This Is Why I'm Running Away To The Desert

It's not a metaphor. I leave Saturday.

I’ve decided to run away to the desert so I can rethink my life.

I leave early Saturday morning for eight days and am going deep into Yucca Valley—just north of Joshua Tree—in the dark and mystical Mojave Desert.

The plan is to write book #2’s proposal, get CLEAR about my art and business goals, and, of course, ~feel~ some of the ~feelings~ I haven’t been able to access because—I don’t know—I’ve been in survival mode since the salad days of April of 2023?

I’m going cold turkey off of social media during my desert stint. If this was three years ago, going off social media would’ve made my stress hormones skyrocket.

BUT I DEPEND ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR MY BUSINESS! I’d moan.

*No bitch, you actually don’t.*

I think a lot of us—myself included—have been guilty of feeding ourselves the lie that “everything we’ve ever built” will crumble if we go OFF SOCIAL—so we can better justify and enable our dopamine addictions.

The truth is—what are we *actually* accomplishing swallowing hours on these wooden platforms?

We scroll and scroll and scroll, hoping to find ~something~ that will scratch the deep itch within—and instead of leaving satiated—we’re full of even more holes.

More than anything, social media is a time suck, an energy suck and clogs our brains with depressing images and far too much “information.” I’m over being a storage unit to useless information. I want something better than useless information. I want knowledge. You garner knowledge through hands-on experience—not through doom scrolling.

Also, I have a hunch that if all of us took a two-week break from social, our businesses would likely do far better in the long game because we’d have the head space to think strategically, to plan, to ideate.

This is why I’m running away to the desert; I want to think big.

I’m running away to the desert because I’ve decided I really don’t want a life where I always feel like I’m chasing my tail.

I’m running away to the desert because I want to dream and scheme my way to an expansive, wild, beautiful life rich with meaning and impact. And I know that if I want to break my default pattern of survival mode, I need to slow down.

I’m running away to the desert because I want to slow down.

The desert just *does* something to you, I swear to Lana. You peer out the window in the morning, and the view is vast; it’s open, it’s sparse. Your creative brain is free to fill in the blanks. The stillness calms the stir of your thoughts. The clear, open sky clears and opens untapped parts of the mind. The artsy rock formations invoke new ideas.

Don’t get me started on the stars. Did you know the stars in Joshua Tree can be blue, orange, white, yellow, red, and pink? The trippiness of the colorful stars makes you weird enough to try something new.

Don’t get me wrong; the desert isn’t all meditative beauty and monumental vistas. The desert has a dark side. It’s an extreme climate—few animals and plants can survive the severity of the conditions. There’s no water, and it’s excruciatingly, painstakingly hot in the day. But come nightfall, you’ll wrap yourself in down and wool, and still your teeth will uncontrollably chatter. The air is bone dry in the desert. Everyone is at high risk for experiencing the dangerous kind of dehydration that makes you hallucinate; see mirages.

Speaking of going crazy, the crowd the desert draws is fucking freaky. And I don’t mean freaky like the fashion victims traipsing around New York in prairie dresses with pointy shoulder pads.

I mean freaky—as in it’s an unspoken rule in desert culture that you never ask anyone their last names. People who escape to the desert are on the run; they don’t want to be found; don’t you dare ask them questions—it’s rude. It’s the wild west on crystal meth. The peaks and valleys are home to a variety of strange subcultures: artists and addicts; conspiracy theorist and criminals; young pretty girls and hell’s angels; hippies and speedfreaks; people who had no choice but to slip between the cracks of society and people who actively chose to slip through the cracks of society.

The desert carries a lot of energy and no energy at all. This why I’m running away to the desert—LA is one note; I crave nuance.

If you can’t tell, I’m pretty obsessed with the desert. The obsession kicked off the last time I went. I was with my family—early fall of 2023.

My parents wanted to take my brother and me on a little trip somewhere in California, between rounds of chemo.

No one said it aloud, but we all knew the real reason behind the trip. Blake could die. We wanted one more trip. It was the kind of brutal truth you’re aware of deep down inside but don’t allow to break through the surface because you can’t bear to look at it. So it sort of just sits up in the skin, like a splinter, pricking you just lightly enough to experience discomfort—but covered by so many layers of epidermis that it’s easy to ignore (especially if anesthetic of wine is involved).

We all went to the hospital for a meeting with the pancreatic cancer surgeon on the way there. The surgeon broke the ugly news: Blake’s tumor was inoperable. The antithesis of what we wanted to hear.

My mom gasped and I sucked in my stomach and my dad distracted himself by checking his emails on his phone much to the relief of my mom—it gave her something tangible to be pissed about. “I can’t bloody believe it,” she stage-whispered to me right in front of the doctor.

On the drive there, my mom and Blake had an explosive fight. Blake and I had our own screaming match a few days later. So much misdirected hurt. October 7th happened mid-trip, on top of it. Reality felt too sharp, too unforgiving, too dark, dark, dark.

But the trip felt magical as much as it did diabolical—which is why the desert was the perfect backdrop for the haphazard flow we were in. We were vacant and hedonistic at once; we matched the energy of the desert.

Blake and I shared a room. We always share a room, and it’s my favorite part of any family vacation. We easily dropped into our weirdo brother/sister mode, where we choose the same obsession and fixate on it for an entire trip. This time, the object of our obsession was the desert, herself. We both bought and devoured the book “Twentynine Palms”—a masterpiece, a prolific detailing of a true crime that examines the underbelly of America through the lens of a murder in the desert. Light reading, just how I like it.

This was Blake and I at our best—rapt and immersed in an obscure subject to fall inside.

One day, we hiked through Joshua Tree National Park, even though Blake was weak from chemo. We shared a gin and tonic and waxed poetic about the eery surrealness of jackrabbits—they’re allegedly everywhere in the desert. He prayed we’d see one, I prayed we didn’t (they’re creepy—which is why I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture).

We never did see a jackrabbit. Sometimes, I fall asleep, and his reaction to one plays out in my subconscious mind. It’s taller than me and casually strolls past us in the glowing dark as we smoke joints on the patio. I still am unclear as to whether it’s a dream or a nightmare.

I took a lot of pictures on that trip. I never posted them because Blake didn’t like the way he looked. He didn’t want people to know he was sick, and he wasn’t invisible sick; he was glaringly unwell. Now that he’s gone, his cancer is public. I know he likes it; he loves attention.

A part of me wishes he’d have let the masses in right at the end of his too-short life—so he could’ve felt the immense love and affection so many feel for him before he left. We all want to be known. Especially Blake. He was a filmmaker—for Christ’s sake.

Sometimes I dream that I’m shaking my brother—“Blake, Blake! Look, look—people cared so much about you! No one will ever forget you!”

But then I remember that yes—close, close friends and family will always remember my brother—but most will likely forget—it’s just what happens.

This is why I’m running away to the desert. So I can write my brother back to life. Because books aren’t like people; they never forget.

This is why I’m running away to the desert. To immortalize my brother.