Everything is terrible and all of it hurts.
My city's on fire and I'm crying over losing my condo to late stage capitalism.
I drove back from my mom’s place in Arizona on Tuesday, January 7th, the day the fires started. I knew the Pacific Palisades were on fire, but it was far enough from my condo in Tarzana, a suburb of LA in the San Fernando Valley, that I felt safe to return home.
About 90 miles out, strong winds were whipping tumbleweeds and trash across the highway. I could feel them trying to push my car into the next lane. I couldn’t avoid hitting large pieces of random debris, and I worried for my car. But I kept driving.
On 210 W, just south of Sierra Madre, I saw the beginnings of the Eaton Fire, a thin ribbon of flames searing down the mountainside ahead. It looked like a crack in the earth, and the earth was angry. I thought, Wait, what? I’m nowhere near the Palisades. I checked the map. No sign of this random fire. What the hell? Another one?
Later, after spending close to half an hour in gridlock traffic, I saw the remains of a grisly car accident. One of the two cars involved was completely flipped over. Both cars were totaled. The traffic I’d been sitting in was caused by the fact that these broken, twisted cars were still in the lanes they’d crashed in, with all the scared drivers like me straining to see what had happened, shocked to see these smoking wrecks and a man sitting on the shoulder while an emergency services person stood nearby. The man looked shellshocked. He might have been crying.
It felt like driving straight into hell.
I got home safely. The air in Tarzana has been clear thanks to winds from the north blowing the smoke from fires in the Palisades and Woodland Hills south. I didn’t leave my condo again until Friday, January 10th, when I decided not to cancel dinner plans with a friend. I’d been alone with my cat for three days. I needed to see a person.
The place we chose was closed, probably because their staff was affected by evacuation warnings that were popping up in parts of nearby Encino and Sherman Oaks. We ended up at a wonderful spot called Anarbagh in a part of Encino that looked safe.
But as we sat down, alarms shrilled on everyone’s phones. They had just declared a new evacuation warning zone—level 2, meaning get ready to leave fast if you need to—and the border of it was across the street. My friend and I decided to stay and eat dinner anyway. There were several other tables there. The restaurant was fully staffed.
We are living through an unprecedented natural disaster and we are going to dinner at local Indian restaurants as the castles and hills burn.
I love LA. I’ve lived here for just over two years, after over a decade of dreaming about moving here. LA is paradise for creatives who love getting out in nature. I love the caliber of artistic minds that dwell here; every new person you meet is more interesting and talented and visionary than the last. I love making smalltalk with A-list celebrities on the beach whose dogs run right up to you, the basic humanity of these little moments reminding you that everyone, no matter how famous, is just a person. I love the many beaches, and the rainbow of humanity that adorns the shoreline. I love the laidback SoCal vibes and the wide accessibility of woo-woo health foods and witchy life advice. I love how liberal California is, and how very much on the right side of history most of its politicians are. I love riding up the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to Malibu. I love the gorgeous, palatial homes in the wealthier neighborhoods, and how you can see them in all their splendor just by going for a drive. I love the mountains that surround us in almost every direction.I love the sunshine, the Pacific Ocean, the palm trees, the arts and culture scene, the palm trees, the food, the palm trees, the music, the theater, did I mention the palm trees? I love palm trees so damn much. They’re like nature’s pom-poms. I feel like they’re cheering me on every time I see them.
And now LA is on fire. Many of those palatial homes have been reduced to rubble. Palm trees flap their fronds like shredded war flags. And while the news is brimming with horrifying photos and stories of celebrities who’ve lost their homes in the Palisades, far fewer people are talking about the predominantly Black suburb of Altadena burning to the ground, and all the many victims of all of these fires who aren’t wealthy or well-known, who are just normal people trying to get by in a very expensive city.
I think of the homeless people who might’ve been living in camps in those hills. I think of the ones our society has refused to see or care for. How many human souls rose with the smoke and flames that we can’t account for, because no one even knew they were there?
I think of the animals, the wild ones and the abandoned house pets, the deer and birds and the little burrowing animals, the confused, scared dogs and cats and horses, left to fend for themselves by owners who didn’t have enough time to chase them down before the flames engulfed their homes.
I think of how, now and for years to come, driving from Santa Monica to Malibu will be like driving through a graveyard of the daring, bombastic dreams that the people of this city have long aspired to.
I have a smaller, personal grief of my own right now. I met with my realtor to discuss selling my home, a condo I purchased in September 2022, against my sweet husband Jonny’s advice. I was moving out of our beautiful house in Colorado and into a new life where I’d have more autonomy and freedom. We were in a very bad place in our relationship at the time, and I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t trust that he had my best interests at heart, which was a mistake. He did. He was right. Buying this place was a bad idea. Home ownership, once the gold standard of financial prudence and the American Dream, is now a very bad idea, especially in expensive markets that are prone to climate change-worsened natural disasters, like Los Angeles. A friend of mine who went through the same heartbreak I’m going through now warned me over a year ago. She said, “Home ownership is like having a really shitty savings account.”
I wish I had listened to Jonny, but I didn’t. I squeezed together the down payment with money I’d made from a commercial campaign I was voicing and some I borrowed from family members. I got a horrible interest rate, but I was confident I could refinance when rates dropped. I was also confident my commercial campaign would stick with me for another year or two at least, and that I’d be able to book another big job (or three) purely because I was now based in LA, the center of the entertainment industry.
I was wrong on all counts. The commercial campaign started phasing me out as soon as I moved to LA. I did book another big job—I was a playable character in Sony’s $200 million dollar first-person shooter, Concord. For a year, I was certain that job would change my life and push me into a new income bracket, due mostly to the instant fan base I would get from the enthusiastic video game fandom.
Instead, Concord was cancelled and taken offline only two weeks after launch. None of my performance capture work was ever released (although Sony did end up giving me this one sweet little unfinished scene). The biggest job I’ve ever booked got me exactly nowhere, and meanwhile, the entire voice-over industry is shrinking thanks to how lifelike AI voices have gotten in the last two years. It’s terrifying. I’ve never made a living any other way.
As for refinancing, the interest rates rose and rose and never came down for long enough to get it done. I tried three times. Every time rates dipped for a second I’d try to refinance, to no avail. As soon as we got close to closing, they’d rise again, high enough that it was no longer worth it.
You heard it here first: Home ownership is a scam.
I love my condo. I made it so beautiful. This is the first place I’ve lived in on my own that I took the time to really decorate, to really make it look like a place I’m actually living in. It’s colorful and eclectic. It makes me happy every time I walk in the door. And now, in the next few weeks, I have to take all my fun, quirky art down from the walls and “declutter,” which means removing the cutest of my jungle-glam furniture choices and making it look as basic and neutral as possible. I can’t afford to move out entirely while we try to sell, so this is what I have to do: live in a dumbed down version of the home I’ve come to love so much.
So as thousands of people are mourning the loss of their homes to these devastating fires, I’m mourning the loss of my home to everything going wrong that could go wrong in the last two years, and a system that makes it nearly impossible for someone with a middle class income to own their home and be able to keep it.
It’s not the same as losing your home to a fire. Not at all. I feel guilty for feeling this grief when so many others are dealing with a much harder grief, far more out of their control. The grief for my city and the grief for my home are compounding into a massive emotional weight that’s had me stress-dreaming nightly and waking up in tears most mornings for the last week.
I am heartbroken to be selling my beautiful little home so soon after buying it. Financially, it hurts that I’ll barely make back my down payment, and all the money I’ve poured into it the last two years served only to line the pockets of the mortgage lender who forced me to pay mostly interest before letting me attack the tiniest portion of the principal. My ego is sorely bruised from the fact that I couldn’t find a way to make this work, with all my smarts and talent and hustle. And my heart is broken because I love it here. I love this city. I love this condo. I don’t want my time in this sweet little unit to be so short-lived.
You have to understand what this condo meant to me when I bought it. I’d gotten married to someone I’d basically just met in 2019 and moved from New York to Colorado with him. We got married so fast because he had enlisted in the army that summer, and they pay you to be married, which I wrote about here.
So, uh, SHOCKER, we ran into some major relationship issues really fast.
Moving to Colorado made sense to me at the time because I thought I could pivot away from being predominantly a performer to becoming a writer of essays about polyamory, the truth about human sexual and romantic behavior (hint: it ain’t monogamous), and how we love each other in this flawed world. But how do you write about polyamory when polyamory is the reason your shiny new marriage is falling apart?
So I defaulted to my first love: acting. I started teaching acting classes for a studio in Denver and later started my very own donation-based Zoom acting studio. I performed in three plays at regional theaters: WITCH by Jen Silverman (Winnifred), The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa Fasthorse (Alecia—what a JOY!), and Twelfth Night (yes, the Shakespeare one—I was Viola and I played her as a nonbinary person and it was dope as hell). I booked the lead in a sci-fi short, and played a supporting role in an indie pilot, plus my voice-over career was bringing in more dough than I’d ever made before. I was slaying professionally.
But my marriage was crumbling, and emotionally, I was a shell of myself. I couldn’t believe how sideways my relationship with Jonny had gone after such a magical start. (I’m grateful to report that we’ve turned that around, and I can now confirm what people say about marriage being hard…but worth it.) I felt no sense of security in the world. I spent whole days on the couch binging Euphoria and I couldn’t get myself to do anything other than what other people were depending on me to do. Jonny later told me it was like watching a beautiful, lush tree wither and die. For his part, he was so caught up in his own pain that he was often unable to support me. It was a very painful time.
Moving to LA was my vote for life. My vote for myself. Moving to LA was freeing myself from a relationship that, while full of love, had become intolerably stifling for my essence, my creativity, and my value system. Buying this condo proved that I could do the adulting thing without Jonny, whose army job and housing allowance were the only reasons we were able to buy a house in Colorado, a house I loved and that we sold in 2023.
I was heartbroken then, too. I loved that house. We made it so beautiful.
Buying this condo was me choosing to believe that my heartbreak would end and I would be whole again if I chose myself. If I chose life. I filled the space with vibrant life. My life. My vibrance.
I made this place so beautiful.
I’m going to lose my condo. It can’t be avoided. I’m slowly accepting it.
But these devastating wildfires have done something wild to my sense of hope for the world. Let me explain.
In 2022, I played Winnifred in Jen Silverman’s acerbic period comedy, WITCH, based loosely on the 17th century play, The Witch of Edmonton. The lead characters, an ostracized older woman named Elizabeth and Scratch, the literal devil incarnate, spend the entire play in a lively, flirtatious debate over the piece’s central question: Is it possible for things to get better, or should we burn it all to the ground and start from scratch?
This question has come up for me again and again the past few years, as I watch the institutions of the world continue to protect rich white men at almost any cost while disregarding the humanity of everyone else. I have found my heart leaning toward the Burn It All Down option, as much as I try to maintain a positive outlook, as much as I believe in hope as a sustaining daily practice.
But watching huge swaths of LA burn to the ground, I am confronted with what burning it all down actually means. It means losing so much of the beauty of the world. It means innocent victims losing their homes and loved ones. It means the grandest cities ground into dust, torn asunder by the rage of the exploited masses. It means priceless works of art lost forever in piles of ashes, lives and dreams destroyed, toxic smoke filling the air and choking all life.
I don’t want that.
Now I know for sure: I want to make things better. I believe it’s possible to make things better. We don’t need to burn it all down.
We just need to realize how much we all love it here, and how much we love each other. How much we all want the same things.
And we, the 99%, need to rise up together and refuse to tolerate how the 1% hoards resources and makes decisions for the world that negatively impact everyone but them. There is no way around this. This must happen.
There’s a famous poem by Maggie Smith (not the GOAT actress, but the GOAT poet) that I’m sure most of you have read by now, but just in case:
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Every time I read this poem, I cry. It’s true. We could make this place beautiful. We could run it in a way that reflects the universal values of love, compassion, and kindness most people claim to believe in but only apply selectively, to certain in-groups, and that our systems and institutions disregard entirely. We could choose, collectively, as a people, that all human beings are inherently valuable and deserving of basic support and dignity, to include access to education, health care, housing, nutritious food and clean water. We can choose to stop making marginalized groups prove their humanity before we are willing to treat them like people. We have the ability to provide these things to everyone. We could. We could.
Watching LA burn has taught me something powerful. I do not wish to burn it all down.
I wish to make it better.
Great post. If you ever want to talk about finance stuff, I am that white guy but I do know stuff, so feel free to call. I'm on whatsapp. But you sound good.
that poem, at the risk of being too on the nose and/or insensitive, is 🔥Thabk you for sharing. I am sending you hope that things will get better and you will find an even more lovely home to decorate so beautifully!!!