“Should I leave L.A. after one year?”

I’ve featured Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis before here and here. Cary is funny, smart, and often deals with the challenges people have trying to lead the ‘creative’ lifestyle. The question today comes from a young person who moved to L.A. to break into the film business.

Dear Cary,

I hate my life. Not in an interesting, deep loathing of great unfathomable difficulties, but more a hopelessness at the unfulfilling and dull day-to-day boredom of trying to make the meager check from my mindless bore of a job stretch to cover my expenses.

I live in Los Angeles. I’ve been here almost a year, trying to get into the film industry. It was once my great dream, and now it seems that I’ve merely moved to a land where everyone is shallow, miserable and hates their career. That or, like me, they are poor, talented and unable to find something with even the hope of moving up in the world.

My mother wants me to move “back home” to the Deep South. It was a place I never liked, but it’s been so long since I lived there, it’s hard to think of it as home so much as a place my family lives. The idea of living there isn’t anathema to me, but there are no jobs there. A future there would not be the bright overwhelming future that sustained me in my dark moments of adolescence. Miserable I may have been, but there was always my own brilliant future. Terrible, traumatic, awful things happened to me, but when I wanted to die, the promise of being something kept me going. I don’t see a way to that brilliant future anymore; I’ve no dreams left to believe in, nothing seems to make me any happier.

I am dreadfully smart and creative, unfortunately talented in many directions, leading to mostly distraction from focusing on any one thing. I am lonely, but antisocial; needy, but distant; desiring of stability, but emotionally unstable and easily bored. I am young, far too young to have given up on my own happiness, but too much a pessimist to deny how miserable my life is making me.

I ran away from middle school by changing school districts, from high school by going far away for college, from college by going further away to graduate school, and graduate school by running from one coast to the other. And I daily try to escape all of that by reading, watching, writing, drawing and any other thing with little base in reality.

To move back home means to give up on this career I’ve spent so much time and money on, to give up on a creative career. I do not know what someone will pay me to do back there. I’ve no reason to think I’d be happier except that I’d have a larger support network of family. Do I stay in L.A. and hope an economic turnaround makes it more possible for me to live a dream I’m not sure is mine anymore? Or do I return home a failure?

In Search of a New Dream

And how does Cary respond?

Dear Searcher,

I have three things to say to you. The first is: Stay in L.A. The second is: Consider the paradoxical fact that as you get closer to your dream it seems farther away. And the third is: You are unhappy because your needs are not being met.

You can read the rest here.

Anybody out there considering moving to L.A.? Anybody who has moved to L.A. in the last couple of years to pursue breaking into the entertainment business?

And how much you want to bet that the letter-writer has aspirations to be a screenwriter?


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