WARNING: EXTREMELY DRAMATIC, VALUELESS AND SELF-ABSORBED, SOUNDS SUPER FAKE
Burning Man is an annual week-long event in a temporary city in Nevada desert “devoted to art, community & 10 guiding principles including ‘radical self-expression’”. I have heard of it long since I attempted to attend for the first time this year. In a Burning Man themed salon talk I went a week before the event, people described it as “everything you wanted to do in San Francisco in a year, you could find it there and do it in a week”. In my co-living space, my housemate Marco told me he started a relationship with his girlfriend at Burning Man and “you just fell in love at Burning Man”. And when I first ever heard about it five years ago, my sophomore year camp leader West, someone with the kind of compassion and charisma that I had never witnessed before, told us he received his new name and new life from Burning Man.
Still, I was skeptical. There’s little chance that an event building up such much hype in me would not disappoint me. I’ve had so many amazing experiences, wanted so little of romantic relationships, and so content with my name or life that I didn’t think Burning Man had much to add. Yet it exceeded my expectation in every possible way.
I guess I could start by telling all those unbelievable events I went to.
I was in a naked group foam bath squashed together in a cube squirted by foam hoses from above. I attended Emote-a-thon, an emotion marathon for releasing full feminine emotions that made me cry for 3 hours straight. I went to Strap-on-a-thon, met two beautiful ladies in the most enchanting dimly lit setting and tried strap-on for the first time.
And I haven’t got even remotely close to the most unbelievable part yet.
I went to Burning Man knowing I wanted to explore. From the beginning, I was very decisive about where I wanted to go, what I wanted to wear (yep I had visions of all my costumes), which event I wanted to attend. I wanted to get so much out of Burning Man for myself that I cared little about the person that I went with, planned everything together with, and slept under the same tent with, my best friend Lucy. On the ride to the playa, she asked me “Can I request us to spend a half day together please?” I was shocked. How self-centered must I have been that she needed to ask that question, in such a nervous and polite way? I jokingly replied, “of course, why are you being so polite, we could spend three half-days together.” What actually happened shocked me even more. In my understanding of Lucy, she was always the girl that’s slightly more traditional, slightly more rational, cautious and innocent than me, yet she was willing to say “yes” to literally anything I wanted to do and tag along after me. While I thought I would be the happiest when I push my boundaries and grow as much as possible, I didn’t realize I was actually the happiest when I motivated other people to do the same and discovered more about themselves. On Friday morning when Lucy came back from her separate trip and in an hour-and-half long conversation told me about all the things she learned and how grateful and happy she was, I couldn’t be happier. My heart expanded with so much, so much love. Happiness is this thing that you could get by yourself, but love is only possible when you have an another.
“The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”
― Viktor Frankl
And I haven’t got to the most unbelievable part yet.
I went to Burning Man knowing I wanted to bond with my best friends. So when I saw the amazing human that I grew to be incredibly close within this year, Justin Angel, working his ass off at Black Rock Bakery, it was a no-brainer that I asked to join him for his evening adventures since I always enjoyed hanging out with him. While in the middle of an endless desert full of bizarre light structures, during nighttime, after biking to places far far away from our camps, with my extremely bad sense of direction, under heavy influence of substances, I became someone exceptionally vulnerable and afraid of getting lost, literally and metaphorically. At one moment after we arrived at a dance party, I wandered to sit on a platform and saw Justin, who had been swaying his arms and dancing in the crowd, suddenly looked around as if he’s searching for something, and then turned around and left the crowd. “Oh no, he must think I’m lost and is looking for me. I need to find him and not make him worried.” I thought to myself. A similar event happened earlier and I felt guilty about constantly getting lost and making others care for me. I climbed down, found him, and hugged him. A whirl of relief and gratefulness swept up in me, and I kept saying “I would be so lost without you.” The next thing I know is we started kissing. And we kissed for five hours, gazing into each other’s eyes, holding each other’s arms. I felt this overwhelming sense of love and gratitude injected into me from outside and I cared little about what this means to our longtime platonic friendship and what others might be thinking of us. I was single-minded, but Justin was not.
I didn’t realize how different his mind-state was until the next night we hung out, after saying that he wanted to have one-on-one conversations with me and expect to have another great time together in midst of his 12-hour-per-day everyday working schedule, Justin broke down and got angry at me to my face because I first acted like I was in a vegetable state, then laughed and talked nonstop and acted like a lunatic. When he refused to listen to me or looked at me in the eye no matter how much I apologized and tried to be kind, when he said “this is a terrible mistake” “the whole burning man is a mistake” and other things that I interpreted as “I hate you”, my whole world starts tumbling down. No, I am not exaggerating. You see, at that time, my most updated sense of “self” / “my world” was constructed by love, and the source of love was predominantly coming from that person in front of me sitting on the ground crying and blaming me. I was petrified, yet a single voice appeared in my head that dispersed all the fear and daze: ”I must believe in myself and make things better.” I understood, everything was changed, Justin couldn’t support me with love and acceptance anymore, I wasn’t myself without the love and acceptance anymore, I must, must, rebuild this world and this self, so that this night wouldn’t be a mistake and Justin wouldn’t hate himself or regret coming to Burning Man. While we were both sitting on the ground buried in our knees, I asked myself, “who do I want to be?” And then the answer just came to me: “I want to be like a little Sun; I want to be radiating positivity, warmth, and love; I want to be me.” I don’t know if it was because some stranger whispered my smile is like sunshine in my ear earlier during an event or because Lucy and other friends have commented I am sunshine personified or because my last-name. Anyways I took those words as a joke until that moment. So I insisted on staying, spending the night with Justin in his tent. While he fell asleep my brain was running a thousand miles searching for more answers, “what kind of life do I want to lead?” “what do I want from me and Justin?” The conclusion I found in that four hours of lying down was, 1) I choose Love as my religion; 2) I am so ignorant and I have so much to learn that I must concentrate on this practice of universal love; 3) Justin and I are incompatible in many ways. I could easily mess up a relationship with Justin and get distracted from my practice. We should stay friends.
That night, I rebuilt my self and my world up from the ashes, and I realized the difference between believing in Love and choosing Love as a religion. The night before, Love was this thing that I perceived. I naively thought it was divine, it was invincible, that if I hold on to it then I could be all-loving and all-powerful. Now I saw, Love has to be created out of myself. It is such a fragile thing that if we don’t pay attention to how we love we could easily destroy our relationships and our identities. We need to love with intention because Love has its power as well as its consequences. I saw how this second night was necessary and inevitable in serving as a lesson for me if I ever want to learn everything about love.
If I didn’t understand how Love can be destructive, didn’t see both the best and the worst of myself and Justin and still rise above to love myself and him, I could never truly completely unconditionally love.
I told Justin of my decision and reasoning the next night we hanged out. While I thought these are perfect answers, Justin, whose deepest pain has always been fear of rejection, felt super hurt and interpreted my words as I rejected him. He insisted that I was motivated by fear by deciding not to move on to the next level with him in our friendship. He might be true, but I was frustrated that he didn’t even share any excitement with me about my revelations! What I wanted to share with the world was “I love everyone”, yet what Justin heard was “you just rejected me”. After some passive-aggressive conversation and us biking around looking for distractions and remedies to his sleep-deprivation aka pho on the playa, Justin decided to call it an early night and go to sleep alone as self-care. And yep, just like that, I broke down. Things have already been super dramatic until that moment, but I am not kidding, I suddenly felt a panic attack and collapsed onto the ground outside his tent and started crying. All those guilt, regret, frustration, and self-hate came up to me, believing that I hurt my best friend’s feelings and kept failing his expectations and everyone else’s expectations, that I was so stupid that I didn’t deserve to exist. I cried for a good complete hour, and the extremely exhausted Justin couldn’t do anything but carried me to his tent, held me in his arms, saying things like “I accept you” or “you are not stupid”. Until I calmed down and he fell asleep. This time my brain was running a thousand miles an hour again searching for new answers. It felt so right, reflecting on the fact that the previous night I insisted to stay and supported Justin when he broke down and this night when Justin was willing to let me stay and supported me when I broke down, that something about our relationship was meant to be both dependent and supportive.
“What’s still worth doing even if you knew it would fail?” is a quote I use for my intro bio on top of my facebook profile, which somehow found its way to my brain that night and made its impact. This random question I put there was meant to show people that I am a little reckless, and prompt them to reflect on their life choices. I never thought it would actually guide my specific life choices. As I evaluated the whole situation for a thousand and one more time, I gradually started to accept the fact that I was, indeed, motivated by fear, to stay with friends with Justin, despite all my desires and goals to love and to grow. I was, so afraid, of losing him as a friend. Because that’s most likely what’s going to happen. Because I had never had relationships that last for more than a year. He gave me so much emotional and social support that I selfishly wanted that to last for a lifetime.
Oh fuck it, our platonic friendship is already so, so ruined by us making out for five hours on the dance floor and by him throwing his temper at me and by me making him feel rejected. I still want him to stay in my life, and a relationship would open up a thousand possibilities for us to grow together. Okay, maybe mainly for me to grow. After all, he also happened to be one of the most emotionally mature people I knew. What if it’s doomed to fail? We are all going to die. I should seize the moment while I am still attracted to him. It suddenly became an easy, obvious choice when there’s no turning back.
When Justin woke up I told him of my reversal of the previous decision and the new one. He was mildly confused and amused at first, listed five hundred reasons why this might be a really bad idea, then eventually became pretty delighted:
“We are so stupid. We’re ruining a great friendship. Let’s do it.”
And just like that, I came back from burning man with a new start of dating my best friend. It is super weird. I felt different in this relationship compared to all the other ones I’ve had. Because we’ve seen each other’s stupidest, angriest, saddest, weakest moments, and still choose to be together, because I know I accept 100% of him and he accepts 99% of me, I cease to guess, worry, hide, play games, fantasize, or act to please. I could just be me. Super comfortable, super secure, super weird.
And I haven’t got to the most unbelievable part yet.
The most unbelievable part is Burning Man leaves me to be more carefree and fearless than ever. This impact still echoes today, a week after I left the playa. Like I could just write about the whole crazy experience and post it here. Like I could just love everyone I connect with and speak to them about my love (Lucy said I was “puking love” in her party two days after we came back). Like I could just do whatever I want to do.
I had this desire to write for a long long time, but the fear of public shame and disapproval kept me from sharing anything. I even had a vivid nightmare in which I couldn’t find any original piece of writing I could present in a public reading that I ran away and choked myself with cheese pizzas aka my least favorite food in the entire world and woke up repeating the word “traumatized”.
This fear has governed my life for so long. I’ve written 100+ pages of google doc journal entries in this year yet I didn’t share any passages anywhere in public. I have a challenging technical job yet I have been really afraid to ask for help. I have amazing friends calling me texting me when they are down seeking emotional support. I love listening and supporting them, yet never even consider them doing the same for me.
It’s part of who I am, being independent. Not being a burden. Not being a nuisance. This has stopped me from embracing the real challenges. Yes, meeting new people is hard, confronting my body image, my emotions, my sexual desires is hard, but not nearly as hard as ceasing to fear if I might fail other people’s expectations of me.
It’s time, to just screw it up and not care.
P.S.
Check out food posts by pro chef Justin Angel
(Shameless plug so that Justin could feel better about his first anger tantrum in three years being recorded)
P.P.S.
Thanks to G. and H., whom I had never met before Burning Man, for making a lot of things mentioned happen.
