Live from the Golden Coast, Part 4: The Last Night in Los Angeles
I have no idea what to expect when I open the dark wooden door of the office suite — I never would have been able to imagine a jiujitsu gym inside a very old-fashioned office building, but that’s exactly what I found: a jiujitsu gym with the aesthetic vibe of my childhood dentist’s or ophthalmologist's office in suburban New Jersey.
The classes are excellent — the noteworthy black belt isn’t there, but a four-stripe purple belt teaches the fundamentals class and a brown belt teaches the all-levels class, and both of them strike the right balance of warm-up, instruction, drilling, and positional training. In the first class, I’m paired with an old Japanese black belt man for pulling guard and a counter for when the person is pulling guard. For the second class, I’m paired with a brown belt woman who has been training for eight years and is close to my height and weight. We drill sweeps and transitions from the lasso guard. She’s explosive, technical, and no-nonsense. She’s my new north star for what my jiu-jitsu could look like in a little under a decade. The training session is everything that I could hope for out of a gym where I’m a complete stranger: I’m welcomed in like I’m already part of the family, the instruction is great, and the sparring is non-spazzy (not to mention, the drop-in rate was only $25). I leave sweating bullets but with my bones intact and a smile on my face.
After all the rolling around, I get a ride back to my host for the night, the Filmmaker. She and I used to work together as researchers at HBS, and after a long stint of living in Turkey (somewhere around three or four years), she’s finally back in the United States and her fledgling directorial career is starting to gain momentum.
She asks me if I want a snack, and makes us a little platter of Armenian string cheese, a salty feta, olives, tomatoes, and salami. As she catches me up on her life, I notice myself eating the items in front of me very compulsively. I’m tired from not sleeping well last night and from the last two and a half hours of jiujitsu. I’m preemptively exhausted by the 4AM wakeup I’ll have to do tomorrow to catch my flight to San Francisco. Most of all, I’m sad and a little envious of how the Filmmaker is making her creative dreams come true and I’m still on the sidelines of mine, all the while at war with my boss and feeling demotivated to the point of tears about my job (even while on vacation). Reaching for a little more of the Armenian string cheese, I think to myself, “Is this any better than the trip to Peru if it ends with me eating cheese instead of puffed corn cereal to cope with my inner turmoil — in March, about love and relationships, in November, about career and personal fulfillment)?”
At some point when the Filmmaker leaves the room for a few minutes, I break down into tears. I don’t think she notices when she comes back to join me, or maybe she does but chooses not to ask. I don’t want to talk about how much I hate my job again — I’ve already gone through it once with the Birthday Girl and the Musician today and will inevitably go through it a few more times this trip with friends in San Francisco.
I try to focus on the conversation with the Filmmaker instead of the food and the feelings I’m having. We talk about courage, about not making excuses and going out to make things happen, the way that men have no fear of doing in this world but women so often do. We talk about women’s tendencies to create artificial roadblocks to ensure failure or otherwise safeguard against success and its consequences. The Filmmaker is sacrificing everything for the thing she wants to do, disregarding the people who doubt her and staying true to her art and her sense of mission around it. She tells me she is starting to see the tide shift: people who used to call her crazy are beginning to suck up to her.
I often wonder what I’m waiting for when it comes to having the writing career, and then I look at how the Filmmaker is hustling, and I have the answer to my own question. I’m waiting for someone else to give me permission, validation, or something else to chase this dream but it’s not going to come from anyone but me. I have to believe in myself more than anyone else believes in me, to the point where everyone thinks I’m crazy for doing whatever I am doing.
The Filmmaker and I also share a love of skincare products and I mention how her skin is looking good — she tells me that she hasn’t been sleeping much, only uses a few Korean beauty products, but other than that, she hypothesizes that her skin looks good because she’s happy: she’s doing something she loves every day and her joy radiates from the inside out.
She tells me the long story behind how, after living in Istanbul for three or four years, she ended up back in the US studying at the American Film Institute (including shooting a movie in China with actors she flew to Beijing and footage that almost didn’t make it out of the country). She continues to impress me: she is energetic and extroverted and brilliant and she never stops. Even as a full-time student, she’s consulting something like twelve Chinese students for college admissions to pay the bills.
While she’s showering, she asks me to watch one of her movies for a class assignment and offer feedback. The movie, at a high level, is about a relatively timid, older, white woman who ends up becoming engrossed in Indian culture by way of a television show. By exploring her fantasies of this part of her world, she unlocks a more courageous, adventurous part of her identity. I joke with the Filmmaker, who needs a new title for the movie other than “The scarf is a self I wear,” that she should re-title it “Sari, not sorry.”
Midnight approaches and I thank the Filmmaker again for her hospitality as I wish her good night. I sleep with the light on, thinking she is going to split the bed with me at some ungodly hour after she finished working but she never comes in. She’s parked herself on the couch for the night, too generously. I slip out a little after 4AM and duck into an Uber to the airport.
I look out through the car windows at the shadowy silhouettes of palm trees down the 110. I’m afraid that this Prius isn’t meant to go as fast as it’s going down the highway and that this long-haired yogi by day, driver by dusk, is going to inadvertently end us both on this screamingly fast ride to the airport.
I’m sitting in the dark typing on my phone to forget my sense of mortality in this car. Unlike the beginning of the trip, which was full of hope, the middle of the trip is filled with doubt. I think I could be happy here, but this morning, I’m not sure I fully see myself here. Right now, I’m feeling sorry for myself and sad that this place didn’t solve all my problems — the novelty of it all helped me that first day here. Everything regressed to the mean once the vacation magic wore off. In hindsight, I tend to be really down a few days before I get my period, so I’m thinking the dark mood is the result of hormones, not a true impression of my time in Los Angeles.
Instead of dwelling in the depression, as I arrive at LAX — miraculously enough, in one piece — I try to pump myself up for the next leg of my trip. I’m kind of regretting that I have three more days out West instead of a staycation, but by the time I land in San Francisco, I don’t regret being out here.
