The desert and fear: How a trip to nowhere showed me the depths of my anxiety as a trans woman in America

• I came out as a trans woman in 2020. The next year, I traveled across America to find myself.
• The desert has a particularly therapeutic quality for me. There, I recognize just how much anxiety I carry in public.

I came out as a trans woman in 2020. I traveled across America traversing the barren deserts of the West to find myself — to find Victoria, the new woman I was becoming — in 2021. Now, as I try to settle down into a normal life, one lived as myself in a normal little house with a normal desk job and normal worries, I cannot shake the feeling that I need to escape again.

I do truly love to visit the desert; it has a therapeutic quality for me. On my travels in 2021, I drove my van all across the country, sleeping in it on mountaintops, generally disappearing from the grid, and aimlessly discovering lands in national forests for fun. I was as self-sufficient as I could be, living off crates of food and gallon-jugs of water stored inside my mobile bedroom, knowing that anything I could get myself into, I could get myself out of.

I recently moved to Reno, Nevada, for the same reasons I fell in love with the desert. Two hours from my house, down the self-proclaimed Loneliest Highway in America, is one of the final respites of dark skies in the 21st century; it's a 245-mile stretch of unpreserved, unimportant land bordered by a military bombing range and dotted with some forgotten ghost towns.

Unlike most other dark sky sites remaining in the country — such as the beautiful Gila National Forest of New Mexico, or the environmentally important Big Bend National Park in Texas — this stretch of land on US 50 remains so gloriously free of light pollution simply isn't worth doing anything with.

Unlike the federally-recognized lands where the full extent of the Milky Way still shines bright, these desert plains and mountain ranges wedged between the neon-lit casinos of Reno and the Great Basin National Park are largely desolate. Traffic headed West from Utah generally takes I-80 through the Northern half of the state, and travelers from Reno to Vegas use US 95.

US 50 is for people nowhere to go and no one to see.

The last eastward expedition I took, I drove until the highway signs threatened 57 miles until next service. I found the next turnoff, chose a dirt road, and headed north, unaware of what I would find. At first, I felt the calm of the desert at its finest. I'd picked a great road because there was nary a soul to be seen; every time I stepped out of the van and shut off the clattering diesel, the only sound in the entire world was my own breathing.

As the skies grew more and more threatening, a slight feeling of unease gnawed at me. I ignored it until I was miles deep down soft clay roads and rain pattered on the windshield.

For once in my anxious life, my worries were justified. If it poured now — as it was starting to — I'd be stuck roughly 40 miles from the highway, sunk into the clay. I hadn't passed a single soul since I left the pavement two hours before, and cell signal was nonexistent.

There were two brief moments of realization as I raced to turn my van around. One: I am such an anxious person that I cannot distinguish a valid gut feeling from the background radiation of my nervous existence. Two: I must beat the rain.

I went to the Grand Canyon last year. It's stunning beyond what photos or words can convey, and its enormity is beyond what I could process. But it never felt special like the desert does in my mind. I had an appreciation for the beauty of it, but I didn't feel the cathartic relaxation I do when I arrive at an unremarkable desert plain somewhere off of the uninhabited stretches of US 50.

As I stood there among other tourists, I felt the same surface-level anxieties I feel every day. They only abated slightly when I walked out onto a rock overhanging the cliff edge, letting myself feel a fear greater than the ever-present dread I have of other people.

That's because as long as anyone is around, whether I'm at the Grand Canyon or in the coffee shop, I'm scared to be me in the world we live in. I only realize that the fear is there at all when it finally lifts; it's omnipresent and all-consuming, because I've lived with it for what feels like my entire life.

Only out in the desert completely alone, finally free of it, can I see the burden I've been dragging around.

When I came out as a trans woman, I ascribed this constant dread to being early on in my transition and worrying I was failing at whatever performance of gender seemed beyond my grasp. I'm now two years in, happier with how I look and more satisfied with my life than ever before, but I'm also less certain that the dread will ever fade.

Existing as a transfemme in 2022's America, constantly defending against attacks on our personhood and our ability to exist in society as ourselves, feels like I'm doomed to constant paranoia and waiting for the other shoe to drop. When will someone decide I'm the next convenient target, and what will I do to stop them?

Of course, it's never happened. Despite the fact that you could tell the time by how frequently I've been clocked as a trans woman since moving to Reno, no one has done anything about it. I tell myself that I'm probably being melodramatic and making my own self-obsession seem like a valid concern, especially when so much violence against trans women happens to women of color.

But I've been bitten by my own self-doubt before. I drove 40 miles into a thunderstorm, writing my fears off as the manifestation of clinical anxiety, and then it rained.

If you can't tell whether the distant clouds are going to build into a storm, is it foolish to fear them? Or is it simply the safest thing to do?

Rihanna's "S&M" blasted through the speakers of my van as I raced away from the encroaching clouds, passing the ruins of some old mining town in the remote sands off of US 50 with about 10 miles to until I hit the pavement. I'd reached a moment of fight-or-flight, and I'd chosen to fight by flight. I didn't have the hubris to take on God in the shadow of His mountains under a pouring sky, but I figured I could outrun Him.

I floored it across unimproved mining roads, wet bits of clay bouncing off my van as the sky darkened, and my body had never felt so nimble. All of my fears about the worst-case scenario had come to fruition as my wipers flicked away rain, and I was booking it down roads I'd only ever seen once in my life, frantically scrambling through dried riverbeds and power-sliding my van through corners I couldn't see around. I was at the limits of what a 26-year-old woman in a 26-year-old van could accomplish.

But I was calm, humming along with Rihanna at 50 mph as I dodged eroded shoulders and wayward boulders. All my fear evaporated when one goal became clear: Go. My van, my safety, and my ability to make it out of here were suddenly between God and my right foot, and I had faith in my right foot.

There was still freedom in living in the vacuum of desolation, even when it could mean my demise; there was no transphobia in a thunderstorm. The only part of being Victoria Scott that mattered in that moment was how fast I could drive.

I want to control my destiny more than anything. I cannot stand walking to the bar down the street in fear, trying to figure out which of the group of men that just called me a slur I need to fear the most. Constantly evaluating and adapting threat models to every moment of my life feels necessary, yet I have no proof it actually is. I'm staring at clouds I can't judge yet.

Yet I'm so tired of being called brave for taking hormones and getting out of bed every day. I can do valiant things, but dealing with the base realities of my existence is not bravery. I'm not facing everyday life with courage. I just want to get my damn coffee and hang out with my friends at a bar, because "Victoria Scott" is neither a statement nor an inherently political one.

I want to engage with my fear on my terms. If people hate me, they should do it for reasons of my own making; if a rogue low-pressure zone wants to flood me into oblivion, it should be because I drove myself into its path on purpose.

I'm not sure any of this taught me a lesson or a helpful note — at least, not one that can change the landscape of the country I live in overnight. I don't know how to fix the broken political system through which we funnel hate and death; I would simply like to pass and stop thinking about my gender in the damn coffee shop. I'd like to stop throwing myself into dangerous situations, either intentionally or unwittingly, just to feel like I have control over my own life again.

Above all, I only want to be brave when I choose courage, because no one deserves a life where every day is a fight to stay alive.