For some people, a place of extremes feels too dirty, hot, and menacing. For me, not so much.
I came to Landers, a remote desert town in California, knowing there’s not much more than a Dollar General and a gas station. I didn’t know it’s also known for desert grey alien beings and paranormal activity, a major bonus to learn less than a week after my arrival. I wanted to be comfortably positioned between nowhere and somewhere that offers live music or a cocktail, a place where it takes effort to get either.
I find myself in the wide, open, dusty, almost nothingness of the desert, wanting to rent a motorbike, run in the heat, observe, and potentially congregate with other people who can stand it. No, other people who can absorb it. It’s easy to spot those people. Their cracked skin tells the story, and well, I want them to tell me about it.
That’s how I started ghostwriting. I sat down for a glass of bubbles and oysters at the Roxy Hotel bar in NYC, striking up a conversation with a woman to my left who would unexpectedly ask me to work with her. A stranger who opened a door that changed my life in ways I could have never imagined.
A stranger is a person who sees you in the context of exactly where you are in a given moment. What a rarity to be understood and known as you are today. Even better, to do that for someone else who likely feels something universal, the terrifying feeling of being misunderstood.
Life is supposed to look a certain way, and when you break out of that construct, you stop becoming legible to other people. They can’t explain you, and most don’t take the time to understand that you haven’t lost your way; you aren’t noncommittal—quite the opposite. You abide by the laws of nature, and anything outside of that feels like a problem. Everything outside of that is a threat far bigger than the fear of venturing beyond the usual.
The desert doesn’t ask for anything to separate itself. It doesn’t ask me to separate myself.
The dirt and superblooms show up differently when surrounded by neutrality. The desert is empty, and full. It’s harsh, and it’s generous. It’s still, and it’s alive. It’s not trying to resolve any of that. It just is, and because of that, you notice things differently.
There’s one cactus blooming with magenta flowers in the yard of the house where I’m staying. It’s so obvious, against all the tan and faded green landscape. I keep wondering, is it the landscape that makes it pop, or is the neutrality of everything around it what allows the color to come forward in such an undeniable way?
The flowers wouldn’t stand out in the same way somewhere else. The desert, in its restraint, gives it a frame where nothing true about it gets lost.
The desert doesn’t create what’s there; it reveals it. It strips away everything extra to make beauty more noticeable. It feels less like a place of emptiness and more like a place of honesty.
I’m living the full range of contrast. I get to be all-or-nothing out here. I get to be windy, and I get to be still. In the peace, I think about my father and the suffocation of extremes in human behavior that come from holding back.
What happened? What did he deny himself? What did he think the world deprived him of? What got interrupted, or shut down, or made impossible? What version of freedom didn’t feel available? What about tenderness felt unsafe? Questions abound. I’ll never have the answers, but I can consider many of them.
What interests me most these days isn’t about what has gone wrong in my life or in the lives of others. It’s what never got to be fully expressed.
What happens to a life when it can’t hold all of itself?
What happens to a person when the world, or pain, or fear, or whatever inheritance they’ve been given, teaches them that only one part is survivable?
I think about that because I know I’m living a life he didn’t get to live.
I’ve stopped separating myself from him and moved closer to the question of him.
Understanding someone doesn’t excuse what hurt you, but it does open a new, complex way of seeing them, similar to paying attention in the desert. How the snakes move, when they travel, how not to disturb them, or let the scorpions in the house. How not to harm them, rather honor that they have a role to play that’s no different than the desert bunnies or the cute little round mice speeding through the brush.
The desert is often misunderstood as barren when it’s really a place to allow the heat to penetrate through to your bones, walk carefully without fear, notice the leathered lines on the sides of the eyes of the people who stay and withstand the whipping, relentless winter wind, the sandstorms, and the soft sway of the bushes in between. It’s a place where things learn to become themselves under pressure. A place where what is alive finds its form.
It reminds me that a person can live by extremes without being ruined by them.
There is something beautiful about becoming more and more yourself in a world that would often prefer reduction.
That which looks barren can still bloom.
That which looks too much to one person might be the fullest expression of another.
When I’m out there, I meet people whose faces carry whole climates in them. I see the art dotting the landscape, no matter the heat, no matter the dust, no matter how unforgiving the conditions are. And all of it feels like evidence that some people have learned to live through extremes without abandoning the instinct to make meaning.
I’ve never wanted one side of myself to come at the expense of the other.
I’ve wanted the frame wide enough to hold both.
That’s the truth of the desert for me. Not that it taught me how to hold contradiction, but that it reflects to me a life where contradiction isn’t a flaw at all. It’s just a form. It’s just nature. It’s what happens when something refuses to cut itself apart to make other people comfortable.
The desert doesn’t apologize for being severe one minute and a bright black sky popping with stars the next. It’s not hurting anyone; it’s conditioning us to build the resilience we must to embrace the fact that nothing is predictable.
It goes on being exactly what it is, but will I? What happens when I leave this place?