By Laura Newberry, Illustration: Patrick Hruby, Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2023
For most of my 20s, I bounced from city to city, chasing newspaper jobs and a graduate degree in pursuit of some kind of stability.
I moved between states every two years on average, making a handful of close friends in each place — some of whom I’m still close with, and others who have fallen away because of the distance. I’m so grateful for these relationships, especially during such a formative decade of my life. But my 20s were also characterized by a rootlessness; building community takes time, especially for an introvert like me, and I usually didn’t stick around enough to feel like I trulybelonged.
I’d lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half when the pandemic hit. Once again, I’d made close friends, but I didn’t feel like I was part of a community, which is what I longed for in this city that can feel so vast, fractured and anonymous. And then our worlds shrunk to our households. It felt like being dissociated from such an integral part of what it means to be human, to be face-to-face with loved ones and acquaintances and even strangers.
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