I went to the kind of elementary school where you learn eight different ways to do addition. On our sprawling suburban campus, identifying whether each child was a “kinetic learner” or “visual learner” would dictate which teaching method was best—we never made it to multiplication. We took sex education and learned what masturbation was. At the end of fifth grade, we went out into the woods and had a ceremony where a librarian with silver hair that flowed down to her thighs assigned each of us our spirit animal.

My parents taught me, above anything, to be inclusive. This meant hanging out with the kids nobody wanted to hang out with, a mantle I accepted enthusiastically. One was a girl who threw frequent, ear-splitting tantrums, who is today two hundred pounds and unemployed. One was a boy who smelled bad and cried every time he lost a game of chess, now a software engineer at Oracle. On the rare occasion that I chafed at their meltdowns, my mother was a little horrified—“it doesn’t cost you anything to be kind,” she would solemnly remind me.

When we moved to Texas the summer before sixth grade, my parents road-tripped us everywhere except Dallas. Dallas was for people who cared about how they looked—awful, shallow women who had boob jobs and dye jobs and fake email jobs. Dallas was for women who had been in sororities. In the seven years my family lived in Texas, we never set foot there.

Instead, we kept Austin weird. I attended a Unitarian Universalist school that gave chapel sermons every morning about being yourself. We questioned social norms and pushed past discomfort. We dismissed feelings of awkwardness as the voices of a nebulously defined and vaguely malicious “society.” We were taught to be “vulnerable” and “authentic”—the worst thing you could do was care what other people think.

My college application had a section where you could describe what you wanted in a roommate. I wrote something like: “it’s really important to me to be inclusive, so if you have anyone who might need help adjusting or fitting in, I’d love to room with them.” My parents couldn’t have been prouder! The roommate I matched with was from Wyoming, and she almost never left the room our first semester. We were fast friends. The second semester, she discovered ketamine, and came out of her shell. She was authentic. She was vulnerable. She was unapologetically herself. One night, I went into our dorm’s piano room and walked in on her having sex with a thirty-five-year-old bartender who worked in our college town. Junior year she had a psychotic break, threatened to kill our dean via Instagram Live, and dropped out to become an OnlyFans creator.

That spring, work paired with the pandemic took me across the country to Los Angeles—the Gomorrah of the being-yourself religion. College is supposed to be the moment in a young person’s life when they exit their conventional bubble and start to question “society,” whatever that means, for the first time. For me, every authority figure in my life had hammered in the rejection of “normalcy” for as long as I could remember. I spent my many tedious hours in L.A. traffic considering the Chesterton’s fence of social norms—why did “everyone else” act the way they did? Why care about how you look? Why care about what other people think? Why care about anything?

I moved into a condo in the Pacific Palisades. It was sky blue, with a bamboo-covered backyard only two houses away from the beach. Rory and Bella, my roommates, were both Pi Phi’s born and raised in Dallas, although they didn’t meet until California. They had flawless Instagram grids and sophisticated taste for interior decoration. When they talked about fashion, they used phrases like “vertical line.” They didn’t set goals, they manifested. We would later joke that they domesticated me.

We split move-in tasks between the three of us. I was in charge of setting up the WiFi. I did it through the company AT&T pointed me to, which was called Viasat. Viasat sent a contractor to install an ugly satellite dish in the backyard. This contractor insisted I pay him an additional $200 over Zelle, which I paid because I was alone in the house and he was a strange man, and I didn’t know the nuances of Wi-Fi installation. When I realized our download speeds were operating at a deficit, I called to have it fixed. Viasat responded that the speed was, in fact, totally fine and refused to cancel service, as well as charging me an additional $400 to return the satellite dish to them.

I told Rory and Bella this story, expecting them to commiserate about how frustrating their own various move-in tasks had been. To my surprise, everything they did seemed to have gone perfectly. Rory told us about going and getting the beautiful pink-and-orange shag for the living room from Mid-City on Facebook Marketplace, and how it looked even better than the photos, and how much she had enjoyed “just banting!” with the hired moving men in fluent Spanish. “Why did you get gaslit by the WiFi company,” Rory laughed.

Obviously, I spent a couple of days feeling embarrassed about this. But after that, for the first time, I posed the serious question: why did frustrating things keep happening to me? I was actually pretty sure I wasn’t meaningfully dumber, uglier, less outgoing, or less driven than Rory or Bella. In fact, we were very similar. Rory would say, “Nat and I are the same person in different fonts.” So, why did things seem to come easier to them?

Susan Sontag blamed the Romantics for convincing us that powerlessness was a virtue. “Sadness,” she accused in Illness as Metaphor, “made one ‘interesting.'” I had come to believe that struggle gave a person moral high ground. My “weird” friends, though I loved them genuinely, had become some kind of sacred cows in my mind. “Everyone else” was a villain to me. But contempt for “everyone else” shuts your brain off from learning about the things everyone else knows. When you feel contempt for a thing, you funhouse-mirror-warp its representation in your mind until you can’t recognize it at all. And in surrounding myself with people who struggled, I had barely caught a glimpse of what it was like not to struggle.

Here was Chesterton’s fence: every time you meet a new person, you teach them, with the cadence of your voice, the straightness of your back, the style of your clothes, and the stories you tell, how you expect to be treated. Every person learns. This is why the L.A. girls posted photos of wholesome tailgates surrounded by friends, and told stories about boys who swept them off their feet. Every pixel of their appearance and every note of their voice communicated that everyone treated them well. They knew that people love to do what everyone else is doing.

At the height of Old Hollywood glamour in 1956, the sociologist Irving Goffman invented “dramaturgical theory” as a form of micro-sociology in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman casts the self not as an innate psychological essence, but as an actor playing various roles in various scenes, flitting between the comfort of “back-stage” and the heat of “front-stage.” In dramaturgical theory, each social interaction is divided into actors and audience members.

The L.A. girl practice of “manifesting” something, usually accompanied by burning sage or charging crystals, is a recognition of this simple truth: you tell people how you expect them to treat you, and for the most part, they treat you that way. When you truly expect good—a phone number, a pitch meeting, a helping hand—you communicate that in the way you carry yourself, and when you meet a new person, they’ll meet that expectation. Los Angeles is a constant parade of new parties, dinners, coffee chats, first dates, clubs—a perpetual stream of new faces to make a new impression on, an instant lever by which your expectations change your experience of the world. Every stranger is a casting director, constantly auditioning each new acquaintance for a new role in their lives. Some people are casting for a heroine, some people are casting for a victim. It makes perfect sense that the idea of “manifestation” was invented in L.A.

One Friday night that spring, we went out to a laid-back club in West Hollywood with a new group of friends. There was a girl there that a younger Natalie would have gravitated towards, with a contemplative frown and stripey blue hair cut in a bold, blunt bob. She arrived the only girl in a group of all boys, none of whom she was dating. I spent most of the night deep in conversation with a friend, and the evening wound down uneventfully. Hugging our good-byes in line for the coat check, one of the new boys pulled me aside and asked me to check on the girl in the women’s bathroom.

I opened the door to find her limp and unconscious on the tile. We had been drinking the same cabernet and watered-down vodka cranberries—but the boys said she had gone from sober and chatty to wasted and passed out in minutes. They believed she was drugged.

Bella and I carried her out of the lounge and called an Uber to urgent care, frantically splicing together every moment of the night between the two of us to try to figure out what happened. A nurse confirmed that she was okay to sleep it off and that she had most likely been roofied. When she came to, hours later, she couldn’t remember anything and said she had never felt that way before. She did mention, however, that she had been through plenty of hard things, and this was no exception.

In the disconcerting days that followed—when we basically decided that the truth was unknowable and to never go to that bar ever again—we spent a lot of time asking another question: why her? We recognized that we couldn’t know the answer, and that to even ask it was to speculate, and to presume, and to some extent, to victim-blame. But we were selfish, and we wanted to believe that we could keep ourselves from becoming victims. What we latched onto was a comment that she made, at least twice in two different conversations as remembered by the three of us: that her ex-boyfriend of three years had broken her nose.

Irving Goffman—who also coined the term “passing” as a sociological concept—described “destructive information,” a fact that the real-life actress must keep secret from her audience in order not to threaten her performance. Here was the truth that the L.A. girls understand better than anyone: when you are “vulnerable” and “authentic,” when you “destigmatize your trauma” the way we were always encouraged to do, you are advertising that other people in your life have treated you badly. When you mention at a cocktail party that you had a mom who threw dinner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eyebrows, or a landlord who shafted you on your security deposit, or whatever else, the wrong person hears “he got away with it, why can’t I?” He spots a wounded deer unable to protect itself, perpetually separated from the happy herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfairness in the fact that people who have been dealt the most hardships in life are the least served by “living their truth.”

There’s a memorable scene in Mad Men where Don Draper tells a distraught Peggy in a hospital bed “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” I think this is advice worth heeding. L.A.’s plastic artifice isn’t just vanity—it’s also a great equalizer. In the fakest city in the world, you too can cast yourself as someone only good things happen to.