October 2010 –
When you first decide to move to any new city it’s exhilarating. You’ve made a huge choice for your life and for your career and you’re ready to make the steps to get going. The easiest mistake to make first is to blow head first into somewhere new with no plan or to focus solely on your career in the beginning.
Now, I’ll be referencing my story in LA because that’s what I know. If you remember, I said that a million people come to LA every year. I also said that a million people leave. Which means a million people come to act, write, or be somewhere in the industry and they leave to go back home within the first year. Do you want to be one of the ones to leave?
So, the first several blogs will focus completely on actually getting to LA and staying there. The practical side of the experience. First, I’ll tell you what I did, then how to do it better… (This is long, so I’m breaking it up into several parts.)
HOW I MADE THE MOVE TO LA:
A little background… I’m 24 years old and I moved to LA over 6 months ago. The plan, initially, was not to move here for 5 years. See, I had been dating someone for over two years and we were engaged at the time. I was living in Lakeland Florida and working at a church as an assistant media director. I had graduated a year earlier from a college that I attended in Lakeland called Southeastern University. I had two degrees. One in Practical Theology (As compared to the impractical degree I could have gotten?) and the other in Television and Radio Broadcasting. My focus was primarily on film and script writing. I had become a short film maker in college and I had continued shooting shorts in my post-graduate life. I would still meet my film maker friends, raise some cash and make short films. This is what I loved to do… Act, write, and direct.
At the time my future wife and I had already decided on an apartment in the area and we were going to tough it out in Lakeland (where I couldn’t stand living) in order for her to graduate a year after me (May 2nd, 2010) to stay behind and possibly get a job at our old college. This wasn’t what I wanted, but I was going to deal with it because I loved her and we didn’t have any money to move across country anyhow.
In the following month, Obama decided that college students should get some extra cash for being in school and gave a tax bonus to young people. This is where the government handed me a fat check of $2000. I was sooo happy about this. I had plans to buy a Canon 7D for shooting short films in the area and I was ready to keep investing in my films.
However… After getting this money, I received a phone call from the apartment I had been accepted to and they relayed a message that they were now increasing their rates of living. Which completely knocked us out of being able to afford to live there. The plan to move there was on May 2nd (The day my fiancé was graduating) and it was the end of April that I got this message.
It’s ok I thought… I’ll just ask my boss for a raise. What I didn’t mention earlier is that my boss and I didn’t see eye to eye. We tried to, but we had different ideas about the job and we clashed on many issues. Recently though, things had been getting better and I figured that we could work something out. The next day I went in to work and spoke to my boss about a raise. He calmly stood up, closed the door, and told me that things just weren’t working out, that he’d have to let me go. He’d let me keep the job though, until I found a new one.
In the same day, I had just lost where I was going to live and my job. All of this happened in less than a few weeks before I had to move out of the apartment that I was currently in.
So, after a LONG conversation with my mentor (A guy named Dave DeBorde that was one of my college professors) and a few prayers, I decided that I was moving to LA now, instead of 5 years from now. The only question was whether my fiancé would kill me or not…
Fortunately for me, she agreed that it was time and that I needed to go. I called two of my best friends from back home and to my astonishment the two of them were already moving to LA at the end of May and I was invited to join along. Kind-of crazy really. So, I went to my fiancé’s graduation, packed up all my crap, and moved back to Alabama for a month, to plan the trip with my friends.
Did I mention that I was planning on getting married to my fiancé on July 10th of that year?
Yeah. So, I was moving to LA for almost a month and a half before I got married to prepare a place for her. A little risky, but I was excited.
When I got to Alabama, our lame excuse for planning began…
To be continued…
