Experiencing an existential crisis within two weeks of graduating from high school and within two hours of moving to Los Angeles is not exactly the most exhilarating avenue by which to jump into what they say is the quote real world unquote. You’d think it’s obvious that the reason so many people feel such brooding apprehension towards moving away from home and family and starting over is that it is So Fucking Difficult. That did not, however, occur to me until I was one thousand miles south of everything I knew, finally putting my true place on this planet into a sharp and painful perspective: I am nobody.
As a brief aside from what I hope will become more like a blog to keep track of meaningful experiences and to update friends and family on my exploits here in Los Angeles, I’ll pose a question: what makes you who you are? Had I asked addressed that question more thoroughly before leaving, things might not have been so difficult, because I realized that I placed the majority of my identity, my Tyler Webbness, in the roles that I took nearly two decades to establish: Son. Brother. Friend. Confidante. Classmate. Student. It was so easy to place my identity in the way people saw me and how I actively affected them on a day-to-day basis. And regardless of what I believed to be true, that it is my responsibility to create who I am, I neglected the fact that my identity was in fact not self-originated but rather almost an exclusive product of my history, my facticity, that which I had been born into, and those with whom I was associated by default. Even the stories I’d chosen to reject affected me in a way that did not occur to me until, honestly, yesterday. And so when I finally got here and looked around and realized that oh my god I don’t know anybody, raw, existential capital-A Angst – the kind which I’d read about but never experienced – took up residence in my head, permeating my consciousness, sitting on the forefront of my cognition, parasitic and tortuous. Simply put, having no identity is no barrel of monkeys.
Where am I? Empirically speaking, I’m sitting on my bed in the Flamingo Motel, North Hollywood. There’s no wi-fi, so what you read now was first a Word document, copied and pasted into Blogspot. I’m going back and forth between writing here and reading Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I picked up from the Iliad bookshop on Vineland yesterday for three bucks and tax, along with Robert Altman’s screenplay for the movie Short Cuts which, if you haven’t seen it yet, I would suggest a fair viewing for some insight into part of what really drew me here in the first place. We pulled into Van Nuys at around 4:30 Tuesday afternoon. After checking out an apartment which turned out to sit outside of the loop of what we thought we were looking for, Tyler and I made our way into North Hollywood and booked a motel. Since then, we’ve been wrestling with our petty, unsexy existential crises and emotional conundrums while trying to find out what the hell we’re really looking for. I would say things got much better today. This is the first night in which I haven’t felt like falling asleep for the sake of escapism; hence, the ability to blog.
As a brief aside from what I hope will become more like a blog to keep track of meaningful experiences and to update friends and family on my exploits here in Los Angeles, I’ll pose a question: what makes you who you are? Had I asked addressed that question more thoroughly before leaving, things might not have been so difficult, because I realized that I placed the majority of my identity, my Tyler Webbness, in the roles that I took nearly two decades to establish: Son. Brother. Friend. Confidante. Classmate. Student. It was so easy to place my identity in the way people saw me and how I actively affected them on a day-to-day basis. And regardless of what I believed to be true, that it is my responsibility to create who I am, I neglected the fact that my identity was in fact not self-originated but rather almost an exclusive product of my history, my facticity, that which I had been born into, and those with whom I was associated by default. Even the stories I’d chosen to reject affected me in a way that did not occur to me until, honestly, yesterday. And so when I finally got here and looked around and realized that oh my god I don’t know anybody, raw, existential capital-A Angst – the kind which I’d read about but never experienced – took up residence in my head, permeating my consciousness, sitting on the forefront of my cognition, parasitic and tortuous. Simply put, having no identity is no barrel of monkeys.
And so but anyway, it’s been a couple of days now and I’ve simply said yes. I’ve said yes to Angst, yes to self-origination, yes to the anguish of utterly inescapable freedom. As Annie Ross wails so soulfully in Altman’s take on life in the City of Angels, “I’m a prisoner of life.” And that’s okay. I was all along. You are too. But it just comes down to acknowledging it. And it isn’t easy to ignore when you’re alone in a city of four million people after 18 years of the same routine. So I’ll stop preaching now and wrap this up.
What matters now is that from this moment on, the stories I choose to accept and those I choose to reject will play an active role in determining the kind of person I will be in months, years, decades. Now that freedom has been granted, so has responsibility. And so the pressure to make something of myself, something good, looms, alive and pulsing. I'm in for the long haul.
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