Katrina

I have been putting this off, just as I have been putting off many other things that I know I will need to deal with at some point.

The Katrina blog.

Well, you all know it's been almost a year since Katrina hit and we escaped. I never thought of myself as a "refugee," per se but I suppose I can understand how usage of that word would be apropos after fleeing something as huge as Katrina.

I actually never realized how numbed out I have been to the entire situtation and its aftermath. I need not rehash the gory details or laundry list the effects for you.

Let's just say that I never realized what we truly "lost in the hurricane" until very recently. You see, I didn't really think we lost much. Some might call that denial, but I would call that type of thinking "temporary coping/ survival thinking." For example, I thought of our loss in the sense of possessions and people. I thought of it in the way that I believe we are typically taught to think of it. I. E. "I didn't lose my house or family, therefore I haven't experienced a real loss." For the past twelve months, the previous sentence is essentially how I conceptualized the hurricane and it's aftermath. I chose to attend SMU. I chose to get a job to make ends meet. I chose to get a tiny apartment to make sure the bills would get paid. You see, by thinking this way, I chose to create hope and stability, a day to day feeling that life would go on, that this set back was just temporary.

But, that is not the complete story and I am not going to explain every nuance to you dear friends. Suffice it to say, that those previous choices were survival choices, those choices made in order to make the daily tasks or rebuilding seem smaller, doable and temporary.

Briefly returning to the concept of loss, I had never actually conceptualized loss in terms of losing a certain way of thinking, coping, acting or being. But, now I know that to lose those latter things is to lose something a lot larger and more important than people typically acknowledge. When you lose your sense of purpose, your constructive ways of coping, your sense of humor or other things, you lose a huge part of yourself that can be very difficult to get back. Honestly, I know in my heart that it is only through love and prayer that they return.

Just like people are apt to think of a disabled person as a broken person, people are apt to think of the survival-minded "refugees" as broken people, too, in some ways. But, I am here to tell you that there are very few broken people, just a lot of people in survival mode. Nothing breaks you if you don't let it break you.

In conclusion, I suspect that many people are still in survival mode, but will soon be in thriving mode, where the kindness and support experienced after the trauma gets turned into the fuel the powers the renewed hopes, dreams, and sense of purpose people create long after the pain of loss. Thus, people transition from seeing the day to day survival aspects of life-from praying just to make it through another day-to seeing themselves as part of something grander and more expansive-something beyond their daily bread.

I may have lost some things in Katrina, but the gift that she gave me was a belief in the fundamental goodness of humankind-a belief that I did not possess before she arrived- and a belief in the utterly unstoppable power of the human spirit when it has a will to thrive.

Good night and sweet dreams.