Dear Los Angeles, I Love You

A love note to LA, reflections on the wildfires, & an apology to the city of dreams....

The fires have me reflecting on everything—absolutely everything—but mostly the concept of home. LA has been my home for the last 15 years (minus the year I lived in New York, 2013-2014), and it’s a place that has given me so much. It’s the place where my entire life began. Watching so many pockets of the city that I love most become decimated, burned to the ground & unlivable has been unspeakably painful… and at the same time, seeing the Angelenos come together has been a sight to be seen.

LA gets such a bad rap for being vapid, surface-level, fake, full of “wannabes” and users and stereotypical Hollywood types who don’t really care about you. My experience has never been that. I mean, those people exist, of course, but in reality they exist everywhere. You learn quickly to steer clear of them. Now, watching the support for the fire victims that has flooded in from every neighborhood, every crevice, of Los Angeles over this last week alone is such a testament to how much love the city has to give. A special kind of person lives in LA (both the transplants & the natives) and never again may we speak ill of those people or call them “superficial”—they are saints, wonderful neighbors, kind-hearted humans with grit and grace, and have shown themselves as such.

Before we get into it, I’ll preface by saying I am one of the lucky ones. My home is very much still standing. The air quality is atrocious and the water is undrinkable, and my lungs will be suffering for quite some time even after just breathing in the air for a mere four days before we evacuated to Sacramento. But I am one of the very lucky few amongst the people I know on the westside who are not more permanently affected. My heart shatters for each & every one of those people. Head to my IG story highlight “LA FIRES” for links & tips for how to best donate and support.

^ image sourced from Pinterest

Now, let’s get into it… a heart spill of all heart spills. A love letter to LA. An apology to my city. I’m already crying.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about when I first moved to LA. I guess I was always destined to live there, even if I had no idea just how destined I was. Looking back, how did I think I was ever going to end up elsewhere? My mom was born in LA, and her entire side of the family has always lived there. My sister also moved to LA when I was young (my siblings are all 14+ years older than me, and she is more than 20 years older than me) and started her life there with my brother-in-law & nieces.

Because of that, I was back and forth on planes to LA before I could even walk. We’d fly into the Burbank airport and take that long, bumper-to-bumper, hot & sticky drive into the valley to stay with family several times a year, all throughout my childhood. My uncle has always lived in Sherman Oaks, my sister in Agoura, and my cousins in Westlake. The Los Angeles valley was always a home away from home. I loved the feeling of being there, and felt like I could tap into the aura and energy of my lifelong idols every time we went into the city—Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol & the like.

Now couple that with my passion for acting (yep, that was my life before the blog life), and obviously LA was the place for me to be. By the time I was in high school, I was spending full summers in LA. First I lived in the Oakwood apartments in Universal City, at New York Film Academy acting school. Mary-Kate & Ashley’s brother was my camp counselor (!) and we’d spend the weekends hiking to the Hollywood Sign or hanging out at Universal City Walk. The Oakwood area was hot, busy, crowded & mildly unsafe at times (lol), but even so, I can’t even describe to you how quickly it felt like home.

^ me on the set of a NYFW film in 2007!! Just a baby! We got to film on an actual Universal lot, very cool. <3

The following summer I lived at USC, in another acting program. I made lifelong friends there and we all formed a pact to move to LA together after graduating high school. Then at 18, I finally did it. I moved to LA. I applied to so many other schools in many other places—Boston, New York, Nor Cal, Florida, Santa Barbara, San Diego, etc. Somehow I *still* didn’t realize LA was simply calling me—like a vibration or a frequency tuning into my heart, calling me home. It was always going to be LA. Duh, Jordan. Duh.

I didn’t get into USC (was heartbroken but it was for the best), but I did get into LMU! When I first moved in, I didn’t like it that much. The city felt big and confusing and kind of stereotypically soul-sucking… but mostly because in all of my free time I went to nightclubs in Hollywood and shops on Melrose, etc. However, by the time I graduated—it was just home. It was more home than my “home” home was. The yoga studios in Santa Monica that had been there for decades were my literal church. The beaches in Malibu were and still are my safe haven. The hole in the wall sushi spots in Venice, the raw vegan haunts that turned me into *who I am*, the flea markets and the farmers markets and the streets from DTLA to the ocean where I first ran the LA Marathon, and so much more just sang to me and slowly but surely became a part of my spirit and soul.

^ falling in love with Dodger stadium as a 17 year old spending the summer at USC

And now, to be honest, watching the fiery destruction and yearning so deeply for places that are no longer there and will never be there again… I feel guilt over the way I have spoken about LA in recent years. Yeah, I actually want to apologize to a city, because I believe in the energy of emotion and that even cities can tune into the feelings of its inhabitants. If Los Angeles were a person, I believe she would be a woman. Not because I’m a woman and women are powerful as shit, but because LA reminds me of “the great mother,” of birthing, of ayahuasca, of nurturing young souls and nursing broken hearts and gently guiding hopefully romantic (in every sense of the word) humans back home toward wherever they may belong.

I am sorry LA, I am so, so sorry, that I spoke negatively about you at any time, even in a joking way. I am sorry that I said, “I just want to get out of the city and live on a farm” (even though that still sounds amazing), or that “LA just sucks after the pandemic, because it changed so much” because it was never anything negative about you, Los Angeles… it was more about how much the world has shifted. It was about the fact that those yoga studios that felt like church to me and crystal shops where I discovered the true nature of my soul are sadly, post-pandemic, all gone. People moved, tides turned. A lot had changed and the energy had shifted. Housing prices skyrocketed, so even people who did extremely well could not even dream of buying a home in one of the coveted neighborhoods, especially on the westside.

Opinions were loud, especially politically, people stopped acting as compassionately as they once did, the streets became far less safe (even in our notoriously refined area, Brentwood) and it at times felt suffocating. But still, I stayed. Even when I jokingly but not-so-jokingly complained. And I stayed because of one simple thing… the PEOPLE. The community. Every single time I tossed around the idea of moving to an idyllic place like Kauai or back to Northern California, I would follow it up with, “But the people. Our whole community is here. Like everyone we love. I could just never leave.” And I really *meant* that. It’s what has kept us in a two-bedroom apartment for the last many years, even as a family of five (yes, I am counting Huddy), just so we could remain in Brentwood amongst so much of what we love and has been home for so long—and now is also home to my babies.

Attie knows everyone in our neighborhood. Every valet guy, every juice bar server, every nanny and kid at the park, every Whole Foods cashier, the waiters at our local restaurants, the farmer’s market vendors—everyone. When we even get within a few streets of our neighborhood, he says, “Oh yay, we’re at the back-home.” (Yes, he calls home ‘back-home’ and it’s the cutest thing in the world.) There has not been one part of me that has been ready to part ways with that familiarity or sense of comfort for him… that of course, also exists for me.

I will never forget running the LA Marathon in 2015. Jonathan paced me, and we weren’t even dating yet. He stopped and ate not one but two hotdogs outside of Dodger Stadium *while* we ran. We jogged through the historic Downtown LA, past Walt Disney concert hall, right through the Hollywood Walk of Fame, into West Hollywood where we stopped at the Orangetheory to go to the bathroom and drink tons of water (miss that old OTF), through to Cenury City, Brentwood, and eventually—23 miles later—we made our way to the ocean.

That marathon was aptly titled back then (before they changed the course), “Stadium to the Sea.” A sight to be seen. I am so glad I got to see LA that way, long before the fires, because it really cemented something in my heart & soul—this city is freaking amazing. It’s made up of so many walks of life, and somehow, some way, it is home to every single one of us. The immigrant families and the multi-generation natives. Not just the celebrities but the every single dreamer & doer & street-corner vendor hustling behind the scenes.

^ my forever idol, in my forever spirit city <3

The artists sketching out their futures and the entrepreneurs building theirs brick by brick. The surfers chasing waves at dawn and the night owls chasing their dreams until sunrise. LA is a kaleidoscope of stories, a place where contradictions collide in the most beautiful way. It’s not perfect, at all, but it’s alive, and it belongs to all of us who dare to call it home. It has a pulsating vibration all on its own, and exists like yet another character who lives there… it’s, quite simply, or should I say SHE, quite simply, is magic.

So with that, I am sorry Los Angeles. I am sorry for anything negative I’ve ever said. I know that words are important, and I will no longer speak ill of you even if I’m joking, or even if I’m having a bad day. You’ve been a home to us all. You’ve held us in your tight embrace as we’ve made our dreams come true and as we’ve gotten our hearts broken and everything in between. You were home to my grandmother when she gave birth to my mother. Just like you are, and will always be, my babies’ home—my little beach babies. My whole heart.

I don’t know where we go from here, or how we will begin to rebuild, but I know we will. I know we have it in us. All of us Angelenos, from the Palisades to Altadena, from the valley to LAX, and everything in between—we are one. An interwoven fabric of glittery dreams & pains we’ve overcome, all cut from the same cloth. We are all here to support one another, and the city, as she begins to rebuild.

I so am grateful that LA called me home all those years ago, and continued to be a beautiful home for me and my community even as we questioned if she was still ‘great’ or if she’d ‘changed too much’ or whatever else. I will not abandon this city anytime soon or likely ever—she has my heart. And together, we will all get through this.

I love you, Los Angeles. And I love you ALL. Anyone who has been affected by the fires or lost their homes, please reach out to me. I am here to help. Grateful for each & every one of you. Thank you, immensely, for reading. <3

P.S. all sales of The Quantum Method this week will go toward wildfire relief funding, so it’s an amazing time to join if you’ve been considering it!! ILY.