On Christmas last year, I stood in the kitchen with my roommate and another friend, cooking a somber dinner. None of us said much. We’d all called our families earlier in the day, our trips home long-since cancelled. We were doing our best to conjure some sort of holiday spirit, but our hearts were hanging low like the North Coast clouds outside. A song came on shuffle, “I Am California” by John Craigie, and as if on cue, when the chorus hit, we all began to sing in unison:

So drink all my wine. Cut all my trees. Make love on my beaches. Smoke all my weed. I am California, can’t you see? Wherever you roam, you’ll always want me.

That song, and our feelings that day, I can only describe as mournful. We shared a deep sense of loss, so obvious in our singing that to name it aloud now feels like an insult to it. It wasn’t the loss of a holiday with my family, but the incalculable loss of the past year. I mourned for the way that sometimes, trying to make the most if it still can’t make enough. I mourned for the fires, for the forests, for loss of the future I grew up thinking I could have. But in that moment, I mourned, more than anything, for California.

I mourned because I knew then that California was dead.

2020 was the year we couldn’t breathe. George Floyd couldn’t breathe. Black Americans couldn’t breathe. The 370,000 people who died of Covid-19 last year couldn’t breathe. But in California, life itself couldn’t breathe. When the August Complex fire blew up, I watched impotently from my mother’s house in Washington, where I’d been living on and off throughout the pandemic. The acrid smoke crawling north through the sky was a funeral procession, and at the other end of it, my home lay dead in an open grave.

When I was three, my parents made the merciful decision to move us from Greenwich, Connecticut to San Diego, California. I still grew up around a lot of rich WASPs, but at least these ones smoked weed and knew how to surf. It wasn’t until I went to New York for college that I became acutely aware of just how Californian I really was. What, you mean everyone doesn’t train as a yoga teacher in high school? My idea of a jock was a water polo player, my idea of culture was Sublime. Christmases were spent barefoot on the beach, and Christmas dinner contained avocados. Like, I’d seen snow on the ground before, but I’d never actually seen the sky snowing.

But being Californian isn’t really about flip flops and avocados. The Golden State is a state of mind, an attitude and set of values. The Golden State of Mind is the self-expression and good vibes left over from San Francisco hippies with flowers in their hair, the drama and glamour handed down from Marilyn Monroe at the Hotel Del. California is about freshness and innovation, “the edge of the world and all of Western civilization” according to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. California stands in our minds like the stars in the sky or the Hollywood Boulevard, for possibility, expansion, individualism and freedom. Above all, California means the relentless pursuit of a better world, on your own terms.

But now, California is dead.

It wasn’t Covid that took her. She didn’t die in the fires. Hers was not a quick death. It played out over decades, her breath growing shallower and more ragged, each exhale releasing more than each inhale could take back in. If you’re going to San Francisco now, be sure to wear AirPods in your ears. Hollywood is for Marvel sequels and sexual abuse; no new stars are born. The self-styled Masters of the Universe trade bitcoins in Silicon Valley, and no one else can afford to live. The Central Valley is a wasteland of dying farms and meth addiction. The redwoods are running out of water as rivers get sucked dry for cash-crop cannabis growing; it’s the same with Napa’s vineyards. We don’t need Burning Man to watch the world burn.

The day I knew California was in hospice was the day I went back to Ocean Beach, San Diego in early 2019. As a young white woman in New York, my part in gentrification had always been as a low-level participant in its expansion; it wasn’t something happening to me, to places where I’d lived and loved. But the machine comes for us all. In my old coastal neighborhood, the van-dwelling flower children spinning fire on the beach had been supplanted by rooftop microbreweries and luxury condos. Hippies gave way to NIMBYs. The machine kept rolling on.

California today is a shell of its former self — an expensive shell slowly burning to death. Where’s the authentic self-expression in Facebook algorithms and mass data collection? Where’s the innovation in letting PG&E kill people and destroy the land every single summer? Where’s the relentless pursuit of a better world in leaving our neighbors to scrape by in tents on the sidewalk when there’s more than enough empty housing for us all? California was asphyxiated by profit maximization and business-as-usual politics.

It was always going to end like this. From Otay Mesa Detention Center to the massacre on Tuluwat Island in the Humboldt Bay, this is what California’s always been.

That John Craigie song goes on:

Yeah, dig all my gold. Soak in my springs. Conquer my mountains, that’s what you need.

Get real, man. California wasn’t born from the stars in our eyes and the wildness of our dreams. She was made by conquering mountains to dig gold. All it takes is stepping outside the big coastal cities to come face-to-face with just how recent and brutal the genocide of California’s indigenous nations was. And for what? For gold. For greed. For the thrill of conquering the next frontier. Innovation and expansion, destroying everything that stands in the way of personal ambition. California is a mega-mansion on a mass grave.

So when I mourn for California, what am I mourning for, really? I learned long ago that my California sparkling like the Pacific in the sun was a myth. But I mourned, somehow, for the dying breaths of that myth. I liked that myth. I liked it like listening for reindeer on the roof on Christmas morning. From MAGA to the entire musical career of Lana del Rey, we’re swimming in nostalgia these days, longing for the myth of what once was, sentimental about the days we believed in it. We mourn for a loss of innocence as we face a grim reality together.

The past decade has irrevocably scraped off any sheen California had left. As authentic as the idealism in the myth of California felt, no myth can hold forever. Reality must crash back in, like waking up after a blacked-out night in a pool of your own sick. Welcome to the world born of Californication. There’s no more sugarcoating the poison, no more enabling the addiction by pretending it isn’t there. Blackened forests and orange skies, it’s Halloweentown from the mountains to the sea. Forty million people trapped under another heat dome and no one can pay rent. California, here we come to haunt you.

Here we are. Can we make it out of this gilded Hell? If there is any way out, then we have to leave it, wholly and sincerely, all behind. No trick of the light like Hollywood magic. No more quick fix technology. No sunshine day dreams. To move forward after the death of our golden girl, we have to actually wake up. California can live again, but not if we keep repeating the myth. We have to tell the truth.

I’m ashamed how little of it I know, but we must begin somewhere. I’m reading a book called After the First Full Moon in April, by Josephine Peters and Beverly Ortiz. It documents Indigenous sciences of plant medicine in the forests of Northern California. A strange series of events led me to a woman who teaches traditional ecological knowledge, and she’s agreed to mentor me. She can bring land back to life — I’ve seen it. Cracked, dry hills turned to lush creeks where the birds sing. I’m learning about peppernut and Jimson weed, pahiip and datura, how to call each thing by its rightful name and where it fits in the stories of the ecosystem.

Now, I imagine willow reeds springing up through Hollywood stars. In my mind, boulevards lined with palm trees give way to watersheds repopulated with native plants. Innovation turns to wisdom. I see how the real California gold is in the poppies that cover the hills, and bit by bit, the grief gives way to a newfound childlike wonder.

The California I mourned for last year was only ever a façade, a hollow phantom made up to enable an addiction to greed and domination. For a while, my sadness became bargaining became anger and despair, and at last, I feel acceptance. In accepting that California, as I knew her, is never coming back, I can trace back the myth to the stories that are real and begin to tell it all again, correctly this time.

Like children learning there is no Santa Claus, the old California is gone. But we don’t need the myth, not when we have the truth we’d been masking underneath. Snowfall in the mountains has magic all its own. Stars belong in the sky, not made of stone underfoot. We fit better here when we stop trying to conquer and start learning to connect.

Caring for what’s really here will feed us more than imagineering what we wish there was. If we haven’t experienced it, then for now, we take it on a degree of faith. Trust the wisdom that came before. I and those like me never belonged in this landscape, invasive species that we are, but here we find ourselves all the same. Though not my native land, California is my home. I can’t bend California to my will — look at what’s become of the centuries we tried. Instead, we must bend our will to hers, learning as we do, that what the earth wills for us is what we really need.

California, like America, is a story we tell. To be reborn, that story can’t teach us to relentlessly pursue a better world on our own terms. It’s time to grow up. Now, we step into our true selves and our real place in the world, and pursue a better world on the world’s terms.