“You’re really good at rage,” one of my friends reminded me on a Zoom call a few weeks ago. She meant I’m good at writing about it. Good at harnessing it. Good at yelling it in paragraphs of varying length. I’m good at channeling it into soundbites.

But what else are you supposed to do with it?

Anyone who knows me knows my natural order is to burn the world to the ground. Yet, women are taught to suppress their rage. It’s why some medical professionals believe we end up with so many autoimmune disorders. Unreleased rage burns holes in our bodies. Yet, go wild with rage and you’ll be called Emotional. Crazy. Unhinged. Hysterical. There’s a long history of locking up women like me or burning us at the stake. Men, on the other hand, are taught that rage is the only emotion they’re allowed to express. Half the population isn’t allowed to have it; the other half can only have it. We are socially constrained emotional inverses of each other—None of it in natural order.

I flew from Seattle to Joshua Tree a few days ago for a solo trekking journey in celebration of my 52nd birthday. I’m sleeping in a tiny white tent on a sleeping pad that keeps losing air because it has a hole that I never remember to fix. It’s cold at night and scorching in the day. Just like I like it. Extreme. Variably uncomfortable. Challenging. Radical. Beautiful. Glorious.

The last time I was here was a year ago with my daughter who is full-grown and the same size as me—5’2”. (So much for only dating tall men. My genetics are dominant miniature Queens.) Then, she was fifteen and I was fifty-one—like a playing card you could flip with the young 15 on one side and the inverse 51 on the other. The fifteen-year-old is like a new and improved even mouthier, more rage-filled, more confident model with better muscle tone and today’s priveldeged perfect teenage hair and Sephora skin regimes. It was 105 F degrees when we stayed in Palm Springs and the teenager’s favorite event was floating around the pool browning herself on a pink flamingo floatie while drinking $8 virgin piña coladas and jamming to Drake. Inversely, mine was stargazing deep in Joshua Tree and watching the moon rise and cast joshua tree-shaped shadows across the silent desert floor. We lay on beach towels together in the desert night on opulent white boulders and since her phone was out of cellular range, she talked to me. It was wild.

When I was seventeen my dad went out in the night and unhooked the cables to the car battery of my 1982 Ford Escort. He’d been telling me to take the school bus instead of driving to school every day for some time and I wasn’t listening. I’m not sure he understood that I didn’t just dislike the people on the bus or the lazy way it took forty-five minutes to meander to school, I was completely and desperately exhausted. I was taking too many AP classes and the only one I was knocking it out of the park in was Honors English (go figure). While my math aptitude was high, my math grades were definitively not. My math notebooks were filled with doomy poetry rather than equations. I wouldn’t fall in love with math for another decade after I began staring at density altitude graphs and later when I began to create the math of metrics at my job at Boeing and now at the Fire Service where numbers can show people how we can become better. But back in High School, I was exhausted from trying too hard at too many things. Most evenings I was either working as a lifeguard or playing Varsity soccer and then staying up ‘til two studying. I was overwhelmed and surviving on pots of coffee. Riding the bus was one more thing for which I couldn’t cope.

So when I went to start the car and it wouldn’t, I just went back to bed. I skipped school pretty routinely to get extra rest or catch up on homework so it wasn’t a surprise for me to just not go. I expected to sleep the death sleep of a teenager, then wake, eat a sandwich, spend the day studying, and regroup for the next day.

But while I slept, things went sideways. When the school called to get my absence excused, my dad, who also savors confrontation, said he hadn’t seen me and they should call the truant officer.

The next day in the office, I tried to explain.

“Wait, your dad knew you were at home in bed?” the office admin asked when she tried to hand me an in-school suspension slip.

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re having a bit of a disagreement about my car.”

She asked if I wanted her to call him and see if he wanted to take back his statement. I didn’t. Explaining my dad would take too long and the only thing I was going to call was his bluff. I wanted to take the punishment in the purest form of opposition. I wanted my dad’s ruse to get played out to the fullest extent. It would be an experience.

The next day, I sat in a basement windowless room with other kids who were In-School-Suspenion (ISS) regulars. Think Breakfast Club except no one was sexy. One lanky boy spent the entire day passed out. He woke only to go to the bathroom. Another talked cars with the bored teacher who sat with his feet up on the desk reading automotive magazines. A girl in all black passed the day chewing one piece of wrigleys gum after another and drawing in her notebook. Meanwhile, I finished a paper on a Thomas Hardy novel, and read four hours of European history I was behind on. I was an absolute freak in this situation.

Then I began writing about what was happening here in the ISS dungeon for my journalism editorial assignment. Kids who were being punished for skipping school among other infractions, were pulled from classes to sit in a windowless room where no teaching or learning was occurring. Devoid of sunlight or fresh air, we sat in a room only conducive for sleeping or slow death. Even as a kid, I could see these other kids needed what I also needed, counseling, tutoring, attention, mentorship, a healthy meal, and yes, more sleep. And what they were getting was the exact opposite, except maybe the kid who got SO MUCH sleep.

When my article was published in the school newspaper teachers (and students) approached me to compliment both the writing and the awareness it was raising about students who weren’t getting an education or rehabilitation. I wish I could say the probably eighty-five people who read my article formed a coalition and demanded the ISS room be closed down and all the kids exhibiting problems get the help they needed. It did not. I don’t know if Meadville High School still deals with kids this way, but I do know what I learned through that experience was that there are positive ways to burn off rage at a wrong situation.

Yesterday, one day prior to my 52nd birthday, I hiked 8 miles through Joshua Tree’s Boy Scout Trail. I hiked dusty trails past smoketree bushes and prickly pear and pencil cholla, and BLOOMING hedgehog cactus. A roadrunner ran across the trail in a desperate hurry. A cactus wren sang atop a Joshua Tree. I sat beneath the sliver of shade created by a thin Joshua tree that always reminds me somehow of a lama kneck. I painted a watercolor in my travel journal. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m also a painter.) I ate a hummus wrap and feasted on peanuts. I hiked deeper into the desert and sat beneath a smoketree’s shade and read Ben Master’s The Flitting about grief over his father’s dying and his mostly posthumous connection to his father’s love of butterflies. I thought about how we reject our connection to our parents in a brutal show of independence often up to the bitter end.

Somewhere along the trail, my phone caught a cell tower, and the now infamous Signal chat security breach Atlantic Article popped in like an oasis: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. I crawled under a tree and read as I filled with I-told you-so rage. The article accompanies a photo of Pete Hegseth and JD Vance sitting on a couch as it accounts blow by blow how an Atlantic journalist was seemingly inadvertently added to a Signal chat known as Houthi PC Small Group, that contained classified information detailing a planned military operation in Yemen. And while all of the senior Trump Administration Officials on the chat string had access to the appropriate SCIF where military operations could have been discussed, they chose to operate via cell phone without concern for the security risk it posed to our military personnel. The phrase Loose Lips Sink Ships, came to mind.

As fellow veteran Pete Buttigieg said yesterday, if he’d been responsible for a security breach of this level when he was a lieutenant he’d have been charged and done time in Leavenworth. But these are white privileged straight men who have insulated themselves from prosecution, who will deny their faults and continue to fail up. Who carelessly place soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen in peril, while paying no consequence for their own inept actions. The incompetence of this Administration is enraging at best. It’s potentially deadly. It’s simply terrifying to wonder how much of our National Security has been breached in the two months before a journalist discovered this travesty. As Buttigieg said yesterday on his Substack:

From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texted blow by blow, confidential military operations, over a chat string—a National Guardsman with combat time, a Fox News contributor Trump lover, and no actual qualifications to lead the entire Defense Department, a man who ordered the erasure of what he called DEI hires on all military websites as if they held positions because of and not despite their gender, skin color, or sexual orientation. This man touts merit-based hires, yet lacks the merit to hold any leadership role, a former soldier who should have known better, is now denying he did anything wrong.

Pete Hegseth needs to be fired. Period. There’s no other justifiable outcome. He’s completely incompetent and putting us all at risk.

Today is my 52nd birthday. I’m now setting off to hike again in the desert. To take respite. To find more blooming cactus. To discover an Oasis. To continue raging and becoming my best self. To demand change. To demand order. To demand we right the wrongs. May our Country sojourn its way out of this racist-led incompetent darkness.

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