Hello friends and family! I am sorry it has taken me so long to crank out another blog post, but as per usual life has been hectic the past couple months. The last I had written on here, I was on a family vacation to Jamaica, but now I find myself trying to keep up with work, classes, travel, and social life (well I am trying to have a social life).
I started taking sketch comedy classes at Upright Citizens Brigade. You may remember I took a class there when I first moved to LA. After I finished up UCLA, I decided that I wanted to continue taking sketch classes and signed up for level 2. Give me a couple weeks and I’ll be writing for SNL of course. The cool part about the theater is that they let you put on your own shows, granted you bring your own actors and props. I was talking with some of my classmates and hopefully we can all get together and plan a show to perform using our sketches from class. Once we have a date, I’ll send an invite on Facebook if anyone is interested in coming to watch.
As most of you know I have been working a night shift (4pm-midnight) for the past year at my current job. I am happy to announce that I will no longer be on the total night shift starting this week, and that I will slowly shift back to day time. Although I will miss sleeping in, I am so happy to have my nights free.
Working nights for a year taught me a great deal about being alone. As an extrovert, spending my morning hours with no one to talk to and no one to physically see, could leave me feeling depressed. I ended up deleting Snapchat, and almost deleting Instagram, because seeing my friends having fun, while I was at work, was not in any way good for my mental health. It made me realize how much we try to show we are having fun and how perfect we are to our friends and family, but it is all just a façade. I could send pictures of my mornings and with the right caption, it could suddenly feel as if everything is perfect. As a fellow millennial I am guilty of it myself, but I am trying not to believe that everyone around me is living perfect lives. I wanted to get out of my rut and feeling sorry for myself. I got off my phone and delved back into writing. One of the only places I don’t put on a mask and try to pour myself into every character I write.
The craziest part of this whole LA adventure is that I am finally lapping myself. During my first year here, everything was so new. For example, Spring came around, and it was my first Passover and Easter in LA. When Saint Patrick’s Day came last year, it was my first ever in LA. I watched as the months passed and could not believe how much was changing with each one of them. I talked about this in my past blog, but I am fascinated with the way we as humans measure time and monumental occasions.
Instead of going on a rant about time again, I wanted to focus on self-worth. As the months of 2019 crept along, I found that I was continuing my same patterns, focusing on where I thought I should be and not where I wanted to be. At 25 years old, there are so many benchmarks you feel like you have to hit. We are constantly being told to show that we are perfect, when in fact we are all exactly where we need to be. What it all boiled down to was that I did not have the confidence I thought I had in myself. It did not matter what benchmark I had hit, or if it had made everyone like my recent post, this year I really started to hone in on whether it felt like a benchmark to me? Was this something I really wanted?
I took to heart a lot of comments I had on my earlier post about turning 25. I realized that change doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes months, or probably the whole year to figure it out. My dad had given me the advice to continue doing what I love.
Along with the sketch comedy writing courses, I stuck with the flag football on Saturdays. I love meeting new people and having an excuse to run around on the beach (and also an excuse to grab a Bloody Mary afterwards).
As of yesterday, I started working out again and may even go to a yoga class once a week. I don’t have any equipment or money to join a gym, so I follow along to videos on my laptop, while using wine bottles as the weights. For heavy weights I use handles or sometimes cartons of milk.
Also, I chopped off my hair and I’m in love with it again. For the first time, I didn’t sit there and think about what other people would say if I cut all my hair and styled it a certain way. It was a c’est la vie moment! All that’s left in my eat, prey, love adventure is to book a trip to Europe (but my bank account says otherwise).
When I first said I was buying a one-way flight to LA with no place to live and no job, everyone called me crazy. Although, it was the happiest I had been in a long time. It felt like I was finally making a move in the right direction. To this day, I am sure people still think buying a one-way flight is a crazy decision, but I am starting to realize we should relish the crazy. The crazy is what makes you happy. The crazy is what drives you to reach your dreams. The crazy is what stops you from becoming mundane. So after almost two years out in LA, yes, I am in fact still crazy and it seems to be working out just fine. I hope to stay crazy, because I am finding that in my craziest moments, is when I truly accomplish what I want.
Lastly, Chad adopted a puppy named Cali. She is already the love of my life. Until next time, please enjoy these adorable puppy photos…
Bonnie Gross 
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