Personal Essays & Advice

I need my bags, belts and shoes to be studded, spiky, pierced and heavy.

Don’t miss out on the shapes the lightning paints the clouds with because you’re too busy swimming in puddles.

Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

As a therapist, I wanted to create a container — a place where someone would cross the threshold and feel.

Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

It’s never been more important to assert your sense of personhood and independence.

Over the years, Chinatowns have offered me ephemeral homecomings in city after city.

Santee Alley has become a place for me to bring closer the family I left, a space where I can unabashedly experiment with my style through their selection of menswear.

Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

It would be too easy and too inaccurate to write these places off as strange anomalies — one-off quirks in a city filled with so many quirks. They are part of L.A.’s history.

Goth Shakira holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love

People seem to think that clothing is the best representation of our personalities, of who we want to be. But it’s actually the jewelry we wear that most often speaks to who we think we are.

Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

I had been needing these reminders that life after a certain age still holds promise; that my body and appearance could be sources of joy, rather than dread.

Goth Shakira holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

I’m eager to discover the massage that will finally allow me to fully yield, because whenever I’m the one on the massage table, I have this strange sense that I’m not “doing it right.”

There is a lot out there. Everyone I talk to seems to have an opinion. I am almost immediately overwhelmed.

There’s no black-and-white answer to this dilemma. Because, to put it bluntly, some people cannot be trusted to follow (or be connected to) their exes.

Goth Shakira holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

Novelist Anna Dorn moonlights as a perfume stylist, offering scent fittings for clients performed over text message. I hired Dorn to help me find a new scent.

Transitions and transformations can be fraught, even torturous. As a death doula, a big part of the work is sitting in that liminal space.

Our advice columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love.

The image Lester Sloan took of Hockney has become a hall of mirrors, an entrance into the very notion of what a mother means. What it means to lose her.

A Rimowa suitcase not only contains your life but becomes an extension of it.

“I feel like a collector in a lot of ways,” says artist aliana mt. For years, they’ve been marking the city’s trees on a map.

An examination of your moon sign can help light the way.

It was sometime in my late 20s that I felt a shift, repulsed by my collection of what I had increasingly decided was just a bunch of s— I needed out of my house.

I’d assumed that apartment shopping would be hell, but this was really something else.

Underneath layers and layers of socialization, we each have a clown willing to risk heartbreak for joy.

Thundercat and Herbie Hancock joined the stage, as we gathered to remember what was and what we’ll rebuild.

“It’s not easy, breezy, light, kind or friendly.” L.A. astrologer Chani Nicholas answers my questions around Saturn.

The Sagittarian needs to move through the world with a healthy dose of playfulness at all times.

My perverse love for lip stuff traces back to when I was 4 and first tried on my grandmother’s Clinique lipstick in Raspberry Glace.

A scorpion may have one tail, but it has two claws.

My relationship with clothes feels like a constant compromise: an acceptance that it will never quite be good enough.

In an ash-white triplex in Ladera Heights, beauty often appeared in one very specific form.

Who bears a burden more elegantly than the tenth sign?

Every time I think of my old idea of midlife — that dreary pasture full of drab linens — laughter bubbles out of me.

Their lovability is something they can’t help.

We’ve found the ultimate talisman of Virgoan vigor: a dutiful pebble grinder.

Inside you are your main audience. The joy lies in the freedom. Be extra. Go bold.

Los Angeles, like its residents, is impermanent, always shape-shifting, always on the verge of becoming something else.

Homemaking is an art, a craft, a practice, a burden, a necessity, a privilege. It’s in the talismans that we arrange within our homes — including our house keys.

The laundromat is your rare “third place” — a spot to go to that’s not your house, nor your office, but a secret third thing.

In this town, actors often stay at hotels for transient periods of time. But what is it actually like?

Everyone suddenly, it seems, wants to lucid dream. I say: First dream, but dream actively. Here are some practices I take to ensure an engagement in my Dream Life.

We find ourselves in that time of year dedicated to the most sensuous and worldly of the earth signs. What is the missing item from your wardrobe?

When you quite literally accept the cards that life has already dealt you, the story of what may lay ahead practically tells itself.

Los Angeles is terrible at housing people. It’s better at warehousing cars. The concrete nautiluses where we temporarily abandon our Kias and Porsches and mopeds produce, reproduce and shelter dualities.

The beauty of surfing is inextricable with the fear of it. It’s as if the baptismal in the ocean were somehow both the original sin and its curative.

I am not the modern, modest Muslim lady my mother wanted, nor the good wife my grandfather must have envisioned in a daughter-in-law or granddaughter. The old bling glares and guards me.

This story is part of our issue on Remembrance, a time-traveling journey through the L.A. experience — past, present and future.

Justin Torres reflects on what happens when the one thing you’ve never lost finally disappears