Perhaps, one day.

Considering the wonderful wrapped in the terrible.

The stark symbolism of a wildfire raging through my city within the first week of a new year is not lost on me. This connection becomes more profound when you consider what feels like impending doom: the dreaded inauguration, in which we symbolically shift the power from a so-so leader to a very laughably terrible leader, a leader who will do nothing to help the problem that caused these wildfires in the first place, and will likely do more to stoke them than stop them out of cruelty and spite.

I am heartbroken. There isn’t any other way to say it, except plainly. Our home is a little over a mile from the Eaton fire’s blaze, and so far, it still stands. But in California, when it comes to wildfires, it’s not an if, it’s a when. Our home may have survived these wildfires, but who knows how long that will last. Like countless Southern Californians, I am left in a heightened state of vigilance—a constant, quiet anticipation of destruction hums beneath every happy memory I make in this city I call home.

I am in the fourth quarter of my graduate program, taking a class called Trauma: its Effects, Awareness, & Recovery. Our first class session was scheduled to meet on January 7th at 7:30pm. But at 7:30pm on Tuesday night, I was on the freeway on the way to my parents’ house, dodging fallen trees and freight trucks that had jackknifed and tipped over in the wind. To my left, the Eaton fire glowed apocalyptic. I never made it to class. Instead, I tapped a hasty email apology to my professor in the stopped traffic, then sped towards my parents’ home as my dogs anxiously whined over my shoulder from the back seat.

Friday afternoon was spent in my hometown, studying in the very same library I frequented in high school, getting lost in the aisles, breathing in the scent of revered classics like Absalom, Absalom!, Persuasion, Jane Eyre. The library is, and has always been, a sort of sanctuary to me. It is peaceful, quiet, and perfect. I love that I can spread all my books and study materials amid the abundance of silence, taking up space and absorbing knowledge for large swaths of uninterrupted time. This is an immense privilege, a luxury, and I treat these library trips with the utmost care.

As I sat by a large window in the reading room and studied the materials for my trauma class, I reached a section about PTSD in survivors following natural disasters. Everything in my mind went still. I know trauma—how it works, how it manifests in the body. I’ve read Bessel Van Der Kolk and understand trauma-informed care. But what I read in this textbook so precisely described how I’ve felt since Tuesday: like the world around me had dissolved and chronological time flattened, my selfhood fragmented into separate parts. One part grieved the loss of what once was, and another was forced to carry on business as usual in a dissociative state.

Clients emailed me repeatedly, asking me to make a graphics that voiced their company’s promise to support victims of the fires. I bit my tongue and made them when I really wanted to yell that none of this fucking mattered. To ask if they realized that Ed, my dogs, and I are currently displaced, that the world is on fire and our home is in peril and our community is in shambles. If they understand that, as they sit from the comfort of their homes asking me to make them a graphic about a tragedy I am currently affected by, no one really cares what a brand or company has to say about this. In some alternate universe where the roles are reversed, I wouldn’t ask any of my clients to do this. I would tell them that to consider social media amid a crisis like this felt inane, almost offensive, and give them the remainder of the week off to recover. But we don’t live in an alternate universe, and I continued to work, scrolling social media as people from other states blithely boasted that California deserved it, denying climate change and bickering about chemtrails in comment sections. My blood boiled, my mind spiraled, my heart ached.

As the week pressed on, I resigned myself to our new reality. The place Ed and I would eventually return to would not be the same place. There was little any of us could have done to stop the destruction, aside from a complete governmental overhaul and environmental reform. Everyone is different, and trauma manifests in a myriad of ways, but many people suffering from post-traumatic stress following a natural disaster find the inevitability of the event almost comforting. It’s slightly different from a tragedy of chance—there is less autonomy, less guilt and pining over the idea that you could have somehow changed the terrible outcome. We instead put this energy into helping one another, rebuilding community and strengthening ties, offering aid in whatever ways we can with whatever bandwidth we have.

In Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, she writes:

“We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.”

And that so aptly describes the complex emotions I’ve felt this week: despair I’ve felt for friends and family who have lost their homes, for beloved local businesses and restaurants I will no longer be able to visit. The guilt I’m wracked with because our street still stands. The privilege and the loss, the disparity of wealth and resources. The mere fact that we have anything to mourn at all. The wonderful is, indeed, wrapped in the terrible.

So what do we do in times of crisis, when the world feels dark and the future looks unfathomably grim? We check in on our loved ones. Cook dinner for our families who graciously took us in, laugh with our siblings and watch The Office in our pajamas. We try to read Proust before falling asleep, in our little brother’s small bed, eyelids heavy. We watch our dogs boisterously play with our parents’ dogs in the garden, feeling thankful they have no way of understanding what’s going on in the world. We check in on our sister-in-law, whose home was destroyed, finding ways to make ourselves useful and support her and her partner. We fall asleep with tears in our eyes, silently asking why why why. We hug our grandparents, and wake each morning to the low sound of wind howling in the eaves, excited to greet a cup of coffee. We wash our home’s walls with baking soda and vinegar, shake out rugs, vacuum the ash and soot from the floors. We drag our bodies through another day, and another day, and another day, clinging to these infinitesimal joys of life sliced crosswise with abrupt, white-hot pain. And perhaps one day we’ll wake up and look around at our lives, realizing that while we’ve been doing our best to get by, helping and supporting others, seeking solace in our respective communities, we’ve unknowingly built something beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than what existed before, and the trees are lush and the air is clean. Perhaps one day.

---

I’m sure you’re being bombarded by GoFundMe links and resources for how to help aid in the wildfire relief effort, but on the off chance that you haven’t and need help with where to start, I’ve included some links below.

• Ways to support black families affected by the Eaton fire. Altadena was one of the first neighborhoods to allow black families to buy homes in the 1960s, so there is a prominent black community there, many of whom have lost everything.

• A master list of mutual aid resources for those who have lost their homes. This covers everywhere from the Eaton fire to the Palisades and is being updated in real time.

• Pro-bono therapy services for those affected by the wildfires. Includes private practices and clinics offering free mental health services for victims.

• Pasadena Humane Society. They desperately need monetary donations for medical supplies and other resources as they start to see a significant increase in the number of burned and injured animals coming to the shelter.

Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. x