According to FEMA, there are four phases of emergency management. Although I couldn’t have named them then, I practiced the first two for years, my own desperate religion: mitigation and preparedness.
Even though we live on a quiet street, I would lie in bed at night worrying about how I’d respond if a car came careening toward our house, into the bedroom where our daughter slept.
It didn’t quite seem reasonable, yet it didn’t seem crazy, either, not to me. These thoughts made me feel horrible, but I couldn’t find a way to stop them. I worried, too, about other things, always accidents, unpreventable.
The anxiety was a leaden weight around my mind. I told myself that if I didn’t speak the thoughts, they wouldn’t be real. That if I didn’t say them out loud, they wouldn’t actually exist.
Except that never worked.
I ignored a part of myself that screamed until it was heard, and then I’d freeze inside, take shallow breaths, try to think of other things, wait for anxiety to pass me by. Thoughts entered my mind and stayed there, looping. I didn’t realize that the not breathing made the thoughts linger. It went on this way for three years.
I. MITIGATION
In the mitigation phase, you engage in activities that reduce the likelihood of an event happening, or prevent it from happening altogether. I accepted my worry as the burden of mitigation; if I just worried enough, nothing bad would happen. Worry was my protection, my twisted prayer.
I imagined my way both into and out of self-generated fears. I never worried about what would happen to me. I was beside the point. I honed my worry on my kids. What would I do if we were in a car accident? Or if the car skidded off the road into water? (This thought made me cease breathing for a second, as though I was already under water.) What if there was an intruder, where would we hide, or how would we escape? If separated in the grocery store, what was the first thing I’d do? Where were the exits in a crowded room, where was shelter?
Behind every worry, the question: how do I keep them safe?
If you’re preparing for the chance of a real emergency, you can take a clear and definitive action. You purchase flood insurance. You build your house up on stilts. You do all this to avoid or diminish the effect of the specific dangers you know exist.
I am not sure I ever faced any real threats, yet I faced all the threats that I could imagine.
I avoided the news because it provided immense fuel for negative thoughts, an endless number of life’s brutal possibilities. If I heard of something horrible, while scrolling Facebook or flipping through radio stations, I would feel compelled to follow it, to look for the thing that person did that I would do differently if in the same situation, to reassure myself this would not, could not, happen to me. It is usually impossible to find that thing. Plenty of people build houses on stilts, and disaster still strikes. It is impossible to mitigate chance, that one wrong move, the unforeseeable error. It sunk me further into the quiet chaos of anxiety.
It’s important to paint an accurate picture: at the same time that anxiety was warping my thoughts, I was also happy, healthy; an engaged, lively mom of two young kids. This worry, the deep anxiety, was a private aspect of my life, not because I deceived anyone with intent, but because I could never find the words to put to it, could never fully explain it. And anyway, I felt superstitious about speaking any of these things out loud, sure that voicing my worries would call them closer. I thought that mitigation required the silent worry, not the whispered confession.
My worries were paper tigers, but I couldn’t see that. Every day, the act of worry felt like protection, so I let the slideshow projector in my brain keep playing the same worn-out fears. Then, maybe, I could be prepared. Then, maybe, I could reduce the probability of anything horrible ever occurring. But I wasn’t actually preparing. Until winter, three years ago.
II. PREPAREDNESS
Connecticut winters are always a battle zone for me, the gray sky and cold weather and everything outside dead. We often lose power in big storms, and one was headed our way. The thought of being stuck in the house with a newborn and a toddler and no power, trapped in place by snow and ice, made me want to cry.
A few days before the storm, I was searching for flashlights online and, in that particular way the internet can take you so off track, found myself immersed in the world of die-hard disaster prep. I discovered a litany of items needed to prepare for disaster: portable water filters, whistles, thermal blankets made of foil, iodine, hand-crank emergency radios.
In the preparedness phase, FEMA says, you take action. You make plans, you stock up. You get ready for disaster to strike.
The panic clogged my throat. We had none of these things. What if we needed them? We would be unprepared. And more than anything I wanted—needed— to protect my kids from the disasters that could befall them. This kind of disaster was a new level, one I’d never thought to worry about before. My virtual shopping cart filled up— hundreds of dollars of disaster prep, every cent of which symbolized not my preparedness or intelligence but my wild fear and deep anxiety. I didn’t need any of this, but what if I did? I could see how it was paranoid, desperate, sad. It also felt like protection against the invisible worries that snaked their way through my head. I was taking my worries and doing something about them; it made me feel less feral, more in control.
My internet exploration made me think that if I had a keychain-sized piece of flint, I could start a fire anywhere, and my children would never be cold. How would we end up where my imagination took us-- in the middle of the woods and in need of a piece of flint? I didn’t know, I just knew that if we did, we would be okay. If I could just be prepared, then maybe I wouldn’t have to worry. If I knew I was ready, maybe I could just settle into bed at night, peaceful instead of anxious.
In a strange, near-paranoid tangent that lasted for days, my finger hovered over the “proceed to checkout” button dozens of times. I stopped myself for one reason: I knew that if I had to explain to my husband why the gigantic Amazon box on our doorstop contained disaster preparations, it would unmask my anxiety. Not just to him, but to me. I knew that, if I was forced to explain, we both would see how off track my mind had become. I could picture the soft concern in his eyes that would layer itself over the deeper surprise. He is calm and levelheaded by nature. His wholehearted attempts to understand the bits of anxiety I had admitted to him in the past had failed; it was a foreign concept. I could feel the look he would have in his eyes as he stared at my disaster prep supplies. I knew that look would translate to the sinking of my heart, and the sinking of my heart to the realization that this had all gone much too far.
Part of me always knew that these thoughts were unfounded, but this first grasp to do something to support the fear and anxiety felt worse-- scary, wrong. But another part of me was so deep in the worry, the anxiety, the fear, that I couldn’t deny that voice in the back of my head, the question that overran every coherent, logical thought: “What if?”
Who can deny the “what if?” voice? Every retort can be answered by the original question. And then “what if?, what if?, what if?” becomes a circling, cycling loop. Because yes, “what if?” It’s a valid question, but it’s no way to live. I could see how my thoughts had become a runaway train, leading nowhere worth being.
I hated the fear. I hated the vice, ever constricting around my throat.
That brush with disaster prep was an awakening for me; somehow being at the edge became the beginning of breathing again. I never said a word about my near move into the preparedness phase, and I even forgot about how close I had come, until months later, when I scanned through the “saved for later” items in my Amazon cart: flint, thermal blankets, a hand-crank emergency radio with built-in phone charger, heavy duty flashlights, personal water filters, a massive first aid kit, a “survival tent”. A chill poured over me in slow motion, my breathing stilled. I was no longer filled with anxiety, or those strange obsessive thoughts; they had been gone for a while, and I was so forward-focused that I almost forgot what it had felt like, back then. But this forced me to remember. It made a cold, hard pit in my stomach to realize how off my mind had been; a brush of the old vice returned to my throat.
I had been one small finger movement away from stockpiling our basement with disaster prep materials, tumbling myself into the depths of my fear. Me. The one who stops everything to rush to the window to catch the sunset. The one who laughs even when she’s crying. The one who teaches her children, and herself, that life is meant to be fun. Me. I was there.
I have no idea how, except that it was a slow progression, that my anxiety happened and that my thoughts fed it, in a cycle that went on and on and got worse and worse until I was at the brink: prepare or let go. Succumb or save myself.
III. RESPONSE
It might be true that I fought my way out of anxiety, and it might also be true that I released my grasp on it and it released its grasp on me—slowly, each finger joint unfurling in its own time—and it might be true that something in me just changed, and I shed anxiety like anything else you might outgrow or move past, like how I don’t wear dangly earrings anymore; how rum and Coke is no longer my go-to drink; how for a while my hair was purple and now it’s back to brown. It might be true that anxiety hibernates, it might be that it lies in wait for me.
Maybe all of this is true, and maybe it is mostly this: I said, “I cannot keep going like this,” I said, “I don’t know what to do,” and I said, “I need something to change.”
Response is putting your preparedness plans into action. Except I had realized that my preparedness plans were big, heavy fear. That the action I needed was to let go of my worry.
I did not sink to my knees, appeal to God, or pray—I did not believe in that, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try. But I saw that my safety was on the line, although it was not due to the danger of outside forces. It wasn’t about a careening vehicle or a hidden gunman; it wasn’t a fire or a flood.
I was the threat. I was my own disaster.
I responded the only way I still had the energy to; I surrendered. I unleashed my desperate pleas into the ether and tried to breathe with the fullness I believed, or hoped, was possible. I did not see a therapist, or join a support group, or take a pill— I felt clear about only one thing, and that was that I needed to pick up the heft of my dulled spirit, distorted mind, listless body. I was not opposed to doctors or drugs, I just felt the deep need to help myself, coming from the very bones of me.
This is not the same for everyone, this was the very specific answer in my very specific heart, and I knew without question that I needed to follow it. I had been the mitigator, the preparer, and now, I needed to be the responder, the first to the scene of my own crime, the disaster I had unwittingly created.
IV. RECOVERY
We get lost without realizing that something deep inside us has always known the way. This is why I say, now: get quiet and listen to yourself, above all others.
I didn’t know that then, and would not have believed anyone who told me that it was so, and for that reason I see how this is not the type of thing you just say and expect people to understand. They have to feel it. But maybe the seed can be planted; maybe, maybe.
I no longer prep for disaster; the opposite, in fact, I live my life expecting joy.
Recovery isn’t passive; it is about actions, too, actions you can take that will return you to a normal—or even improved—situation after your emergency is over.
It has taken a lot for me to convince myself that the emergency is over. No. That it never happened in the first place. I was never in an emergency situation, but tell that to my mind, tell that to the fear that coursed through me as surely as blood.
Now and then I catch myself thinking the worst, old grooves worn into my brain, a path I tread out of habit. The vice grabs my throat, my breathing becomes quiet and ragged. It is part of me in some odd way, maybe just for now, maybe forever, and even though I am not ashamed I find myself wishing for a different truth. I wish I could say that the thoughts never come back, that anxiety never creeps around the edges of my brain. I can’t. It does.
What makes all the difference is that now I know the secrets of mitigation: to let go when it comes, to catch myself in a thought spiral and wind my way up, out, and away instead of down, down, deeper. To breathe until breathing becomes easy again.
Sometimes it’s simple, and other times it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done; it feels like physical exertion, trying to pull myself up, myself plus the added weight of those heavy thoughts. It feels like trying to get rid of any habit, biting your nails, or tapping your foot, or twisting a strand of hair around your finger—you start doing it long before you realize, I’m doing it again. But I realize, and I stop myself, and then it’s easier; history has proven I can do it.
That’s what we need, so often this is the case, we need history to prove that we can do the impossible task. That makes the first time the hardest, and the rest easier by tiny increments. New grooves can begin to make indents in your brain.
When you’ve lived through disaster you have two choices, and I do believe they are choices, easy to choose but difficult to follow: you crumble or you’re stronger than before. I lived through a thousand disasters in my mind. I’m stronger. It’s easier today than yesterday, easier still tomorrow than today, and when the day after feels harder than ever, something in me knows it won’t stay that way.
I wonder who the woman was whose finger and mind, both, lingered over impending disaster and stayed there for a while. I see her in me, sometimes, and I don’t like it. But I breathe, and breathe, and keep breathing.