Living at Home

a reflection on the year i lived at home

I’ve been listening to Olivia Rodrigo‘s album Sour & trying to remember what it’s like to be seventeen again. When I was still living at home, returning Curtis’s calls, & starting therapy (for the first time). When the only things I really cared about was the prom I planned, my AP English Language & Composition class, & whether or not I was going to be on the Homecoming Court my senior year. When rent was a musical I had never seen instead of a Venmo caption & when my friends & I went to In-N-Out three times a week because I had a car & we had nothing better to do & nowhere better to go & not enough money for anything else.

I wasn’t on Homecoming court, by the way.

& I didn’t cry about it…but I did cry in relation to not being on Homecoming Court.

*

I remember when I got my driver’s license—I almost started crying when the woman in my passenger seat told me I passed. I felt the biggest wave of relief & a deeper sense of freedom, even though it would just be me & my little brother, Matthew, in my car for a while. California has a one-year provisional license law & I was told very clearly I would be following that law. That meant I could drive no one else, other than family members unless there was someone over twenty-five in the car. & it’s not like I was friends with any twenty-five-year-olds when I was sixteen (even though one of my friends was, in fact, dating her band teacher. I can’t believe I thought that was okay back then.).

After only having my driver’s license for about a week & against my will, my older brother, Dillon, made me start driving him to parties any time he was visiting home from USC. I can’t tell who was more excited about my license in the first place…Dillon loved having a built-in designated driver.

I didn’t drink at all in high school, but I smoke weed for about a year. I was California Sober before I had the terminology. But I mostly kept my drug habits a secret because I had a reputation to uphold as a La Cañada Royal Court Princess. Can you believe that I was the bad influence friend for a second there?

I quit smoking once I started hallucinating & having phantom-stabbing pains every time. I tried to make it work, but I couldn’t.

I have considered making it work a few times since then, but I was never successful.

*

Not that I really had it, but I spent a lot of my free time driving around in high school. I went out on drives after school constantly. I learned all the street names in my hometown, became familiar with all the biggest houses, & uncovered all the coolest places to hang out with my friends. AKA every lookout & hilltop.

Once I felt like my driving habits outgrew my hometown, I started driving to the Griffith Observatory & the Hollywood sign…regularly. I wouldn’t even really hang out there, I just wanted to see them & remind myself how lucky I was to grow up in Los Angeles. Luckily for me & my mom’s general wellness, this was before Find My Friends. I don’t think anyone knew where I was for sure.

The first time I ran a stop sign I immediately pulled over & waited 5 minutes for the cops to come ticket me. My anxiety was pretty bad in high school.

I got pulled over exactly once & it was actually a pretty funny story. My friends & I were coming back from In-N-Out after a football game where the theme was “blackout” so we were all wearing all black and a few of us had black stripes under our eyes (blackout is a very bad theme for a school in a community that is 0.8% Black). After I dropped off my friend Ella from her house, I pulled into the medical center parking lot across from her house to do a U-turn and then pulled out of the parking lot and left to drop off my other friends & their respective houses. Out of nowhere, I realized a cop was following me and was trying to pull me over. I had no idea what I did wrong. When the cop approached my car, they started asking me all about the medical center l, why I pulled into the parking lot, and what I was doing. I told him I was simply dropping off my friend at her house, but the cop accused us of having the intent of breaking into the medical center since they had seen a few burglaries recently. He said he was sure we pulled into the parking lot, saw him, and decided to leave immediately. I was dumbfounded that he thought a bunch of sixteen & seventeen year olds would try that, but I’m sure our outfits & painted faces didn’t help. I explained that we had just gotten back from In-N-Out (showed him my lemon-up cup) & we were dressed in black because of the football game theme (showed him the flyer on Instagram). He started laughing & let us go.

*

By the time I graduated, I had been told by multiple people on multiple occasions that I had the worst car in the parking lot. There was something about living in a rich LA suburb, yet driving an Acura from 1999 with sun-faded paint all over the top of it made people feel fine about telling me that. I was even “love tapped” by someone in the parking lot once & was so unbothered that I didn’t even get out of my car. Truthfully, I didn’t care about the condition of my car. I was very proud to have a tape player. As long as it got me from point A to point B, I was fine.

I wasn’t allowed to have a car in college until I was a senior because Dillon didn’t have a car in college until his senior year (AKA when I left for LMU I just gave Dillon the Acura & it graduated from the crappiest car at La Cañada High School to the crappiest car at USC) (also Matthew is a junior & currently has a car in Oregon, so we definitely know who the favorite is). But luckily for me, Dillon had a few flights out of LAX my freshman year of college & we made a pact: he’d drive to LMU from USC, I’d drive him to LAX, & I’d get to keep the Acura until he landed a few days later. Over the course of my freshman year, I got three parking tickets, but it was awesome having my Acura for a few days every so often.

The Acura died at the beginning of my sophomore year of college and my dad sold it to our favorite local auto works shop for the balance on his account, $180. I posted on Instagram about its death. I loved that car even though it didn’t have an aux <3

During my junior year, I had the same pact I had with Dillon with my parents. They drove to my apartment, I drove them to LAX, & I got to keep a car, the seafoam C-max, for a week. But this time, instead of spending too much on parking or getting parking tickets, I ran into some other trouble. Rather, trouble ran into me, Someone decided to smash into the passenger side of my car at the Lincoln & Manchester intersection while they made an illegal right turn on red. I cried. A lot. But I got lucky—it wasn’t totaled, we got it repaired, & my parents let me keep it for the summer & the rest of my senior year & every single day since college has ended up until this moment (even though there was a period of time my parents were going to take it away from me & the thought of being separated from it traumatized me). If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting my seafoam c-max, I’m sorry! In the words of my friend Yacko, it’s the most Lizzie car you’ll ever see.

*

I graduated college in 2020, the first wave of COVID grads. However, I stayed in my college house until our lease ended at the end of June 2020 & instead of moving home right away, I went on a road trip to Utah.

My friends dropped me off in La Cañada on July 3, 2020. When I moved to college, my parents dropped me off. When I moved back to my parents, college dropped me off. It was my perfect, full-circle moment in the screenplay that is my life. I didn’t cry when they drove away. I actually felt incredibly optimistic about the phase of my life I was about to enter.

Moving home had always been my plan & my parents’ expectation, pandemic or not. Dillon, who graduated college three years before I did, had still been living in my childhood bedroom that my mom redid for him since his college days & I figured I’d try to last as long as he did, too. It seemed like a really good opportunity to still live in sorta-Los-Angeles while also saving money. I knew this was the time to really start saving money.

When I moved home, I wasn’t allowed to kick Dillon out of the bedroom I grew up in. It was across the hall & a lifetime away. But I still found myself surrounded by elementary school yearbooks & photos of people I hadn’t seen or really spoken to in years. A lot of it is happy memories, a lot of it isn’t. How I think about high school fully depends on the day.

My plan for moving home went as follows:

Step 1: Join a church. Most likely St. Bede’s or La Cañada Presbyterian Church. Which one I would commit to would fully depend on how Catholic I wanted to be post-grad, which was up in the air. Step 1 also included leaving Cornerstone Church Westchester, a church I had been attending just under 9 months. I knew how to join a new church, but I didn’t know how to leave one.

Step 2: Get involved in Young Life or some local ministry. Preferably high school ministry. For some reason I could clearly see myself ministering at local coffee shops before & after class to a bunch of teenagers who thought I was cool & old even though I’m cool & young. 

Step 3: Probably start dating someone. I was back on Hinge at this point & not hating it.

Step 4: Get a job & stop receiving unemployment checks even though being on unemployment was amazing & gave me the resources & time to pursue my creative outlets. All I was doing was making art & it felt like I was getting paid for it <3

(Only one and a half of those things happened)

*

It’s important for me to mention that I had been praying about moving home & asking people to pray for me & my family for months before I did & was feeling really good about starting fresh & having the opportunity to redefine my relationships.

I saw one of my best friends from high school, Mahli, who was in the car the first time I got pulled over, exactly once before her family sold their house & she moved away. Mahli’s move made her my fourth & final high school best friend to move out of my hometown. First, it was Julia. Her family moved back to Oregon right after we graduated. Then it was Ella, she took a gap year before starting at the University of San Francisco & her family decided to move to  New York since they always had an apartment there. Next was Phebe. While she was at Northern Arizona University, her family also decided to move to Oregon. & finally, Mahli. I knew it was coming. Why wouldn’t it be coming? La Cañada kept proving to offer me less & less as time went on. I felt like I was getting pushed out.

I don’t really want to talk about it, but within two weeks of my moving home, I got screamed at over a miscommunication by one of my brothers & it was that moment I realized I needed more than prayers to make living at home work. It had been so long & I had grown so much that I thought I would move home & still feel like the person I grew into becoming after I moved away. But I was reminded that no matter how much I experience, no matter how much I grow, no matter how many therapy sessions I pay for, no matter how much mindfulness I do, no matter how many bible studies & church services I attend, & no matter how many prayers I pray or ask people to pray for me…I will always be the girl who ruined family vacations growing up.

When I was a teenager, my family thought I was lazy, moody, & ungrateful.

I was depressed & suicidal.

When you’re fourteen, it’s not easy to tell your dad you’re trying to convince yourself not to kill yourself every day while he yells at you about the dishes.

*

About a month into living at home I drove up to Lake Tahoe by myself for a last-minute vacation (?) (I hate the word vacation) with a girl I was sorta-newly-friends with, Carly, & her family. Her boyfriend & his family were sick, so he canceled, & she still wanted a friend. I became that friend because we were texting on the right day at the right time & I have never said no to a road trip. Carly said, “do you want to come to Tahoe?” & I said, “I can leave tomorrow”. 

I decided to take the long way to Tahoe up the Angeles Crest Highway & ultimately to the 395 before hitting Nevada & then looping back down to their rental house. I wanted to take the scenic route because I had the time & was re-committed to romanticizing my life. I also can’t ever spend too much time in my C-max <3

Unless it’s my commute to downtown Monday through Thursday <3

Within the first hour of my drive, I started catching up on all the new music I hadn’t properly listened to yet including “Crying out Loud” by my top artist of 2016, State Champs. It goes like this:

You hate to say it but you're not okay / You love this game but you know that I won't play / She's 23 with a teenage dream

I was 22, but I still thought “wow, me!!!! I am so not okay & I’m almost 23 & I won’t play games!!!”

(I felt like a guy with a girl was playing games with me because he called me every time she was doing drugs & would FaceTime me for hours at a time & always said there’s no one else I can talk to forever)

There were other lyrics I related to, but that’s a story for another time. I don’t want to think about my love life in July 2020. 

I still lie awake with the memories.

I also listened to “folklore” in its entirety for the first time. I cried to “betty” on repeat for a solid hour on that same drive. 

I'm only 17, I don't know anything / But I know I miss you

A few weeks before them the boy I fell in love with when I was 18 had recently told me he still loved me & I had to tell him that if the guy I knew gave me the green light I couldn’t make any promises I wouldn’t drop everything to be with him.

The conversation my ex & I had while I was sitting on my bed in my parent’s house surrounded by a kaleidoscope of memories from my childhood made me feel like a teenager again. How did I know less at (almost) 23 than I did at 17?

*

I ended up living at my parents’ house a little less than a year after I graduated college. I didn’t make it nearly as long as Dillon did, obviously. I officially moved out in June 2021. 

Living at home was (mostly) working until it wasn’t. My car’s radio would continuously echo back-and-forth between Westchester & La Cañada & I often found myself spending more nights in beds that weren’t mine instead of driving “all the way home”. This was great until I started to feel less like a person with a bedroom & more like I was living out of my car. No matter where I was, I never felt like I was fully there.

*

I think my most recent teenage dream was when I was 23. The guy I know & I were trying to figure things out, so he drove up to La Cañada to have dinner at my house so we could talk it out.

But instead of talking it out, we cuddled out under the stars & looked at constellations instead. & I’m telling you. When that boy leaned over & kissed me that night…it felt like my first kiss again. When your heart is racing & it’s meaningful but innocent & it feels like a movie & you get so caught up in it that you can’t really think about anything else other than how warm the back of his neck feels on the palm of your hand (& whether or not it’s a good idea to be kissing in the first place & hoping your neighbors can’t see you & how this is definitely what Katy Perry meant when she sang you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream) but those thoughts quickly fade into this is the only thing I want right now & neither of you really say anything afterward until a few moments later when he says was that okay? & you just squeeze him tighter & nod & kiss him again. You’ll just have to figure it all out later. 

I figured I’d eventually write about that moment.

*

My first night in my first big girl apartment-we-call-our-house-because-it-feels-more-like-a-house-because-it’s-one-story-&-has-it’s-own-garage was June 18, 2021, & I very quickly felt reeeeaally far away from 17.

I stared up at my ceiling & thought about the rest of my life & never living at home again & rent & insurance & bills & everything else & felt less like a kid than ever, but not quite like an adult. Do you think we ever feel grown up?

It’s funny—I’ve seen Mahli & Ella more times in the last year than I have most years since I graduated high school.

Ella & I were at Chili’s once waiting for Mahli’s shift to end when I started confiding in her about my Mental Health Decline of 2021 & how I blamed it on my closest friends, my college graduation, & my job.

“I don’t know what happened since I graduated college, but something must’ve because the amount of hurt that’s come back up for me has been jurassic & sometimes the littlest things can happen & I’ll start spiraling. I always thought I’d eventually go back to therapy once I graduated but it got to the point the people who were closest to me started telling me they thought I needed it & how I should stop thinking about it & actually go.”

Ella looked at me really confused & started almost…laughing? She gave me an empathetic look & said “Eza…you moved home…that’s what happened”.

I was dumbfounded because the answer I had been looking for for months suddenly felt so simple & it took a safe piece of home to remind me how much home can hurt.

& that’s all I really want to say about that.

The thought of seventeen may wrap me in nostalgia’s blanket & I may romanticize high school basketball games & assembly setups, but the reality of it felt much different.

Hayley Williams was spot on when she said "22 is like the worst idea that I have ever had, it's too much pain, it's too much freedom, what should i do with this????"

I’m 24 at this point & I still don’t know.