Los Angeles.
My dear, dear Los Angeles.
It has almost been four years since I started living you. Our silly relationship started on a very hot day in the Summer of 2022, when I landed at LAX with three bags and a dream bigger than me.
I do not think I really lived you during the first two years. I steered away from downtown. I did not have a car to drive around and complain about your traffic and your issues. I stayed safe away from you, in Long Beach.
Then, two years ago, everything changed.
I got a job and I started navigating you. In the past two years I moved to Orange County, but I commuted to you every single day. The 405, the 10, the 91, the 105. I navigated them just like I navigated Venice Boulevard, Olympic, Hollywood, and downtown.
A while ago, I took that photo above somewhere on the freeway, through a dusty windshield, the skyline sitting quietly in the background like it had been waiting for me to finally look up.
I think that is what you do, Los Angeles. You wait.
I arrived here certain about a lot of things.
Not arrogantly certain, I want to be precise about that. More like the certainty that comes from studying something deeply in graduate school, from reading the literature, from writing the papers and defending the arguments and having them hold up under scrutiny. I had a framework for understanding the world and it was rigorous and it was mine and I believed in it completely.
And then you started putting me in rooms.
Not all at once. Slowly, the way you do everything: through accumulation, through traffic and time and the particular pressure of a city that never fully stops. A meeting here. A conversation there. A room where someone said something I had not anticipated, and I listened, and my framework shifted slightly, like furniture rearranged in the dark. Nothing dramatic. Just: there is more here than I accounted for.
I had to learn to hold what I knew, next to what I was learning. That is harder than it sounds. There is a comfort in a complete worldview, in knowing where everything belongs. The discomfort of complexity, of finding yourself genuinely uncertain about something you were previously sure of, is not something anyone prepares you for. They prepare you to advocate. They do not always prepare you to be changed by what you encounter while advocating.
You changed me, Los Angeles. Not into someone different. Into someone larger.
I will be honest, the loneliness surprised me most.
I had expected the work to be hard. I had not expected the particular loneliness of the middle, of occupying a position that does not map cleanly onto any existing camp. The spaces that should have felt most familiar sometimes felt the most foreign. The rooms that should have felt foreign sometimes felt like the ones where I could breathe.
That is a disorienting thing to discover about yourself. That belonging is not where you expected to find it. That the people who share your values do not always share your methods, and the people who do not share your values can sometimes share your humanity in ways that matter just as much.
I spent a long time being afraid of that disorientation. Afraid of being wrong. Afraid of being misread. Afraid of saying something in one room that would close a door in another. I moved carefully, which is not the same as moving freely, and I felt the difference even when I could not name it.
There were nights on the commute home, the 405 going south, the sky doing something unreasonable with the light, when I sat in traffic and thought: I do not fully belong anywhere in this conversation. Not on one side, not on the other. Not in the rooms that want me to be angrier, not in the rooms that want me to be quieter.
Just: in the middle. On purpose. Alone in it.
At some point, something shifted.
I cannot tell you exactly when. It was not a single moment but a slow accumulation of rooms navigated, of positions held under pressure, of being told I was wrong and discovering I could survive it. Of getting called things that were meant to sting and realizing, after a moment, that they did not change what I knew to be true about the work.
The fear of not fitting did not disappear. I want to be honest about that. It is still there sometimes, in certain rooms, on certain days. But it stopped being the loudest voice. Something else got louder, something closer to: I know what I have seen. I know what has moved and what has not. I know which rooms produced something real and which ones produced only noise.
That knowledge is worth more than belonging.
I stopped asking whether I fit and started asking whether the work was moving. Those are different questions and they lead to different places.
You gave me things I did not know I needed, Los Angeles.
You gave me growth that did not look like growth while it was happening, the slow, uncomfortable kind that only makes sense in retrospect. You gave me joy on rainy days, which I did not expect. There is something about you in the rain, gray and slow and briefly off duty, that I have come to love more than the version of you everyone photographs.
You gave me exhaustion with purpose. Which is a completely different thing from exhaustion alone, and I have had both, and I know the difference now.
You gave me rooms I had no business being in, that now feel like home. You gave me conversations that should not have been possible. You gave me a version of myself that is less afraid of being in the middle, less afraid of the loneliness that comes with it, less afraid of being told she is wrong.
You gave me the commute, which I complained and still complain about constantly and which I also think is, quietly, where a lot of the thinking has happened. The 405 going north in the morning, the city still waking up. The 110 coming home, the skyline behind me, the dusty windshield between me and everything.
Almost four years in, and I still do not fully know you.
I am not sure that is possible. You are too many cities inside one city, too many contradictions living side by side without resolving into anything neat. You hold them all: the beauty and the damage, the possibility and the exhaustion, the people who are trying and the systems that are failing and the strange, stubborn hope that persists anyway.
Maybe that is why I love you. Maybe that is why the middle feels more like home here than anywhere else I have tried to stand. Because you, Los Angeles, have never pretended to be simple. You have never asked me to be either.
I do not know what comes next. For me or for you or for the work that has wound itself so completely around the years I have spent inside you. One thing I am sure of: I cannot wait to see what else you can teach me.
I took a photo through a dusty windshield on a freeway going somewhere.
And the city was right there.
And I was not afraid.
This essay is part of Pillow Talk: Diary of an Advocate, my newsletter on Substack. If this resonated, you can find more there.