organizations that are close to Tim’s heart: Save the Children, Stand Up To Cancer and the Bridgeport YMCA. Click on each to learn more and to support their work.
