What It Means to Be Stranded
I took the commuter train from Dublin to Galway, about a 2.5-hour trek each way. Not bad, I thought. I got a coffee and a donut at the train station and enjoyed the exact view I’d been yearning for on my train ride to the west coast: green, cows and sheep.
On the train ride back to Dublin early that evening, about thirty or so minutes into our ride, the train came to a stop and stayed that way… for a while. Eventually, the conductor (a warm and cheery woman) came out to inform us that there had been an accident on the tracks ahead and that she was, frankly, unsure of what the next steps were. After some more waiting, we were told to exit the train and wait outside the station for more next steps. I looked up at the sign at the train station as we exited, not that it meant anything to me, and saw that it read (in English and then in Irish below it), “Woodlawn (Móta)”.
I know now that Woodlawn/Móta is still in County Galway, not even halfway to Dublin. All I knew at the time (what with spotty cell service and being a foreigner) was that it seemed to be the middle-ish of Ireland in the countryside. Fortunately, the views from this train station parking lot were absolutely beautiful (probably more so to me than to the locals just wanting to get home on a Tuesday). As I stood there in Woodlawn/Móta, staring out over the lush tall grass and weeds with no clear way of getting back to Dublin, I thought about how there were far worse places to be stranded. Then I thought about all the times I’ve convinced myself I was “lost” in Los Angeles, how that was probably not entirely true.
Lately I’ve been finding comfort in rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as her words hit different when you find yourself living in the state she’s writing about. I keep coming back to one passage in particular:
[…] California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
– Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter”
After I moved here, a gradual existential realization started to formulate. If you are a fellow Los Angeles transplant, your early experience in the city might go something like this: You say you’re moving to LA and everyone (who doesn’t live in LA but maybe did once, or has family or friends who still do) warns you about how “horrible” of a city it is, how sprawling and big it is, how isolating it is, how everyone there is “just looking for fame,” how the people are opportunistic and also fake. At some point in your LA journey, you might realize that much of this cynical advice (which you’d confidently scoffed at before) has varying degrees of truth to it. And not only that, but you are now one of those people unconsciously perpetuating this specific, negative stereotype about a vast and complicated city. You start to ask yourself some very hard questions, such as, “Am I opportunistic?” (Yes.) “Am I obsessed with the idea of Celebrity?” (Yup1.) “Am I power-hungry?” (No! I couldn’t be… but wait. Yes. Yes, I am…2) “Am I elusively chasing something greater than myself with no real idea of how to get there?” (Always! But more so here!)
All difficult questions, of which I am weirdly glad I answered honestly to myself. In the end, it is not LA’s fault that I moved here and pinned all my biggest ambitions and dreams onto the place for reasons I can’t quite articulate. It is also not LA’s fault that I randomly chose to live in a neighborhood nobody’s heard of next to the freeway in The Valley3. It is not LA’s fault that I choose to stay isolated sometimes during an anxiety/self-pity spiral. And it is certainly not LA’s fault that I told myself all of these vague hopes and dreams had to happen here, and SOON – or else…! Or else what, exactly?
“[…] because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
And yet here I was alone in a foreign country, on another continent, at a train station with no train, surrounded by strangers, and I didn’t feel lonely or failing or even lost at all. I just felt at peace, or something like it. Maybe, sometimes, “feeling lost” is a self-perpetuated myth, a hollow kind of whine covering up what we really want to cry out: “I am changing and I am growing and you know what, it turns out it’s actually really fucking hard!”
And maybe, sometimes, you need to catapult yourself into new situations, new places, to realize these sorts of things. For there are far worse places to be “stranded,” whatever that means.
…a Capricorn
thrilled to report this is changing for the better soon!