You can fly from Virginia to California in about 5 hours.

You can drive the same distance in a little under 2 days.

The pioneers traveled for almost 7 months to reach the West Coast from the East.

It has taken me 16 years to make the journey.

To be honest, my upcoming move to Los Angeles isn’t my first. It isn’t my second, either. To be precise and for the record, it’s the 4.5.0th time I’ve relocated to the City of Angels.

Confused by the numbers? Let me explain. My first excursion was in 1995. I lived there again in 1996 and 2005. Between that, in 1998, I ventured as far as Knoxville before turning my car around and strolling back to Virginia. In July of 2008, just days before I was due to leave, I canceled the trip. That makes this the fourth and a half and zeroth time.

The first time I left, I knew exactly one person in Los Angeles. I quit my job, gave up my apartment, loaded everything I had in a U-Haul and drove cross-country with my cat, a friend, and my car on a tow dolly. We hit LA on April Fool’s Day and by the first of June I’d landed a good job with the top venture capital firm in the city and a very cool place off Sunset Strip. But come October I was back in Virginia, unemployed and living with my parents. Repeat with the crash and burn endings of the 1996 and 2005 migrations. Six months seemed to be the magic number for the length of time I’d make it there.

I know it seems crazy when you’re looking in from the outside and I’m aware that it’s worried my family and my friends that I’ll so willingly dump my life to pick up and move 3000 miles away, when I’ve done it before and by conventional standards it obviously didn’t work. What’s the definition of insanity? According to my mom and Albert Einstein it’s “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

But I venture to say that the definition of insanity is denying what calls to you, attempting to shut out that yearning that tells you that you want something different that what you have. And LA has called to me, over and over again. The first mention in my journals back in 1993, that maybe it’d be a cool place to live. The vacation in 1994, two weeks spent mostly alone discovering a city that was a stranger to me, yet oddly familiar. And the night shortly after, when I woke with a start, alone in the darkness and drenched in sweat, realizing that the decision to leave had somehow already been made by my soul, without my consent, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Believe me, I tried. My name shoulda been Karal DepressionGuilt Gregory. Depression, the anger-turned-inward bitch that she is, I grew up feeling and thought was a natural part of me. Guilt because I really honestly believed I should want, and want to want, what other people seemed to want for me. Scraping the 2008 move was a turning point, because it was a last-ditch effort to make Virginia, the state in which I was born and bred, home. But I learned, through the past year, that I have a vision of home that hasn’t yet been answered with the reality that I find here and it has nothing to do with the job or the family and friends that I love. It has to do with me.

So why did I turn around in 1998? I was barely a day into my journey when I stopped for the night at a little motel outside of Knoxville. I was watching Oprah and trying to fall asleep. I don’t remember the guest or the topic, but I do remember what she said. If you’re not comfortable in your own skin, it doesn’t matter where you are. I drove back to Virginia the next morning.

I’ve spent these last months digging and excavating every thought, feeling, journal, event, in my life, turning it over, examining it, summarizing it, sorting what works and what doesn’t into two separate piles, one for the trash and one for me. I’ve drafted lists of my values and my beliefs, my mistakes and my accomplishments, my vices and my virtues. Mostly, I’ve listened to me, a lot. Quite simply, I shut out reason and I listened to that other voice. The one that talks to you at night. The crazy one. And it told me what I already knew: I want to go back.

Because in reality, LA is so very good to me. There’s the real and the surreal. I’ve hiked the hills high above Hollywood, overlooking the city, shopped Rodeo Drive barefoot, and drove a Lexus sports car on the weekends ~ my boss’s way of keeping it in shape. I’ve worked among ~ and been inspired by ~ creative and talented actors and artists, was a personal trainer in Pacific Palisades, and dropped 10 pounds in two months without even trying. I’ve spent an evening out at sea on the Quiksilver surf boat with world class surfers, been surrounded by a firehouse full of firemen wanting to chat at Mel’s Diner on Sunset (my roommate is hot) and watched classic movies on the side of the mausoleum wall of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery while sitting below, and above, the stars. I’ve fallen in love and had my heart broken at the Santa Monica Pier. I’ve built incredible and lasting friendships. Each move, each experience, has given me something. In essence, I awaken and I live, and incredible things happen in LA, because I feel whole in LA. I feel like me, in LA.

In late December I’m loading up my beagles and I’m rambling out to Los Angeles, again. I’m taking only what fits in my car: a few clothes, my camera, my laptop, some books. I’ve learned to travel light. I’ll be staying with the hot roommate, in my room that looks out on the Hollywood sign and the hills I can’t wait to hike. I have some things I want to do, and I feel them falling together. I’m grounded, if not in logic, in the balance and the harmony that come from knowing my feet are firmly planted on ground that I have tilled and turned and cultivated if only because I have refused to believe in failure or the reality of a linear life path. I am comfortable in my own skin.

The morning I hit the road in 1995, my then six-year-old niece Kaylyn offered her unadulterated view of why I was leaving. Aunt Karal’s going to have adventures and meet a man. I love that.

So yes, if someone asks me, I will tell them I’ve been to California 4.5.0 times.

4.5.0 is just a number. And my soul soars higher than that.

Los Angeles panorama with the Hollywood Hills in the distance.