I Love You, LA
Reflections on 15 years of living in the city of dreams
It feels strange to be writing this, especially after recently moving away from Los Angeles, but the horrific wildfires in Southern California inspired me to take a moment to share just what this city meant to me during my time there (and how it still has my heart even now).
To talk about my time in LA, I have to go back to the beginning to provide a little context. Growing up, being in Southern California was my dream, probably due to my obsession with The Karate Kid back then. I saw the story of Daniel LaRusso and his single mom making this big change (circumstances similar to my own), and it made the idea of living in California feel accessible in ways I hadn’t really ever seen before. Cali was supposed to be for the fancy people, the well-to-dos — you get it. But The Karate Kid made it feel like even someone like me (a kid from a trailer park living near O’Hare Airport) could also one day enjoy the same opportunity as the LaRussos. In that moment, a dream was born, and it took more than 20 years to be able to fulfill it.
My first visit to Los Angeles happened in 2007, which is the very same year I embarked on my “official” writing career. I just remember even in that first hour, as I was perilously fighting traffic on the 405 freeway after leaving LAX, I was completely enamored. I can’t really explain it but there’s just something about Los Angeles that when it gets its hooks in you, that’s it. You better start figuring out how to get there because that is your fate now. And that’s exactly what happened during that 2007 trip.
At that point in my life, things weren’t going very well. I was in a marriage that I just wasn’t invested in at that point for a myriad of reasons I don’t need to go into here — suffice to say, I was living up to the expectations of so many other people and I had lost sight of just who I was as a person. I had nothing that was “me” anymore, just what everyone thought I should be, and I realized over time just how many of my own goals and aspirations I had sacrificed in order to live the life everyone else thought I should be living. I was a mess and I needed to figure it all out. That trip in 2007 changed everything for me.
While I was there, I hung out with a friend of mine from my high school days who worked at the same convenience store I did when I was a teen. He had moved to LA years before to pursue a music career (the band did some cool things!), and it was evident to me that my childhood dream and my desire to find balance in my adulthood were intersecting in some rather interesting ways. I remember on my last night on that trip, my friend and I headed out to the PCH to drive around and we stopped at a beach to just hang out and chat. He and I had been through so much in the ‘90s and he was the only person that I felt like I could admit to all the “horrible” things going on in my head: I wanted out of my marriage. I wanted to get back to writing (a passion of mine since age 6). I wanted more out of life. And I wanted to be in LA. And it was in that discussion that I knew just what I had to do, regardless of how painful it was all going to be.
Flash forward to April 2009. Somehow, I did it all. I had started writing online about horror and had begun to find my footing in the world of horror even though I wasn’t a huge personality or knew a ton of people. My divorce went through on my birthday in March 2009 (coincidentally enough, the very same day my ex and I started dating in HS in 1996), I was watching two houses go into foreclosure (this is a long story in itself, but let’s just say I got “bullied” into going through with the second house, and oops! our first house didn’t sell because of the housing market crash), I had just been let go from my job as the company I was working for was struggling, and I was basically starting my life over.
As it just so happened, at the end of March 2009, I had a trip already planned to visit LA that I decided to take even though I was unemployed. Fate stepped in, and I scored a job interview during that trip, and in 5 days, I came back to Illinois, packed up my life, moved my kitties to my mom’s temporarily, and made the move to LA. Even now, nearly 16 years later, I still cannot believe I did that.
But it was amazing from the get-go. I was regularly working with this great publicist at the time, Ed Peters, who was always encouraging me to go out to events, and it was like being thrown into the deep end of the coolest pool ever. So many people welcomed me into the fold, and putting myself out there into the LA horror community led to me finding the love of my life, Brian — something I will always be grateful for.
Over time though, as I continued to settle in, Southern California became so much more to me than just the things I was doing and experiencing that were related to writing about horror. Some of it was just immersing myself in different communities (I originally lived in the Echo Park/Silverlake area, which was amazing, then moved out to the Valley, and continued to explore areas from there). We had a lot of movie-related traditions that developed over the years (I mean, I did live 20 minutes from both the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street houses as well as Daniel LaRusso’s apartment), but there were so many other aspects of living in Los Angeles that became the foundation of so many other traditions in my life.
One of the biggest things was taking drives on the PCH. Anyone who knows me knows just how much the movie Point Break means to me, and something that Brian and I started doing in the wake of losing his mom in 2010 was to take coastal drives just to decompress and recenter ourselves. This might sound like some hippie crap, but there’s just something about being near the ocean that gives you the best healing vibes ever (and driving on Topanga Canyon to get over there always felt like a dream to me — how could this wonderfully offbeat area full of art and lush greenery still be in the LA area?). As Patrick Swayze said in Point Break, “It’s that place where you lose yourself and you find yourself,” and that’s how I felt about heading out to the Coast (this sentiment applies to my feelings about LA in general, too).
But these drives became something we would do several times a year (I spent so many birthdays eating pizza at the beach during sunset), and I’m just so beyond heartbroken that these areas that meant (and still mean) so much to us are now facing such unthinkable devastation.
Something else that became a huge thing in our household was all of the different Christmas lights neighborhoods that you could find pretty much anywhere. Burbank, Torrance, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, Alta Dena, El Segundo, Woodland Hills — they are everywhere. This is something we embarked on in our first Christmas together in 2009 and our efforts in finding all the best lights continued through Christmas 2023. We almost drove out this year, but our budget held us back. We won’t be making the same mistake in 2025.
It might seem superficial to pin so much on just going to look at lights, but what always made those experiences so special were the people living in those communities who would invite people in and allow us to celebrate the season alongside them and their families. Two areas in particular that we really love are Hastings Ranch and Christmas Tree Lane, and parts of these areas have been ravaged by the Eaton Fire. My heart breaks for those communities too, because these are people who do so much to make others feel welcome and they’ve lost so much in the wake of these fires.
When we decided to move out of Los Angeles this past fall, it wasn’t an easy decision by any means. The life that I spent more than 15 years building in Southern California transformed me in ways that I could never properly summarize with mere words. I owe so much to my time in Los Angeles, and I will always be grateful for all that it gave to me. For years, LA was my home, for better or worse, and unfortunately, in the last few years, the worse began outweighing the better, and changes had to be made.
As I watched on in horror over the last few weeks when the fires were raging (and now, keeping up with so many people still contending with fires and the devastation that these disasters left in their wake), my heart just hurts for the people of Los Angeles (all of Southern California, really). The coolest thing about LA is that each area truly feels like these small, niche communities (especially if you live in a large apartment complex where suddenly, you have 100 new friends out of nowhere) despite how enormous Los Angeles truly is, and while people may have issues with each other, they will always step up for others because it’s the Los Angelenos way.
It’s a place where so many people come to follow their dreams, because the people and the vibes of the city of LA make it feel so accessible and full of endless possibilities. It makes me so mad when I see folks disparaging the “California Elites” as if those folks make up a significant portion of Los Angeles’ demographic. More often than not, the people I knew and met were folks who were there looking for a shot at a better life, and were working hard to try and make that happen however they could (myself included). These are the people who made me feel so welcome and like I belonged in LA for more than 15 years (in both big and small ways), and those are the people I have been thinking about throughout these horrendous fires. I can only hope that one day soon they can start dreaming again.
Resources to help support the LA Fires:
LAUSD Education Foundation’s Emergency Relief Fund
Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s California Wildfires Recovery Fund
Great piece. I’ve never been to LA but seeing this horrible situation used as an excuse to bash the city and its residents is mentally nauseous. Glad to see so many people like Heather, Dana Gould, Patton Oswalt speaking up for those who lives have are impacted by the fires has been a glimmer of compassion in current world state we’re suffering from.
Well done, Heather! You’re awesome and your story kicks ass!