Making New Memories in Los Angeles

On my clean slate in California.

Trigger warning: this piece contains descriptions of behaviour related to eating disorders

Have you ever been in the right place…but at the wrong time, and with the wrong people? The recent fires in Los Angeles prompted me to recall both my experiences in this city.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was nineteen, after dreaming of it for all of my teenage years. As soon as I learned about the City of Angels, I knew: this was going to be the place where I built my future. Not only because I spent my childhood dreaming of Hollywood stardom (I know, I know) but also because it seemed like a place that held so much freedom. So much opportunity, all lined with palm trees and bathed in golden light. My head was spinning at the mere idea of living somewhere like that. It seemed lightyears away from my upbringing in icy Stockholm, where I was bullied at school and never quite felt like myself. While standing in sub-zero temperatures at the drab bus stop surrounded by greying snow, I kept repeating to myself that once I got to LA, I’d finally step into the person I was meant to be.

Well, when I get off that plane in 2002, I hardly feel like a new person. Finally enrolling to study Theatre Arts at college, I feel like exactly what I am: a teenager on her own in a vast, terrifying new country filled with dangers lurking everywhere. It’s my first time away from home, and the sheer distance between myself and everything I know is palpable. Walking those dusty, sun-speckled streets, I am so acutely alone. I’d never felt like this before - some days the loneliness is cripplingly painful. My anxiety attacks, which have been appearing on and off for a few years, sink their claws deeper into my defenceless mind.

Photo from my 2019 return to LA. I have no photos from my 2002 time there. But if I remember correctly, the sunsets have not changed at all.

My roommate is a party girl who buys huge vodka bottles, invites strange men into our flat to watch them do lines of cocaine off my course literature, and passes out in the back of countless taxis. We mostly hang out with our next-door neighbour and his weed-dealing friends. I am madly in love with every class I’m taking at the college; school is my happy place and I avoid going home for as long as I can. I spend most of my weekends falling asleep on strangers’ sofas at house parties, learning that when I drink too much, I become sleepy. Starved for attention, I give my phone number to a couple of men who ask, before learning the trick of giving out a fake number. My diet consists of vegetarian burritos from Taco Bell, $1 noodles from the dollar store and the occasional luxury: apples from the farmers’ market. Some days, I exist solely on a bright orange liquid from Ralph’s that was free from calories, sugar, and fat - basically carbonated water with artificial colouring. On occasional mornings, I treat myself to pancakes and hash browns at the college cafeteria, only to purge it all up in a bathroom stall, staring at my bleary-eyed, pimple-stained face in the mirror afterwards. It will all be worth it, I remind myself, when I become My Real Self. I call home and gush about how amazing everything is. I go on auditions where I’m told “we need to do something about the accent” and lose call-backs to the harsh reality of not having a green card. I dance to Nelly at the Santa Monica Bar & Grill and get wasted on apple martinis that random men buy for me. I am locked in someone’s car in Compton. I spend what little money I have on magazines and cheap hair straighteners that do nothing to my hair. I’m told I look like Katie Holmes but does Katie Holmes eat stale donuts at midnight and cry herself to sleep? I get fake nails and can’t stop staring at my hands. I fall desperately in love with a guy who throws me a bone every once in a while and then returns to his army of gorgeous Latina girlfriends. I come home at three a.m from yet another house party and get up at seven to get three buses to my improv class in someone’s West Hollywood basement. That improv class is possibly the best part of my week. I watch the sunrise from the grimy windows of yet another taxi, but I don’t really see it.

I wish someone had taken me to Echo Park. Maybe someone did. I can’t remember.

I leave Los Angeles several pounds heavier and exhausted to my bones. My face is littered with acne and my head is spinning constantly. Waking up to grey skies and old snow once again, my heart despairs. I’m back where I started, and Sweden is my reality. As far as I’m concerned, LA has been just a dream. An illusion. I push the warm nights and apple martinis to the back of my mind.

Fast forward seventeen years.

It is now 2019. I have just sold my book. What better way to spend part of my advance than a trip to LA? I haven’t been back on US soil since I left back in 2002 - since then, I’ve been in recovery for my anxiety and eating disorder, moved to Italy and learned Italian, gotten a university degree, moved to the UK, had a career in the fashion industry and abandoned it to instead work in animal rights, started my own business, and met my husband. He is now sitting next to me on the plane to the City of Angels.

Hello love of my life. I never really left you.

Returning to LA doesn’t feel like a return. It feels like my first trip somewhere new. Because after all, I’m a new person. I am someone who goes to vintage stores on Melrose. Someone who dines at Crossroads Kitchen. Someone who receives a private tour at the only vegan fashion museum in the world. Someone who gets a discount in Moby’s restaurant Little Pine because I work for an animal charity. Someone who has cocktails at the Sunset Strip, in bars where my favourite rock bands partied back in the day. “How are you?” says a man standing next to me at the bar. “I’m great! It’s one of the best nights of my life,” I beam in response. He lets out an echoing laugh. “Then I pity you!”

Watching my husband surf at Venice Beach, I am exhilarated. I’d never seen any human that happy before or since (except for the next time he went surfing. And the time after that). It’s contagious. How could LA ever be anything but a happy place, I ask myself.

One of my favourite two Venices in the world

I go for pizza at Double Zero with a girl I met on the internet whom I credit with having turned me vegan. I very much consider Amy a friend, even if this was our first time meeting face to face. She smiles at me from across the table, looking no different than she does on the pages of my book, which I was proud to interview her for. It’s like we’ve known each other for years. We have - just not in person.

We queue for the telescopes at Griffith Observatory and I see Saturn. Rings and everything. I look out at the sunset from the top of the observatory and feel hot tears in my eyes. Welcome back, the city says. I never really left, I whisper in response.

We take the bus to Las Vegas to celebrate David’s birthday. It’s so hot it feels like having a hairdryer blowing in your face. We walk around at night in 38-degree heat and gamble at the casinos. I win $1.49. David takes photos with showgirls and we end up dancing at a bar into the early hours. We have lunch at The Modern Vegan which I still remember now, six years later. On our way back through the desert, I listen to Bruce Dickinson’s Tears of a Dragon while David sleeps. Release the waves, let it wash over me. Arriving back in LA feels like we’re “home” somehow.

Santa Monica, my spiritual home. And briefly, my actual home.

We go to Santa Monica. I feel the sun on my skin and the waves at my feet. David asks if I want to go see the apartment building where I lived back in 2002 and I shake my head. We walk past the shopping centre where I spent so many afternoons. I have no desire to go in. I stand at the corner of the Third Street Promenade where Santa Monica Bar & Grill once was. David and I have a huge plate of ramen at an outdoor restaurant while a busker gives a lovely performance in the middle of the promenade. His little daughter runs up to hug him after the last song, while his partner films on her phone. Slowly, I erase the anguish I once felt while walking these streets. Instead, brand-new memories are made. I hold David’s hand on the bus. This time, I’m in the right place, at the right time, with the right person. This time, I am the right person. That night, I sleep so soundly, it’s like I’ve never had an anxiety attack before.

The right time, the right place, the right person

On our last day in LA, we go back to Venice Beach. We eat Ben & Jerry’s vegan ice cream and get tattoos. “Half-moons are hard to do,” says Brian, the tattoo artist. “The circle shape is difficult.” He gets it perfectly right nonetheless. I keep touching the plastic wrapping around my arm as we walk home, eager to remove it. Every time I look down on my left wrist, there’s a little reminder of the second chances we get in life, and that no story is really finished unless you want it to be. I cry at the airport, just like I did in 2002, but for completely different reasons.

To help the victims of the LA fires, visit the California Fire Foundation Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.