I went to the desert to heal. It worked. Then I came home.

I returned home from camping feeling good. Really good. The kind of good I had forgotten was still possible.

The Eastern Sierra mountains. Bright blue skies. Desert sand and dry air stripped everything unnecessary from me. There's something about that landscape...the scale of it, the silence, the way color just sits there, unapologetic...it moved me in ways I didn’t expect.

I felt cleansed. Soothed. Like my nervous system exhaled, and I could breathe without the heaviness in my chest. 

For 24 hours, we had no cell service at all. No news. No scrolling. No bracing for what came next. Just the world as it actually was, right in front of me.

When we came back into range, I felt a flutter of real anxiety. What happened in those 24 hours? Had something new collapsed? Had he done something irreversible?

He had. And nothing had stopped it.

And just like that, the thing I’d put down for 24 hours was back in my hands.

Why can’t I shake this feeling of doom?

I know scrolling doesn’t help. I know that. And yet I can’t look away and pretend everything is fine, because everything is not fine.

Women are being systematically pushed out of public life, and it's happening fast. The Secretary of Defense has said openly that women don’t belong in combat roles, that we should stay home. Women are being blocked from advancing in the military. And the Save America Act would require women to prove their pre-marriage name matches their voter registration...with a birth certificate.

The right to vote, which women fought and died for, is being quietly and deliberately put in jeopardy.

And Trump threatens to obliterate Iran. Threats that border on war crimes. Openly. Daily. And no one is stopping him.

This week, the whole world watched him threaten to destroy a civilization and then walk it back. Two more weeks.

The cycle every woman who has lived with an abuser knows by heart: the threat, the reprieve, the threat again. He wasn't leading. He was performing...in his dementia, unhinged state.  And the audience was the entire planet.

I am outraged about this. Are you? 

I also believe things can change...I have to.

The Berlin Wall came down overnight. What looked impossible became history in a single day. That is real, and I am holding onto it.

I’m not going to write today about the times I stuffed my own anger to keep the peace. That story is coming...it’s one I know intimately.

But today I want to ask you:

Where is your anger living right now?

Is it in your chest? Your jaw? The back of your throat when you start to speak, and then don’t?

Because what is happening in the world right now is highlighting something very old in a lot of us.

Something we were trained to swallow. Decades of: be quiet, keep the peace, don’t make it worse.

And now the world is doing exactly what we were always afraid our anger would do...exploding anyway. Without us. Over us.

A woman who knows her anger...who can feel it without being swallowed by it, who lets it inform her choices instead of drive her silence...is a woman who is very hard to erase.

Right now, that matters more than it ever has.

I went to the desert and put it all down for a few days.

The red mountains didn’t know who the Secretary of Defense was. The blue sky didn’t care about voter registration. The sand just held me.

I’m glad I went. And I’m glad I came back. Because this is where the work is.

P.S. This summer, I’m launching a small group called ANCHORED... for women who are done silencing themselves in their relationships and in the world. If this post stirred something in you, stay close. More soon.

*Photos by Thomas Roberts. Thank you, Darling, for using your eye to capture the beauty of our trip.