“One Strong Belief” Prompt: The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?
In the fall of 2001, I packed up my life and my stuff (basically furniture and 40 boxes of books) and moved 2000 miles to Los Angeles, where I had no family, one acquaintance, and had just gotten a job. I’m sure a lot of people at the time wondered why the hell I was doing such a thing. People are still sometimes visibly surprised to learn that I moved out here without any kind of already existing support network.
Call it my first mid-life crisis. My mom had died, my cat had died, there was political turmoil at my workplace, and I had just turned 35. And I came to the conclusion that even though chance had set me down at birth in a small town in Ohio, that didn’t mean that I had to live my whole life in that part of the world if I didn’t want to. The various changes in my life just acted as a springboard to get me going.
I’ve been here now for 10 years. I always bought into the view of Americans being such a peripatetic population, but from the reactions of a couple of my friends and family members then and even now, I wonder about that. They look at me like I might as well have moved to the moon. It’s just as odd and as far, in their opinion. And me? I’m a midwesterner through and through, *and* I love living in Southern California. I’m glad I did what I did 10 years ago.
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