Au Revoir, NextDoor

In June 2026, my beloved mother will have been gone from this world for twenty years. If I close my eyes, it feels like a matter of months and a lifetime simultaneously, as though I am a ninety-year-old woman, even though I am simply middle-aged at this point. The battle scars are etched deeply on my psyche. On the bright side, I also realize now, because my psyche is mine alone to keep healthy, I refuse to let another person write or rewrite the narrative of my life when I am supposed to be the heroine of my own pathos, while I stop acting like I am on heroin in my grief. (Kidding, a bit of word play)

The buck stops here (especially the ones that I earned through my writing). And so does the abuse. Telling another person who they are in hopes they undo themselves emotionally is, to me, the highest form of abuse. I don’t do it for fear of karmic repercussions. That’s probably the only place I completely reflect my Indian background. I simply cannot allow it to be done to me anymore, as it has been done for the last two decades, especially by the people who I assumed (before my mother died) loved me. That too proved to be an expensive lesson, both financially and for my injured soul. I am a highly visual person, which is probably why I decided to become a filmmaker in the first place. Watching my mother die in such a gruesome manner in the prime of her gorgeous life has haunted me visually in ways I neither thought I could endure nor survive.

As a writer, I need outlets for my fingers and thoughts. I truly believed I had found that “safe” space a couple of years ago. NextDoor was my nirvana for a long beat.

Admittedly, I write a lot on the app, NextDoor. In 2023, it was a platform for connecting with screenwriters and others in the entertainment industry who were suffering the effects of an ongoing strike. Over the last couple of years, it has reconnected me with friends with whom I lost touch. Through regular engagement, I've learned about what’s going on in The Palisades from the opening of Equinox to the delicious recipes from the local baking club I need to work off at said Equinox, and just generally, on NextDoor, I have tested my mettle in how vulnerable I can be with words that pertain to my truth.

Without a thriving film industry, I talked myself into believing I could no longer afford to live in my hometown of Pacific Palisades moving back to my other hometown of Las Vegas (there from the ages 8 to 17), Toronto (where I was born but can’t stand for the grey slush that almost feels year round) and Orange County where I have no connection but to my mother’s family.

Six years ago, after my father’s retirement as a Las Vegas-based physician, I had to ask for permission from Dad’s power of attorney aka my brother for when I could come up from Orange County to spend time with my father. In the beginning, my brother needed to be present, but as the weeks progressed, my father himself asked me why I was leaving so soon and why I wasn’t coming over more regularly. He said I needed no invitation to be in his house, which he called mine as well. Days stretched into weeks, and so that my brother didn’t have to be responsible for my father for 30 days in the holy month, I was allowed to stay the entire Ramadan, which has always been a season I approach with trepidation. In theory, I love the holy month’s mission, but I complain bitterly about fasting, even though I feel like a superhero when the month inevitably passes so quickly.

I love being around my father, but my brother was not so pleased with these developments and was quick to wield his power of attorney. During a particularly stormy February, while there were landslides and power outages in a pre-fire Palisades, my brother demanded that I leave my father’s home, as there was no power. He alleged he was going to take my father to his house, a house I have never seen. In fact, I have never seen any of his Palisades properties since my mother died. My brother and his wife had left The Palisades in a huff years before, stating they didn’t recognize the community in which they had once grown up. But, back to that rainy and definitive day. When I countered that it was over an hour back to Orange County and I didn’t mind staying at Dad’s without him until it was safe to drive back to mine, my brother refused and insisted I leave. It was in that moment that I decided I was done with this nonsense, and I was not going to cry anymore over this situation. I once loved my brother very much. It is he who has made it difficult for me to love him for close to 20 years.

Talking to my therapist, he pressed me to answer his question that just because I didn’t own my own home in The Palisades, what was wrong with renting? I couldn’t answer that question immediately. When I was still in my 20s, my mother guided my home ownership. She believed quite rightly that it was often hard for a working screenwriter to qualify for a mortgage when they sustained themselves from project to project. When I had my first position at a production company, she gently nudged me to buy multiple properties, and, for that guidance, I would have forever been in her debt had I actually heeded her sage advice after she died.

My mother wanted me to pull it together when she was confined to her bed and in denial that she was dying. She didn’t realize how much I needed her to keep living. She pleaded with me to “take over the checkbook” and warned me that if I didn’t, she had no choice but to involve my brother in our finances, as he had not been included in our money when he made the decisions he did in terms of his marriage. I let her hand over the responsibility of the estate to my brother. Well, I did, or my suicidal ideation decided for me. There is no debate on these facts. I did that willingly in my grief, and I would never deny that. I signed over everything I was asked to sign over. What I didn’t anticipate was being locked out of homes, having limited access to my surviving parent, or that I would be forced to take to public platforms to try my family in the court of public opinion when I no longer had access to the properties my words and creativity had afforded me. It was both an outrage and a heartbreak. This is a tale as old as time, and I am not unique in the protracted legal battles that often follow when a key person dies intestate. In fact, I knew when I was incarcerated on trumped-up charges, and my British husband begged my brother to aid in my release, and he refused; we were done on a level nobody could deny. My husband continued pleading, and my brother acquiesced by sending his best friend to the court to meet my husband. All the good that did. The so-called friend (an Orange County attorney who himself was incarcerated for a DUI in Newport Beach and for whom my brother would take a bullet as he is more family to him than I could ever be…talk about pot calling kettle a felon…) told my husband to go on with his life, that I was going up the river for a very long time. Funnily enough, my husband persisted, and I was released with a bit of street cred that I could survive incarceration in a camp similar to what Martha Stewart had to endure. But that’s a funny story for another time and already recorded in a comedy script called BUNKIES. But, I digress…occupational hazard…Where was I? Oh yes…

I came back to The Palisades on my terms, and Dad and I couldn’t have been happier to be in each other’s midst. I love my parents, and the healing that took place when my father and I could be real friends without outside interference meant so much for my healing.

I didn’t mind that when I secured my own Palisades property with no assistance from the estate, I became a primary caregiver when my brother said he turned around for a minute, and Dad fell in the shower, even though I advised that he was unsteady on his feet before I left The Palisades to return to Orange County. Accidents happen, and if I had to carry my father on my back for the rest of my life, I could never repay the kindnesses he and his wife showered upon me throughout my life.

We were navigating his incapacitated state and the effects of dementia when the fires hit. My brother said he would put my father in an assisted living situation. I was given a significant chunk of change when my rental was engulfed in flames, so I secured a property for my father and me. We were ostensibly father and daughter who hadn’t lived in the same home in 37 years, we were roommates where he still owes me a month’s rent that has to come from my brother, and I was his willing caretaker.

Post fires, my brother and I resumed our acrimonious relationship, and strangely, he and his wife have created aliases so that they can monitor what I write on NextDoor. They apparently want to ascertain if I am saying anything about them. I wish I could give them every assurance I have absolutely nothing to say about my sister-in-law because she has said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for which I need to respond.

She didn’t say she was sorry for my losses when my life was reduced to rubble. She didn’t ask how I was dealing with my trauma or inquire as to how I was managing taking care of my father and myself. She didn’t ask me how it felt to lose the last remnants of my life with my mother when the flames swallowed my keepsakes whole. She didn’t question how I feel in my pain, and conversely, she didn’t say or imply anything cruel or speak to me in subtext so she could share her true feelings about me.

That’s because she has said nothing, so why bother checking NextDoor to see if I am writing for her? She hasn’t given me material or dialogue, and every screenwriter worth her weight in Ozempic needs something to work with.

I can say that definitively because she hasn’t said ONE WORD to me post fires, even though she lived in The Palisades from birth and left on her own accord, whereas I didn’t leave voluntarily when Mom died or when the fires pushed me out of my comfort zone. I have not seen her since the devastation, and she only saw my father (her former employer when she decided to become his office manager) until October 2025, when I left the rental and started moving back to a rental of my own choosing in The Palisades. These are irrefutable facts, not my opinion, which means nothing when it comes to estrangement.

I have nothing to say about her, so she should probably stop wasting her time on NextDoor, and maybe I should, too. I have a life to build back in effort that goes beyond the words I write and right….