I need the desert.
Right now. I need to be out in the dry, dusty, barren desert with the heavy silence and brilliant stars. I need the rocks. The cacti. The texture. The silence. The rugged silence. I need to stare at the vast emptiness and let my mind whirl. Life is too busy, too complicated, too demanding, too exhausting. I feel like the desert is an escape from realities and responsibilities. A magical moment to pause time. A place where I can think and be and revel in my utter confusion while the distant world of obligations and phone-calls spins chaotically on. Without me.
Graduation looms a mere three months away and I feel as though my world, security, and sanity is crumbling before me. I have no idea what I'll be doing in three months. I have no idea how I'll pay loans off when volunteering seems to be the only prospect before me. I have no idea how to make dreams happen. I've pursued something I've loved for so long, and now that I'm on the brink of it, I'm balking. I'm terrified. Excited and anxious and scared and restless and frustrated and bewildered and tired.
What do I want? I WANT to grab my camera and notebook and listen to the stories of women around the world. I WANT to sit in the dirt with these women and give their voices a platform. I WANT to show the commonality of women and mothers around the world; their struggles, their pain, their joys. I want to gauge my ears, get tattoos, get sunburned and sit under patched roofs and learn from people I've only read about. I don't want to read one more theoretical model or social critique. I'm so burned out from academia. I want humanity, I crave connection, I need reality and honesty and humility and simplicity. I'm starved for real people in real places with lived experiences and their own personal narratives. I'm so exhausted by chronic abstraction; the sitting behind desks in quiet rooms in filthy rich La Jolla TALKING about poverty and aid and women's rights and empowerment and how white people have fucked it up. I need to do something with my hands. Let me help deliver a baby. Let me dig a well. Let me scrub the floors of some orphanage. Let me plant crops. Let me DO something tangible.
I need to walk and walk and walk and walk. In silence. In hot, sweaty, unbearable silence. I need to trudge, and think, and be. I want to stretch my arms across the mountain ranges and breathe in the vastness of the stars. I want to revel in my humanity and my identity and my own uncomfortable skin.
In three months, something will happen. But right now,
I need the desert.
Right now.
