I Hate LA

It’s finally here! After many requests, encouraging words, comments and just being plain ole yelled at, I have finally decided to write it all out to give you a glimpse of some of the ridiculousness that I experience daily. I wasn’t avoiding the task of writing down my experiences to share with you all, it’s just so much. As a creative, I am constantly sifting through YouTube videos that tell me that I should find my niche, but what if being all over the place is my niche?

What if my self-diagnosed ADHD is the thing that sets me apart or makes me relatable? What if my story resonates because it’s a bunch of black girls trying to figure it all out when they have everything going on, all of the time? Those black girls turn into black women just like me. Black women that are just trying to figure it all out while doing all of the things, wondering if they will ever find their niche.

I don’t know where to start. If you are new to my world, you will quickly find out that I have traveled and lived all over the US. I’m constantly jumping into new adventures and my life can have some very real twists and turns. All of that has brought me to LA. A place I knew I wouldn’t be a fan of, but BABYYYY! I hate this place. Yes! You read that right. Okay. Let’s start there. I HATE LA!

If you have navigated to find your way to this blog, you have already discovered that I am a single black woman from Toledo, Ohio. I’m in my early 40s, 42 exactly. I am a Taurus sun & moon; I like spontaneity and security…. - Children are not a part of my current chapter, well none that have been expelled from my womb – but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t eventually going to be in the book. And yep, I know this is starting to read like a dating app, but it’s all relevant or will be somewhere down the line. Especially the dating app thing and womb part, but more importantly, you are learning that my colorful demographics may help lead you to why I think LA is just not the place for me.

A lot of people move here to follow their dreams of being a part of the entertainment industry or maybe because the weather is better than almost everywhere else. Some people move here because it seems like a place where you can just be yourself and live wild and free, I just came because I could. That was my first mistake. I was so tired of the uphill battles that I was fighting during the pandemic, that I decided to take the easy route for the first time in my life and the consequence of that is that I landed in a place I hate.

I have a part-time job at an airline, and they had a spot open. I had a place to stay already lined up. The new place would be only 10 minutes away from the airport, so I didn’t have to worry about traffic, and I had plenty of family that lived less than a few miles away. It was seemingly the perfect destination to relax for once. I thought I could breathe after we had finally made it to the tail end of a global pandemic that had us all literally holding our breath for three years.

What I didn’t plan for was the audacious racism, sexism, and classism, and I'm not always sure which one I’m being exposed to at that moment. There was no way to know that I’d be experiencing constant microaggressions, the post-pandemic culture, and the dating pool that’s being peed in as we speak. I was clueless about being too black or not black enough – depending on how you define blackness. I even managed to throw myself into a job hunt that made me immediately decide to go ahead and just freelance full-time.

Each day I am just outdone by the lack of service, misinformation, disorganization, and confusion that I am subjected to, and I know it can’t just be me, but it leads me to write it all down to share with you from my vantage point. It’s either that, or me yelling at the person that just cut me off in traffic, or cussing out the DMV employee that told me that I didn’t need to do any the of things that he told me to do on the last visit – my 8th visit by the way ….. I think sharing my story with you all is a better coping mechanism.

Keep up with me as I give you a weekly glimpse into my life, and why I hate LA, yet somehow, I seem to work it all out.