Starting Again

How quickly priorities can change. 

New year, new me! Lose 10 pounds! Find a job I can be more passionate about! Learn how to cook! The typical list goes on. Lists like this are made when we have the mental and emotional bandwidth to make them. This rarely extends to times of crises, where all of our faculties for problem-solving become trained on just getting through.

In just a couple of days, due to wildfires in Los Angeles, 30,000 people went from “new year, new me!” to new year, no home. Many people who built their homes themselves. People who raised families. Invested everything. All gone. 

Additional people were forced to evacuate and decide what to take with them. (For some context on the true magnitude of these fires, the burned area is 1.5 times larger than Paris, and nearly 2.75 times the size of Manhattan.)

A day into the fires, I spoke with a friend of mine who, along with his family, is now in a rental property, wondering where they will live this year. They have children whose schools have burned down, a community whose physical nucleus no longer exists, and have lost no small part of their life savings. Even if they were to return to their neighborhood, there’s no “neighborhood” to return to. 

He said to me: 

“It’s not just the homes. It’s hard to grasp, but the entire neighborhood where we have all lived is gone. The schools are gone. The shops. The markets. The library. The parks. There is nothing left. It doesn’t compute because we can only imagine a building or a house burning down. Not all of them.”

Audrey and I were among the lucky ones not forced to evacuate. Nonetheless, the fires came too close for comfort, and like so many others, we were placed on a “red flag warning,” and readied a bag in case we needed to go at a moment’s notice.

 It’s a nice idea that this moment is a clarifying one, forcing us to instinctively laser in on the things that really matter. Not for me. I didn’t know what to pack. My laptop comes with me everywhere anyway, as does my passport. Many inexpensive things that matter to me emotionally are sprinkled all over the house, so I really didn’t know which ones to take. Audrey wanted to take a little set of wooden penguins my mum bought for us, which was kind of funny (save the penguins!) I have a little pin from Disneyland Audrey bought me once, which has Disney’s Hercules on it and says “Go the distance,” but that comes with me everywhere too. 

So what to take? I really don’t know. 

Perhaps because I’ve had the experience of losing everything before, I’ve never let myself get too attached to the stuff I accumulate over time. (Though let’s be clear, I am attached to the many years of work it took to buy our home. I think people forget that when they say things like, “It’s only money.” It’s so flippant. 

For people who didn’t start with money, losing money isn’t just losing money—it’s losing all the time that was sacrificed to accumulate it in the first place. Time one cannot get back.)

 

As a brief aside, this friend of mine I spoke of above recently told me he and his brother were cleaning out their mum’s house after she passed. She had kept everything her whole life. And I mean everything. It had all felt so important to her. And it was. But to him? To his kids? Did they really need his and his brother’s baby teeth that she’d kept? Did anybody? Did they have a place for all the knickknacks, the furniture that meant something to her? 

They got rid of 95% of it. He joked to me that “no one in the future is going to decide they need to open a museum of my mother.” 

He’s right! And there’ll likely never be a museum dedicated to you or me either 100 years from now. Sorry. The stuff we accumulate will eventually just not matter. (Kind of liberating, no?)

 

Anyway, back to the fires. 

When we make our grand plans for the year, we rarely assume that a day later, we might be discussing such things. Our plans usually assume the year will remain typical. Often, when I plan out my days (though I’ve gotten better at this), my plans assume I will be operating at optimal efficiency, with zero unintended interruptions. I rarely have such days, and probably, neither do you.

In reality, there are always bumps in the road, challenges that divert us from our plans, and sometimes, whether literal or metaphorical, catastrophic wildfires. Sam Harris, who incidentally was one of those evacuated by the fires, once said: 

“If you think things can’t get any worse, that’s just a failure of imagination.”

This phrase has always been a kind of morbid comfort to me any time I find myself complaining about something I disapprove of, like a pulled hamstring, an overwhelmingly busy workweek, or a difficult relationship (no, not you, Audrey).

Well, that phrase was fully substantiated last week, by people whose imaginations could not have conceived of the extent of the damage that was done to their city and their life in the space of 48 hours and beyond. And yet, the phrase remains true. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider how things might have been worse, had people’s family members or pets been inside, which in some tragic instances, they were. 

This, however, is absolutely not something that is helpful to point out to someone who is newly traumatized by such a staggering loss: “At least you’re still alive!” This has been given a name—toxic positivity—and, sadly, too often it takes the place of listening to someone and connecting with them in their pain.

 

For those of us living in LA, there’s something deeply disconcerting about this whole thing—how damn out of control it makes us all feel now that we are educated on how, exactly, this kind of thing happened in the first place:

OK, so let me get this straight . . . it just needs to not rain for several months, be especially windy, and some fires need to start, and a firestorm could send flaming embers flying miles in every direction, starting fires at a scale no municipal firefighting service, no matter how well-funded, could possibly be equipped to handle? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm . . . right. So what you’re saying is, none of us have been safe this whole time, and there’s nothing you can tell us that “really” means we are safe here in the future? OK, got it.

This isn’t the kind of reassurance we like to have as human beings. 

It makes us feel out of control in a way that shakes us to our core. 

“What do you mean it could all just end at any moment? 

That can’t be right. We have self-driving cars but you can’t save my house from burning down?”

I believe that for many, the finger-pointing that occurs after a situation like this is a reflection of this shocking and unwelcome encounter with the feeling of being totally out of control.

 

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, which synthesizes clinical and social insights into the aftermath of trauma on its victims, Judith L. Herman writes:

 

"To imagine one may have done better may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness."

 

So what can we do in the face of utter helplessness, or total loss? 

Well, one thing I know is that in the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. 

I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

As an example, someone I know came to me for advice in a bitterly acrimonious divorce whereby in her 50s, she was losing half of her savings to a narcissistic husband, who had never worked, nor contributed to raising their children, but now demanded every penny he could get. She had to sell the house she loved to pay him what he demanded, move to a part of the city she didn’t want to live in, and face a future where she would no longer be able to retire when she’d hoped.

I told her that continuing to compare where she is now to where she thought she was financially before the divorce was a recipe for misery. 

Instead, she had to mentally reset her starting point to where she actually was today, and then build from there. Only then could she feel the satisfaction of making progress again. 

This wasn’t positive talk. It came from hard-won experience.

 

The second survival strategy in times like this is 

to remind ourselves that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. 

Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

 

But there is a simple, natural, and beautiful survival strategy I’m seeing all over LA right now. 

People are talking. 

This seems to be because we collectively have something non-trivial to talk about—a socially acceptable pain, a shared reference point of grief, sympathy, and worry.

Friends who haven’t spoken in months or years are reaching out to each other. 

For my part, it’s even reconnected me with friends I haven’t exchanged words with in years who live halfway across the world, but wanted to check in on me. 

But it’s not just friends. People in coffee shops are chatting who would normally keep to themselves. There’s something bizarrely cozy about it. Like we are all huddled together talking about this thing that’s happened. There seem to be fewer strangers around.

It makes me a little sad for everyday life when a natural disaster isn’t happening, because in many ways, there’s no less pain on those days. On any given day, we all walk around with our own localized, individualized, hidden sources of pain that sit right beneath the surface, begging for solace and connection. Most days, we neither feel entitled, nor courageous enough, to allow people access to these parts of ourselves. Others, feeling the same instincts, give us the impression of having none of these challenges of their own.

 

I just watched the Avicii documentary and was reminded of how even a world-famous DJ who appears to be on the top of the world can be on the brink of their own internal natural disaster without even the people closest to them realizing it. By the accounts of his friends, he seemed to be in good spirits on his way to an adventurous trip to Oman, where it would later be discovered he took his own life. 

Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

 

In a call for support to his contact list this week, a friend of mine signed off an email by saying: 

“In LA, a lot of people need each other right now.”

He’s right. But isn’t that also true of everyone, all the time?

You don’t need to be in LA right now for this to be true in your life. 

Someone you know is going through a devastating heartbreak right now, whether you know about it or not. Someone is having anxiety about their health, or is experiencing a chronic pain they are afraid is never going to go away, or thinking about an ex they fear they will never get over, or questioning their worth, or feeling lonely and isolated in ways they’ll never admit on social media. Maybe that someone is you.

None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. 

Huddle up, and let’s talk.

Key Takeaways

1. In the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

2. In times like these, we can remember that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

3. Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

4. None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. Huddle up, and let’s talk.

What About You?

Is there someone you can reach out to in your life to see how they’re doing? 

Those check-ins often mean more than we realize. 

And what of your own situation could you share with someone today that you might have normally kept to yourself?

You sharing it could not only help you receive more support, but also give someone the invitation they need to share more of themselves. 

Matthew Hussey