This year I made a playlist for my annual gin and tonic happy hour that started with Janelle Monáe’s “Float.”

No, I'm not the same

I think I done changed

See somethin' not the same

I used to walk into the room head down

I don't walk, now I float

I don't step, I don't walk, I don't dance, I just

Float

The weather forecast kept saying Areas of blowing dust, which is meteorologist for Fucking whiteouts all day. It was windy, and when it wasn’t windy, it was hot, and when it wasn’t hot, it was cold, and when it wasn’t cold, it was raining.

We’ve really had it all this year, I wrote in a group text and received many commiserative emoji from my coworkers.

I sat in a porto at 5am on Friday counting my breathing, reciting the litany, reminding myself that this wasn’t going to be like 2023, the rain was going to end this afternoon, everything was going to be okay.

And it did, and it wasn’t just okay.

I had the opportunity to compare myself to myself, to notice where I was feeling strong and capable and where I was feeling meek and uncertain, broken down by the events of the last two years. Divorce and death and moving and learning how to cohabitate and getting dumped. The last couple years have ground up my self esteem like the Barbie Dream Shredder.

This was my eleventh burn, and my tenth on staff. I kept counting the years on my fingers, certain I couldn’t be right, that it couldn’t have been that long. After so many years, every Burning Man is a snapshot of my life, a side-by-side of how it started and how it’s going. The ritual of going out to the desert every year has become my longest relationship.

This morning I opened the Box Office, I wrote in my journal, and a little bit of rain sprinkled down out of a scattercloud sky. 

I woke up thinking about my ex, thinking about my dead husband. There’s so much ahead of us and we don’t know where it goes. I come out here and try to notice things like it could be my very last time. Box Office is my longest relationship. Everything we have, we lose. Everything we love, we lose. Ourselves, we lose. 

[A sunshower is] a fox’s wedding. A good omen.

I feel like a blood cell moving through an enormous body, something so big I can’t understand the scope of it, I can only traverse, react, interact, play my part. I love my friends and my department and my job. And someday it will be gone. So for now I try to notice it, soak up what I can, like the playa soaks up rain.

And then of course there are the little moments, the blessings of spontaneity: 

Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like A Love Song” playing in the commissary, wiping away my hangover, becoming my anthem for the rest of the event; the three people arguing at 6am about who was going to walk in whose footsteps as they traced a slippery path through the mud back to their camp, laughing raucously and shushing each other by turns, making me laugh so hard I had to kneel down; giving a ride to an older man who had overextended himself trying to get his steps in, listening to him bitch soulfully about getting older, thinking and not saying he reminded me of my dead husband, of how my dead husband would have been if he’d gotten to stay alive.

About four days in, I looked at myself and saw the sea change happening. Finally, finally, I hated myself less. In 2025, I came to Burning Man feeling like I was failing at almost everything I care about—home ownership, writing, polyamory, marriage. 2026 hasn’t been a cakewalk either. But this year on playa I found myself in a better state. I’m grateful. I’m growing.

Watching the sunset stain the mountains pink, a sight seen hundreds of times and always cherished, like hearing a lover sing a familiar song in another room; finally signing the contract and getting to announce my new book; catching raindrops in my coffee cup after the storm; setting up an impromptu checkpoint in front of camp where we validated tickets and credentials, even dragging the vendors (usually so staid and professional) into the shenanigans, making them bust out their backup supply of scanners for verisimilitude; having a drunken 2 AM heart-to-heart with a friend about love, parenthood, duty, attraction, monogamy.

When my ex and I broke up I thought polyamory was over for me, I wrote. I didn’t see the point in it anymore—I thought those connections were closed to me. And I didn’t want them. I didn’t feel good about the idea of being vulnerable like that with someone new, or of forming community with people I would inevitably lose later. And I’m still not interested in getting another romantic partner. Not yet. But coming out here I felt my stray cat heart light up. I can still do this. This is intrinsic to me. And I feel better doing it. More grounded, but also more adventurous. More like myself.

Rolling out to the burn in a truck, driving by a karaoke setup under a pop-up tent where a man was wailing Modest Mouse’s “Float On,” another track from my happy hour playlist; an all-girls art car tour with Chris and Quaker, trundling through the desert in a giant firefly; ducking out from under a shimmering cloud of falling embers, gasping and exhilarated, on the edge of fear; the man who reached up into the van to give me a jar of honey, softly, like he was placing it on an altar, who kissed the bite marks he’d left on my shoulder.

On my last morning I watched the sunrise from the top of the corral and thought about my life. I carry this self with me, I wrote, my playa self, my open air dreaming self. And also: I will not pass this way again. I misremembered The Mountain Goats’ lyric, “We will not pass this way again, so kiss me with your mouth open” as “kiss me with your eyes open” and as a reflection on the year that feels more appropriate. 

Climbing into a woman’s metal body, climbing into a fire tower, climbing into a shark’s mouth, feeling wild and adventurous, feral and untamable and completely myself.

No, I’m not the same. I’m fucking better.

To the moments that we make

And the fucked up shit we can’t erase