What I Learned from Going to Burning Man
And why the FOMO will haunt me all week
There’s a video out there you might have seen. “How was Burning Man?” she asks.
“How was Burning Man?”, he replies. “It’s a fundamentally absurd question. You should be asking me how wasn’t Burning Man… It was spiritual, physical, mental. It was everything.”
The parody is near perfection. Once you’ve been, you will jump on that pedestal and preach of the greatest city on earth and all its glory. You won’t let anyone “less informed” stomp on your sky castles!
And today, of all the wondrous sunny Sundays in Great British history, there’s a grey cloud hovering over me, because everyone else is heading back to the playa. And I’m not.
I got my chance though - twice - in 2016 and 2018. For months after, I was the one desperate to convince people, even as their eyes glazed over, that it’s not “just a festival.” That your very soul would reach near enlightenment should you pedal a week on this numinous playa. It is dazzling out there. It is dusty. There are parts I don’t remember, but more I’ll never forget.
To anyone thinking about going to Burning Man for the first time, there seems to be a lot to weigh up.
Yes it’s expensive. Yes it’s a pain in the arse to get to. Yes it’s going to eat up a shit-load of your vacation time and yes, you are going to be without the Internet for a week.
You could laze it up in Bali. Or Center Parcs. You could even just go to Glastonbury. All of them would be cheaper. And cleaner. You’d even still have WIFI.
In order to know for sure whether going to Burning Man is worth it, you’re going to have to go. Which means forking out the two grand (more-or-less if you live outside of the U.S), hire yourself a car/U-Haul/exorbitantly-priced RV and get yourself down to Black Rock City, aka The Playa, aka “home” - a land where the imagination, resilience and utter absurdity of 75,000+ people makes anything possible.
One afternoon, I was pondering the point of a writing desk, just sitting there abandoned in deep, deep playa, when I started to chat with a man in his late 50s, in a mohawk and tight leather pants. He explained he’d written five letters before coming to Burning Man. Each was meant for someone different. He told me he’d know who those people were when he met them.
We ended up chatting for about an hour. Then he handed me an envelope.
I waited till the gates had closed behind us before I opened my letter. It was all about courage. I had seemed courageous to him, apparently. And I’d reminded him of a time when he’d had to be courageous himself. I found that really strange at the time. I’d been feeling a bit shell-shocked by it all, to be honest.
I guess we rarely see ourselves the way strangers do. There’s a kind of fresh start for all that occurs when we meet someone new.
He had his reasons, he wrote, for having to summon the strength to go on. Like others on a sandy pilgrimage to the playa’s man-made temple, he’d brought his pain and his suffering to Burning Man. He came to find peace, he said, and to leave everything else in the ashes.
Some come to Burning Man to party. Some come for the art. Some come to make music, or a fresh start. Some come to do it all.
We shared what we had out there, mind, body, soul, food, booze. We ensured everyone had enough of what they needed. We had rules. We had compassion, we had kindness. We had fun. So much fun!
So if you choose to go, one year, won’t you smell, and come away poor, and wish you’d gone to Bali?
Maybe.
But maybe it will teach you a lot about yourself; a week that feels like a year. Maybe you’ll find peace and a leftover bag of weed in a pile of teddy bears.
Maybe when you close your inbox in Reno, you’ll start to address some stuff you’ve left unopened inside you.
Maybe you’ll come away lighter, after leaving your secrets with strangers.
You want to twerk and play Twister at a Miley Cyrus party, eat mashed potato and gravy from an ice-cream cone, and watch two trains smash together in an orchestrated wreck? Why wouldn’t you?
You want to attend an eye-gazing ceremony and quiver your way to ecstasy without touching anyone, or anything, then have a pillow fight with a 75-year old woman and her son? Why shouldn’t you?
You want to dance to a Mayan Warrior under desert skies? Toast another sunrise with free-flowing champagne? Lay your memorial to a loved one on the dusty ground and cry, cry, cry? It’s OK to be sad here. It’s OK to be happy right after.
You can look at it all as a noisy, ridiculous, never-ending filth-parade you’d rather die than participate in again. After all, have you seen those porta-potties at 1am?!
You can turn a blind eye to your “default world” and spend a day getting spanked, or making cat-faces out of your nipples, or learning blow job techniques and eating grilled cheese sandwiches handed to you in lacy panties.
You can be Barbie.
You can make lasting friendships with people just like you, and with people who are nothing like you at all.
You can come home! That’s where “Burners” love to say they are - and why I’ll have FOMO all week. They come home to the kid who never grew up, who still prefers to buzz through the day in butterfly wings. They come for the good of the child they once were, before they lost faith, or love, or hope… or everything. Sometimes they even bring their real kids.
There is glamour here…
But there is horror too.
You will have never been this dirty. You will have never been this tired. You will have never experienced such FOMO while simultaneously experiencing more fun than you thought it possible to have. Every party is the best party. Every time you sleep… and sleep you must, eventually… you miss out.
Unless you’d prefer to miss out.
Only you can decide if you should go to Burning Man, because yes, you might hate it.
Or it might be one of the best things you ever did.*
What is all this?
As a Harlequin and HarperCollins author, you may know me, Becky Wicks, from my many Mills and Boon romances, my memoirs on Dubai, Bali and South America. Or my YA series, which started with Before He Was Famous.
More on writing, publishing and how to find inspiration in the little things to help improve your work, coming soon.
*This post was adapted from an article I wrote in 2018.