The Gravitational Pull of Cleveland

Or, how to give it all up to chase a dream

I had never laughed so hard at something so fucked up.

We were at our friends Chris and Aryn’s house and we had eaten dinner and Chris was telling us about the time he was a painter for a company that owned nursing homes back in Cleveland. He and his partner would go from one rundown home to another and add a fresh coat of paint to the walls to hide all sorts of building and health code violations.

He described how sometimes they would repaint a room with the resident still in it, still lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, as they maneuvered around them with drop cloths and rollers and… what? You aren’t laughing?

Of course not, it sounds awful. I think it was the extreme awfulness of it that somehow tipped it for me past the merely horrible into the realm of the insanely absurd. Like, how surreal, how poetic, how… funny? It didn’t hurt that Chris also happens to be an incredibly gifted storyteller. So, I just lost it. Tears down my face laughing.

It also didn’t help that relating to things was the way I made sense of the world and this was so beyond anything that I had encountered myself. In a way, it was as if I was listening to fiction. I mean, I had some bad jobs in my life, but you can hardly compare scooping ice cream to what Chris had experienced.

It wasn’t until later that night, when I heard the story of how Chris and Aryn gave up everything to move to Los Angeles, I was finally able to see the flaw with always trying to relate to things to understand them. I mean, my own LA origin story was so boring. I came here for college, the end. Despite being scary to me at the time, it was a risk with a lowercase ‘r’, it was the kind taken with huge guardrails and a safety net in place. I was young, I had no responsibilities of my own, and I had my parents’ support.

What about the people who come risking it all? The ones fighting against everything, including their own fear, to make it here? The ones like Chris and Aryn?

No, I could not relate. But. I could listen.

Cleveland, Ohio

It all starts in Cleveland.

Having never been, Aryn explained to me, “Cleveland's a pretty working class blue collar city. As a kid it felt so ‘Metropolis’, but it's just not, it's super small.“

Aryn grew up near downtown where her Dad worked for HUD¹ and her Mom was an ER nurse, while Chris was from the ‘burbs where his Dad worked at the nearby Ford plant.

Both of them found a love for storytelling when they were young.

Aryn was focused on literature. “I started writing in 4th grade, and by the end of high school I had already written two novels.”

Meanwhile, Chris was focused on film and TV, “I remember being really disappointed with the way the show China Beach ended. So I went in my room, and I fixed it by rewriting the end in my notebook. And I was like… Boom. Nailed it. That’s how it started for me.” By the time he was in high school, he was making making his own movies and writing scripts.

“But, it was still, this is only something you could do for fun. It's a hobby. It's nothing you can do for a living. I wasn't allowed to think like that. When I graduated from high school, it was, ‘Where you gonna work? You gonna go work at the plant with your dad?’ It was stuff like that. Pay for your own college if you wanted to go.”

With her love of writing, when it was time for Aryn to graduate, she had her sights set on New York.

“I wanted to be in New York because, it's the publishing capital of the world. So, when I graduated high school,  I went to my Mom and said, I'm gonna move to New York and It was, “If you go there, you will fail, you will get raped, you will get murdered. I can't be there to save you.  You cannot go.”

Chris had a similar experience. “My Mom did the same thing to me. I said I wanted to move to LA and the next day my Mom said she went to a psychic and the psychic told her that if I moved to LA, I was gonna have a massive asthma attack and die because of the dust and the weather out here.”

Despite being frustrated, Chris and Aryn say they both understood where their parents were coming from, “That's just what our parents knew. ‘That's what you're gonna do because that's what we did and that's what you do here’. If you had roots there, chances are you were never going to leave. You get married, you have kids, you get the house. That's what was, kind of, embedded into your brain.”

They Meet

“We actually met because we started talking about writing - you were working on your book and trying to get published in Cleveland, and I was convinced I was gonna be able to sell a screenplay Cleveland.” Chris laughs at the thought of it now.

They fell in love and got married. “We both had jobs and I remember thinking at some point, I guess this is just what I do now for a living. I’m a painter. This is what life is. And I look forward to the weekends just like everyone does in Cleveland. And as a hobby maybe I'll write stuff from time to time. | did that for five years.”

Meanwhile, Aryn had become a yoga teacher. “I remember sitting in the room with all of my yogi friends and thinking, all I wanna do is write.  And, Chris would come home and talk about how all he wants to do is work on a TV show.”

“We were just kind of like in this weird orbit. I always tell people now everything we want is on the other side of fear.

So, if there's something you want to do and it scares the shit out of you, that's what you should be doing, because that's where all the good stuff is. And instead of approaching the fear, we literally were stuck in a roundabout.

We were going around and around and around.”

The Decision

They bought a house. They had a kid. They did all the things they were supposed to do. Then, one morning, when Chris was up really early, holding their baby, something changed.

“I remember the moment where I had to say, I had to do it. I remember being dressed for work holding him and thinking like,

‘I want him to do whatever he wants to do with his life, even if it means getting away. And I can't, I can't teach him that if I don't live by example.’

And, I remember Aryn coming downstairs and saying, ‘Hey, I think we should move to Los Angeles‘ and I was just like, ‘Fuck it, when do you want to go?’”

The Move

Their parents were not happy. Neither was anyone else they knew, it seemed.

“There was just so much pressure from everybody. Every time I would say, ‘hey, look, I wanna do this’, somebody would have 15 reasons why I shouldn't, and there was something better to do there. Or they would be like, ‘oh, we're not good enough for you. You're leaving us,’” Aryn remembers.

It was a hard time. What made it harder was, even though they had finally made the decision, they still… didn’t know how to leave.

How do you do it?

So, time continued to pass until suddenly… their baby wasn’t a baby anymore. He was three and going to need to start school soon.

“That’s when we looked at each other and we're like, if we put him in school, we're never leaving.” Aryn said. “And I walked upstairs and I bought a plane ticket and I walked downstairs and said, you leave the 12th.”

And just like that, they were finally moving to LA.

Chris, thinking back, “I remember thinking, it's super final now, this is really happening. It was horrifying.”

“Chris flew out to LA and I started packing the house, and then his dad came with us and we drove cross country. We got to Arizona and Chris still hadn't found a house or apartment or anything.”

“And I was in a rest stop and finally he called and he's like, ‘I found a place.’ So, I was like, YES, we're not gonna be homeless!’

Oh my God, it was so stressful.”

Being Here

Xan, their son, loves the ocean.

Photo by Ari He on Unsplash

“I think he's always been a California kid, always. It's almost like he needed to be out here. I feel like he belongs out here.” Chris says.

They’re happy. Aryn states, “This has always felt more like home to me than the house we had actually bought.”

They’ve been in Los Angeles for 13 years now.

Today, Chris is a filmmaker and a VFX producer, Aryn is an author and a genealogist, and Xan is learning animation and watching the waves.

Inspired

Hearing their story reminds me how hard it is to fight against other people’s ideas of what’s expected, of how life ‘should be.’

How hard it is to fight inertia.

And how much harder it is to move towards something, than away. To muster the motivation all on your own to chase a dream, even when everything is working to keep you right where you are.

I can only hope to someday find the inner strength, courage and determination that Chris and Aryn found in themselves to do something that scares the crap out of me.

For now, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that you can be thinking about doing something for years, decades even, but in the end, when it finally happens…

It happens so fast.

In an instant.

As fast as it takes to buy a plane ticket.

1. HUD aka the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.