Sexy Times- Totally Not Depressing…

From the moment I decided to leave Los Angeles, a calm washed over me. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace… like maybe my intuition was not so much completely dead as it was beaten down and broken from the last 5 years I spent battling to call this strange city “home.”

The months leading up to the decision were tiresome. My job, though I loved the family who I babysat for over the last 2 years, had completely depleted my social life of late nights out with my filmmaker friends. In fact, since starting at my new job, my tight knit circle of friends who were more like my family, had fallen apart, segmenting into warring fragments and rendering our close bonds difficult to maintain. I had felt like I was on top of the world when I came into knowing these like-minded, hungry individuals. We worked together and put out films and felt like anything was possible if we stuck together. I could act and write and direct at my leisure, and was on a high that would soon come crashing when I confronted the ten plus years I had worked in the film industry without the literal payoff. Was it time to reevaluate? I felt like I was spread so thin, never knowing which direction to go… writing, acting, directing… feeling like every time I made headway in one direction, another would begin to tug, demanding my attention. Was I self-sabotaging? Or maybe I wasn’t good enough. The familiar fears circulated in my head, I wasn’t pretty or brave enough to be an actress, I wasn’t disciplined enough to be a writer, I wasn’t hard working or knowledgeable enough to be a director.

A happy distraction from my disintegrating friend group and dwindling ambitions was my yummy boyfriend, who I half adored and half wanted to kill. We would cycle through phases of being completely smitten with each other, and pushing each other’s buttons, leading to screaming matches and feelings of rage. It was complicated. He has a rare form of epilepsy and takes a horrible medication that, to put it simply, turns him into a huge asshole, but it stops him from having seizures. We were contemplating moving in together for awhile, and then talking about it, but the months leading up to the move, it was all becoming real and it seemed like there was something menacing lingering in the air, making it seem like an impossible feat. We tried, we planned, but the more we talked about it, the more stressful it became. There were so many things that were all coming to surface, the nearer the move got, but something needed to happen because my landlord had finally figured out a way to price me out of my beautiful, but mostly broken down apartment. In the span of 5 years since I had moved in, the price went about $2100 to $3000, mirroring the quickly rising market price, and on a millennial’s salary I could no longer afford it. So I finally had to give up the place that I loved and had spent the years shaping into some semblance of a home.

New Years Eve came and time was ticking and I was afraid to make any concrete resolutions, already dreading the inevitable part of 2019 where I would be forced to face all of the things that I did not achieve. Last year, it was rewriting the pilot script I had been passionately plugging away at. It was taking every ounce of my energy to get the story just right, and in the time it took me to work through draft #5, Netflix dropped “Sex Education,” which told much of the same story as my, “Sexpert.” Sobbing through episode 2 and recognizing that the characters were on a very similar journey as mine were meant to be, I decided to shelve it. The thought still gives me anxiety and I can’t help but feel like I’m a failure for not having finished, although I know in my heart I will get to it eventually.

So as New Years approached, I contemplated goals that were more abstract… enough to prevent me from facing my usual November/December shame spiral. I believe that forming a meditation practice and connecting with some sort of spirituality for the first time in my adult life (which for me mostly centers on the magic of science) had something to do with my new set of goals. I wanted to live for the day, and make decisions around what was new and scary and adventurous, and would fill me with a sense of fulfillment and love. I was tired of living like every day was just menial step on a path towards achieving some kind of trivial success. I thought long and hard about what I love most in life… the things I might regret most once my fragile existence comes to an end. I thought of family. I thought of my mom, my dad. When I think about my mother, my heart aches knowing that I might one day have to live on this earth without her. I thought about the delicious meals my dad cooks, and wished I had learned more when I had the chance. I thought about my adorable young niece and nephew who live only 15 minutes away from my parent’s house, on the other side of the country, another 15 minutes from the beautiful beaches of Jupiter Florida. I thought of home.

And I thought of adventure. I thought of traveling and seeing the world, and of all the things I used to dream about as a child… living in the wilderness, learning new languages and testing the limits on things that are possible for humans to experience on earth, the bluest of waters, the brightest of cities, the cutest of animals, each day completely new.

For months leading up to my move I felt conflicted. I knew I had a yearning to take a break from the life that was unfolding in front of me without my knowledge or consent, but comfort and fear held me steady, tempting me to stay put and not make waves.

Then, one morning after days of rain, at 6am, I took the infamous 110 N on my way to work in my 2004 Scion Xa, when the car hydroplaned. It sent me skidding across the 3-lane highway towards a barrier and I braced myself for impact, hyper aware that I had no control over what happened next. I stayed alert and when the car bounced off of the cement barrier and spun back into the middle lane and the air bags deployed, I was miraculously untouched, and thankful for the young gentleman who had pulled over in front of me and let me know he was on the phone with 911 reporting the accident. He asked if I was okay enough for him to take his leave because his pet rat was in the car and on its way to surgery.

My poor car, my first car, my car that had kept me safe over the last 15 years, had lived in New York City with me and had traveled across the country a number of times, had finally died, and saved my life in the process.

I was fragile throughout the rest of the morning. I was fragile when my sister arrived at my apartment a few hours later, fresh off the plane from Australia where she currently calls home. I was fragile when we both laid in bed and Skype’d with our mom, and fragile when my mom told us that she has breast cancer and my dad has prostate cancer. 

Then, I was not so fragile anymore because somewhere inside of me I suddenly knew what was next. I was going back to the birth place of the “Florida Man,” and the same city where Robert Craft was just busted for soliciting sex.

I was going home.