I never wanted to move to Los Angeles. Sure, I know living in this city is a shimmering dream for a lot of people—there are beaches! And palm trees! And Hollywood! And celebrities! But it was just so far away and so expensive, and I was so, so sick of moving.
I’d grown up on the other side of the country, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The winters were cold, and my love of figure skating made them colder. It seemed I spent my whole childhood in the car, always on the way to the nearest slippery surface. When I got older, my skating career fell apart—and I fell apart too. I lived on the streets, did heroin, went to rehab, went back to heroin, and eventually went to prison. Over the course of all that, I moved from Lancaster to Boston to Reading to Scranton, then crisscrossed New Jersey for a few years before landing in Ithaca, New York. That was where I got arrested and where I returned after two years in prison, at which point I went into journalism. My first job was at the Ithaca Times, followed by a short stint at the New York Daily News, three years at the Houston Chronicle, and a few years at the Marshall Project. By 37, I’d probably only once lived in one apartment for a full year, and I was ready to settle down right where I was—which happened to be in Texas, of all places.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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As a kid growing up in the Northeast, I’d never even considered calling the Lone Star State home. It seemed so foreign—a Wild West of big hats and big hair, teeming with guns, gaudy fashion, and an almost cringeworthy sense of red-state pride. But I fell in love after a single winter in Houston, when I suddenly realized I’d made it to April without needing to buy a snow shovel. My gloves were still buried in a suitcase; my winter coats had been mothballed. The summers were hot. But after a lifetime of cold, that was a trade-off I was willing to make. There were pools in every apartment complex, palm trees scattered across every strip of grass, and little green lizards scurrying along every sidewalk and wall—all things that seemed lush and exotic to my cold New York sensibilities. The places I lived were diverse and progressive and not at all what I had expected based on East Coast stereotypes of southern states. And for a reporter covering criminal justice, Texas seemed like an untilled field of stories waiting to be told. If you want to find a broken government agency to hold accountable, look no further than Texas prisons. Sooner than I would have predicted, I found people who felt like family—and Texas started to feel like home.
Then the Los Angeles Times called, urging me to come be a staff writer. California seemed so far, and I dreaded another move. I now had Texas plates, a pair of boots, and a working understanding of when to use “y’all” in a sentence and when to use “all y’all.” I’d only just finished wrestling with one version of the West, and now I was going to have to confront another, in a place even farther from where I’d come from.
But the Times was the kind of opportunity journalists dream of, and I couldn’t say no. I told myself I would at least try it out, if only so I wouldn’t one day look back in regret. Plus, if I didn’t like it, Texas would still be there.
So in mid-January of 2023, I crammed everything I owned into my car and set off with a friend who was in the middle of a breakup as my copilot. We went from Houston to Austin, then across an endless Texas desert. We talked, we drove, we daydreamed, we cried. We gaped at the never-ending desert valleys with alien rock formations. The cacti looked taller than seemed plausible. The mountains looked bigger than we remembered, drenched in sunlight and a sense of finality. Between us, we’d spent 50 years in Texas—but everything looks different when you’re leaving.
We spent a night in El Paso, then finally reached the state line and drove into New Mexico, then Arizona. By the time we detoured briefly to Las Vegas, we’d taken to driving in near silence as we stared out the windows wide-eyed, dazed by the mile-by-mile realization that maybe we’d somehow made it four decades into life without ever truly understanding wonder: it was the West laid out before us.
As dusk settled in on the fifth day of driving, we crossed the Los Angeles County line, crested a hill, and gasped. The setting sun blanketed the skyline in improbably bold oranges and reds, with all the glittering hopes and riches of Los Angeles lounging coquettishly below it. The buzz of 10 million busy lives filled the air just beyond the splash of our headlights, and the darkening ocean glimmered in the distance.
At this point, it probably sounds like I am going to tell you I fell in love with Los Angeles instantly. I did not. In fact, it took me all of five minutes to start identifying all the things I hated about the place.
Some of them I’d been warned about: Taxes are higher. Everything is expensive as hell. The traffic is life-changingly awful.
But on top of that, the air felt so dry compared with the swamp of Southeast Texas. My body seemed to wither into a husk for a solid year after I moved. I got headaches. My skin flaked. My lips chapped.
From where I landed in West Hollywood, a stone’s throw from the luxury of Beverly Hills, the fixation on wealth and consumption felt so conspicuous it seemed to seep into my subconscious. Between that and the high cost of living, I found myself thinking about money more than ever before. After nearly a decade of southern hospitality, the people seemed rude. Casual acquaintances felt mercenary in ways I never expected. Friends canceled plans at least four times as frequently as in any other place I’d lived. And it wasn’t quite the enlightened paradise I’d been led to believe it was—or at least it didn’t seem that way to a reporter whose beat included the county jails, where I soon learned that the conditions were as bad as in any Texas prison.
And yet…more than a year later, I am still here. I don’t think I love life in Los Angeles—but I am in love with how Los Angeles makes me feel about life.
Initially, I thought maybe it was because of the perpetually perfect weather, or the endless supply of things to do. Then I thought maybe it was the dating scene, with its vast pool of sapphic possibilities. Or maybe it was just that I’m kind of a sucker for hope and L.A. feels like a city of dreams—there are movie landmarks around every corner, and even the streets are famous.
Eventually, I realized it wasn’t any of those. It was something I’d begun to notice all the way back in the West Texas desert, as I struggled to wrap my mind around the sheer scope of scenery I’d only seen in small doses before. But it had taken a while for the word to come to me: it wasn’t wonder; it was awe. Awe is an underrated emotion, one you can go years without feeling or even thinking about once you hit adulthood. I think of awe as something reserved for little kids on Christmas, when they wake up to discover that magic is real. Before I moved here, if you’d asked me to describe all the moments in my life when I’d most clearly felt awe, they would have come from my childhood: The first time I saw the ocean. The first time I visited New York City. The first time I saw the ground from an airplane. The novelty of life made it so easy to see awe everywhere as a kid—and so easy to miss it as an adult.
In the 1970s, when psychologist Paul Ekman described six basic emotions, awe wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t well-defined, and—unlike anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness—it doesn’t have a distinctive facial expression.
It’s only in the past couple of decades that researchers have begun taking awe more seriously. In the early 2000s, a pair of academics—Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt—proposed a definition of this “fleeting and rare” but “little-studied emotion” in a paper published in the scientific journal Cognition and Emotion. “In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” the feeling is characterized by two features, they wrote: vastness and accommodation.
The former is probably self-explanatory, though in this meaning, “vastness” refers to “anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self” and can involve not just physical size but also social or cultural size—such as power or prestige.
The latter feature is arguably the more important part, and it’s what sets awe apart from wonder: it’s the need to adjust your whole mindset to assimilate the presence of something so new and limitless. When the attempt to accommodate such an experience fails, awe can be terrifying. When it succeeds, awe can be enlightening.
“Awe can transform people and reorient their lives, goals and values,” Keltner and Haidt wrote. And because human personalities are fairly static, finding awe can be “one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.”
In Los Angeles, it seems that awe is everywhere. Now I can see that red sunset every night if I want. From the middle of Downtown, I can watch mist rolling off snowcapped mountains. When I walk two blocks to the store, I can glance up at the glittering hills speckled with lush celebrity mansions. From my apartment window, I can see a spread of improbably cartoonish plants I once thought existed only in Dr. Seuss books. It’s not that awe didn’t exist in all the other places I’ve lived—it’s just that it seems so much easier to find in L.A.
Now, whenever people ask me how I like it here, I rattle off my list of grievances and then add, This is the happiest I’ve ever been.•
Keri Blakinger is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and the author of Corrections in Ink. She was named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her magazine story about men on death row in Texas who play Dungeons & Dragons.
