I recently wrote about my experience going into Hurricane Harvey, but now about a week on, the initial shock, fear, and panic of having gone through it are wearing off, and the reality and the thoughts that come with it, are settling in.
1. My gratitude is so real
I got lucky. Like exceptionally lucky. The old neighborhood I used to live in flooded, in my new one, neighborhoods on all sides of my own flooded. I can walk 10 minutes in one direction or another, and there are houses with their entire lives wet and muddied now on their front lawns. Considering in this mega storm where Houston got something like 40+ inches of rain and everyone now knows someone who's house got water damage or tornado damage, I just cannot believe that we somehow made it. But with that comes guilt. Odd maybe to think about it, but it's like relief mixed in with, but everyone else around me is suffering. I'm struggling to be happy here, and even more so because the storm really effected my friends in such a heart breaking way.
My gratitude though is so real for the bigger picture. There were so many people who dropped everything from wherever they were and came to the aid of perfect strangers. You expect first responders to come because that is literally their job, but when you have someone in a truck, or boat, or bringing their construction equipment to come and help save people from the flood waters, you cannot begin to say thank-you enough. There are a million stories, all of them more incredible than the next and it reminds you what is most important in life and that skin color, how much money you have or don't have, what neighborhood you grew up in...none of it matters in times like this where people need your help, and Houstonians, and so many abroad and out of state have answered the call to which there are never going to be enough thank-yous in the world.
2. People still have major problems
It's easy to focus on the storm and what it's done now, but we can easily forget that people had problems long before Harvey became another one of them. If you had stage 3 cancer before the storm, you now have Stage 3 cancer and your house might now be gone. If you were struggling to make ends meet before, your situation could have just multiplied 10 fold. If you were going through the worst divorce in your life prior to the storm, you're still going through that now. There are just so many people who thought they'd seen the worst, but they had no idea. It's hard to think about the people who may have already been breaking by life, now just in a daze and having to now struggle 10x more than they did last week.
3. When life gives you lemons, it squeezes them into the cut on your finger
My friends bought their new house a week ago. They had worked extremely hard to get this house, even living with relatives for a time to help them to save every single penny. Harvey hit. The flood waters rose. They had to get to their roof with their pets as everything they had worked for got swallowed up by the storm. They. Lost. Everything. Cars, clothes, furniture, beds, couches, food, appliances. You name it. The only thing they got out with was their lives and their pets. You have not felt devastation like that until you experience it or see it for yourself first hand. You just don't think life could do that to the nicest people on the planet, but nature, life, neither care who you are and what you've worked for and the struggles you've gone through...it can happen to anyone.
4. Yes we can
As sure as I talk about number 3 and 4, the hammers and construction crews are hammering away all day now. Our mayor said it best in that we have never been, nor are we now, hopeless as a city. A lot of people had those thoughts, like how can we even possibly rebuild this city now, but just down the road in Galveston, one of the worst hurricanes in recorded history, hit that island killing 8,000 people and destroying the entire city. It took years of course, but they rebuilt. Houston has been through many disasters, and as one elderly man said in an interview, this is just another day in my life.
Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, blizzards, drought, tornadoes...sh*t happens all the time, all over the world. You cry, you get mad, you get frustrated, you have no clue how to pay for it all, but you start one brick at a time, one dollar at a time, one day at a time, and you get through as best you can. That's what we're doing now. Again, volunteers, strangers, companies, all of them are humming away at the problem. Millions have been donated. Everyone is working or helping to work. We can choose to wallow, or we can choose to do what we all can to help friends, neighbors, and strangers to recover.
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