August 29th, 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans nine years ago today. Luckily, it was the one hurricane I ever evacuated for (and even early, beating the traffic - I had a bad feeling), because my apartment got six feet of water. I lost nearly everything. I did go back to New Orleans in January of 2006. I left at the end of that July, ending my seven years in New Orleans. I know things have changed dramatically in the last eight years, but, what things were like those few months back is still burnt into my brain. If you want someone who can tell you about how deeply the Hurricane affected various communities in New Orleans or New Orleans in the last nine years, you are looking for someone else. I'm really only qualified to give a "this is what a natural disaster means to the emotional life of one person who lived through it" story.
This is a tough day every year. This year it feels...harder? more emotional? than the last few. Some years I don't remark on it on the day, and it sneaks up on me as I can feel summer ending, and I take just a little bit of time to sit with the loss. But, today, it feels like some of the things that the hurricane set off have come full circle. This was the year that multiple strands in my life made "I need to see New Orleans again" go from an occasional thought to something a little more definite. I still don't have a plane ticket or definite plans, but there's an acknowledgment that that is part of the healing process.
I don't know and can't know what it was like for someone for whom New Orleans is where they are from; I had done "the college student who then continued onto grad school so I live here now but I don't have the roots from here" thing, and it was still devastating. I didn't have to stick around to really dig into rebuilding or deal with the community I expected to have for a lifetime now being scattered all over the place - I didn't end up somewhere else when I thought I never would. And that space itself is kind of liminal - it adds an additional layer of connected enough to have trauma, not connected enough to quite fit into that narrative or to really feel like one can own that trauma.
(It's at this point that this gets hard to write - which means something when one is a dyke who has lived on the West Coast and has a plethora of identities that point to Gold Medalist in the Lesbian Processing Olympics. Hell, I was a queer spoken word performer - verbalizing my emotional life in detail to people is A Thing I Do.)
But this was the first year that I let myself have anything that didn't have a definitive endpoint or an immediate exit strategy. It was the first time I had something hard that I could easily run away from rather than figure out, and I didn't run away. Everyone who stayed close in my life before this year is because they put out a continual effort to do so. This is the year where Hurricane Katrina and "let's do everything to not experience that degree of loss again" went to "Hurricane Katrina is this shitty thing I lived through. It sucks. I will not let it run my life." And that, gentlepeople who actually read this, is Some Scary Shit. It's also August 29th Is No Longer A Major Excuse For Problems In My Life Day, which is letting go of the scratchy, uncomfortable yet warm blanket of a defense mechanism.
