After the Texas Disaster: Now What?
The sun is shining on a late February morning in Austin Texas. Laundry is sorted into piles for the wash, my cat naps in a sunbeam, I’m sipping lukewarm coffee and listening to NPR. It feels like a normal weekend in Pandemica, until I walk into the bathroom and am confronted with buckets of water collected in the bathtub ahead of a boil water notice and threat of complete water outage; or I look outside to see a pile of branches chopped down from the neighbor’s tree that was, a few days ago, dangerously ice-laden and collapsing on the power lines; or I open the hilariously empty refrigerator and contemplate the leftover beans I made in a desperate attempt to keep something warm in my stomach.
The last seven days feel as though they folded in on themselves and we are all awakening from the worst collective nightmare. Historic low temperatures accompanied an ice storm/snow storm/ice storm shit sandwich; half of Austin, along with millions of other Texans, lived in the dark and cold for days on end. This, after 350 days of the same list we can all repeat mindlessly like Aria naming her names: pandemic, civil rights uprising, contested elections, natural disasters, insurrection at the Capitol, Kimye divorcing. And once again, when the sun breaks tomorrow, we will be tasked with looking in the mirror and asking ourselves: “What the fuck do we do now?”
It’s laughably absurd that we should think we’ll wake up Monday morning ready to go with those TPS Reports, or that the cortisol flood we’ve been drowning in for a week will effortlessly slide away unnoticed. I am grateful that there is a collective push to call what we are experiencing as trauma, and as someone who used to grit my teeth through terrible life experiences and shrug off that word like it made me a victim, let me tell you how freeing it is to call trauma, “trauma” and stop trying to take responsibility for it. The word “trauma” doesn’t make you a victim, but it does give you vocabulary to explain and begin to heal the pain you’re feeling.
Last summer I was talking with my therapist about the powerlessness I felt during the protests, the collective pain seared into our history with George Floyd’s dying words, and the feeling that every time I got my feet under me, something I had no control over swept the leg. These “disruptive events,” as she called them, aren’t caused by our choices individually, but we have to deal with them, often individually and in isolation. Platitudes at the top of a Zoom call don’t fucking cut it when you need a 5-minute hug from your best friend accompanied by a fifth of something brown and taking a sledgehammer to an old radiator. Alors, this disaster in Texas that we have experienced first hand, and the pain and powerlessness that our friends and family across the country have felt watching our suffering, is another Disruptive Event that we have to recover from.
In fall of 2019 I experienced an individually traumatic event, and my response to that has been to over-prepare. It’s a very common trauma response; one I watched my father manifest, having been a child in the Great Depression, by stocking half the garage with canned goods and the other with generators and HAM radios and pretty much anything else you’d need to be fully self sufficient. Following my own Big Bang, I stocked the house with canned goods and gallons of water and installed security cameras and reread FoxFire books and packed Go Bags and mapped out escape plans. It bled off the anxiety knowing that I wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. The Doomsday Prepperess version of JLo in Enough.
In early March 2020, I asked my closest friends to pack bags and leave them by the door or in their cars and have alternate routes mapped out to my house, in anticipation of riots over empty HEB shelves and looting downtown. In June 2020, I paced my house while friends filmed the brutal police response to peaceful protestors and again asked them to stock up on water and milk for tear gas treatments and to please get the fuck out of downtown, anticipating the worst. On January 6 2021, I wept while watching the coverage of the Capitol riots and poured gin for lunch. And on February 11, I texted my friends to go to the grocery store and prepare to hunker down for a while in anticipation of…well, what happened.
I say this not to gloat or to remind my friends what a goddamn gift I am to their lives, but to underscore that even in the face of total preparation, we can’t hold back the tsunami of awfulness. This past week, I did everything I knew to do: I went shopping on Thursday before everything hit, I have a reserve of blankets and nonperishables and flashlights and batteries, I covered outside faucets and dripped inside ones into collection vessels. I have garden clippers on hand that proved essential when a neighbor’s tree was about to collapse on the power lines. I’ve made great strides in my personal life and have a boyfriend whose presence here for a week straight was a blessing and not a threat. I kept pet carriers and a few days of food by the door in case- god forbid- something happened in the house and we had to get out fast. I cleared the walk and the cars and dug out the road around them the first day so we could get out if we needed to. I have NASA blankets and crank radios and walkie talkies and full secondary chargers and gallons of water in the pantry and kept the faucets open when the pipes froze so when they came back on they wouldn’t blow out. I have a hatchet and a hunting knife in case I need to brain zombies or 127 hours myself. In short, I am fucking prepared.
But here’s the thing: being prepared for emergencies doesn’t stop them from coming. It simply means they won’t overwhelm you. Having a fire extinguisher doesn’t mean you won’t have a fire, it means you can contain it.
The converse though, is that being prepared in the face of a disaster doesn’t preclude you from feeling the full effect of the trauma. My power never went off this week, and for that I’m grateful, but the roads were impassable and my house is small so I sat powerless while my friend with two small children had to scramble for warmth when her house lost power. Is she less prepared than I am? No, she was simply unlucky and I was powerless to help her, even if I had a personal snowplow and flamethrower. (OMG picture it: Hitchmongus, plowing through snow and…well, Humongous was a Bad Guy so there are no parallels to draw besides the plowing. But not tha- you know, I’ll leave the metaphor here to die)
Other friends live in these new, modern apartments built on the ancient burial grounds of SXSW wristbands and Old Austin honky-tonks, and they lost power while pipes burst and sprinklers gushed, creating glacial TikToks in the stairwells. Were they unlucky or underprepared? I’d argue the former, and sue the building managers, but that’s another story.
I suppose, Dear Reader, this is where you’re like “Hitch. We’ve all lived through this, what’s your fucking point? Who edits your essays? Isn’t your boyfriend like a famous writer who can tell you when enough pontificating is enough?” And to that I’ll reply “The point is forthcoming; your mom is my editor; and yes but no, I do what I want and also he’s prone to navel gazing so get off my shit.” When I ask “what the fuck do we do?”, *this* is part of an answer to that question. I’m processing by writing. It’s a post-mortem, or an “after action review” for the less morbid. Where did I do well? Where can I improve upon next time? These are questions I certainly fucking hope ERCOT is asking themselves today.
We cannot survive the things we have in the last year and what appears to be continuing into the next by avoiding acknowledging the psychological effects that this traumatic whiplash is causing us. Name it. Call it what it is, recognize that it is creating deep rooted trauma responses and coping mechanisms, and be easy on yourself when you realize those aren’t serving you. You can experience traumatic, life-changing events and acknowledge its effects on you without losing your power in life.
So, now what? My own initial response is to jump back to The List, like nothing has happened. But I take a look around my house and see the animals sleeping, the plants turning their leaves toward the sun, the birds finally chirping and the neighbor’s chickens out pecking for the first time in days. They are finding peace, but I really want to sit on the floor and cry. Scream-cry like I haven’t done in a very long time, weep for the pain and suffering still happening inside and outside of me and my own powerlessness to fix it. Instead, I write this and will shower and see my bare toes for the first time in days; I’ll take small steps to regain lost ground today and a little more tomorrow. I already put an auto response on my email explaining I’ll be slow to respond and while you wait, why don’t you donate to Austin Mutual Aid. I am filled with an impotent buzzing: I can’t sit still but I can’t focus on the totality of fixing what needs fixed. But again, we have all been here before, and it was rightly pointed out this morning that these crises are at least showing many of us that we have a normality to come back to. I just have to remember what my own normality looks like.
I spent decades in my life downplaying trauma, refusing to “play the victim,” restarting my life over and over because I felt like if I torched it and started over, then I was exerting my own control and rewriting my destiny. But it wasn’t until all of that bit me in the ass and I had to stop dead in my tracks and hear the words that absolved me from having to fix the unfixable around me, that I was able to take responsibility for my own healing. There is immense power in vulnerability and in not trying to solve unsolvable problems but allowing them to exist outside of me and see them for the monsters they are; then your attention can be diverted to true healing and not just building useless defenses. For example, if it’s raining and you use all of your energy to blame yourself for not being a drier person, you’ll stay wet. But if you realize that the rain is out there and focus on your own umbrella, the rain will be something you experience without letting it destroy your core comfort. It will still be wet out there, but you don’t have to blame yourself for every storm that passes through.
Take a deep breath. Be easy on yourself. Be sad, be mad, be anxious and restless or be numb. However you choose to process this catastrophic event, don’t judge or blame yourself for it. Ask for help when you need it, stay hydrated and wear sunscreen. And please. Fucking Vote.
