Tips & Resources
Fire Victim’s Survival Guide
On the night of October 8th, 2017 I lost my home and everything I owned in Santa Rosa, California to the Tubbs fire. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like to go through something like this, but hopefully what I learned from my experience can help. This guide can be helpful for those suffering…
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #6 See a Therapist
Repeat after me: therapy is not a dirty word. Mental health is important. There is no shame in seeking professional help to address the areas where I am struggling.
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #5 Be Selfish
When It’s Too Much I’ve talked about how in my experience when you’re going through a trauma, most days you just need to focus on being okay and not necessarily worry about making progress in life. Well, sometimes there are bad days. Days like today for me when my mortgage company is struggling to get…
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To Rebuild or Not to Rebuild
After losing our home in the Tubbs fire in October of 2017, we finally just broke ground on our rebuild a few weeks ago and are scheduled to pour our foundation in about a week – over 18 months later.
But back then, we didn’t necessarily know what we were going to do. Should we rebuild? Should we sell the lot and buy a new house? Could we build a manufactured home on my parents’ lot out in the country? Could we sell the lot and build a new house somewhere else?
If you’re in a similar spot after losing your house to a fire, hopefully you can learn from our experience.
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #4 Be Bold
When you’ve been through some really hard shit, it’s really really easy to want to put on some camouflage and fade into the background. And by all means, if you are still in survival mode, allow yourself that time. I needed it. A lot of it. I didn’t want to be in the spotlight anymore and I stopped interacting on social media. I stopped asking friends to come over and keep me company.
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #3 Make New Friends
When you go through a trauma, it creates a rift in your life. For me anyway, there is the life I had before the fire and my son being born, and there is the life I have after.
It’s not even like two different chapters, it’s like two completely different books in the same series – some of the characters are the same, but it could very well exist independently.
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Raku: The Japanese Pottery Style that Speaks Volumes
You don’t have to literally survive a fire or be a super deep thinker to get it. It’s not really a big stretch. Pottery is fragile until it’s been fired. Clay is carefully sculpted with an attentive touch and only holds its shape when it’s put in a kiln at over 1000 degrees Celsius and exposed to extreme temperatures.
We’re like that too. We’re more soft and susceptible to damage before we’ve seen hard times. After we’ve been through some shit, it hardens us and leaves us more likely to survive.
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Be Alive, Don’t Just Survive
I recently attended Quiet Lightning’s event Sparkle & Blink 98, a curated submission-based reading of writers and poets in San Francisco. I haven’t been to a reading event in a while, so this was a really great event to attend. I got to meet other writers and get inspired on a whole other level.
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #2 Accept You’re a Victim
Most of the time there’s nothing we can do about it. When my entire neighborhood was lost in the 2017 Northern California Wildfires, no one saw it coming. I don’t live in the middle of the forest. I’m in a residential neighborhood. That shit just doesn’t happen!
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How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #1 Learn to Say Yes
I’ve never been good at accepting help. Call it pride, call it stubbornness, but it’s one of my biggest faults. In college, I literally failed courses because I thought that going to my professor to tell him or her that I was struggling meant that I was admitting I was weak. We all suffer from this to some extent, but I am ashamed to admit that it took me 34 years to learn my lesson.
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