Imagine this:
It’s roughly 85 degrees Fahrenheit at night. There is no breeze. The power is out. Your food is slowly rotting away in the refrigerator that is without power. There is no fan. There is no ice. You have striped down to your underwear in hopes of cooling off, but it’s no use. You continue to sweat on your bedsheets. The air is stale, and no one can answer when the power will return. You’re not allowed a generator in your apartment, so you have to make due with the paper fan you acquired last year from some shop you got a year ago.
You haven’t gotten a wink of sleep – not even a good nap – and you have to go to work feeling greasy and tired for a whole week. You become a cranky zombie, just trying to get by.
That’s how it felt when I lost power for 180 hours, here in Texas during the middle of summer. Hurricane Beryl had come through and though we were prepared to “camp” at home, we couldn’t due to the extreme heat. Nothing we did cooled us down, and we had become statues in our home, trying to exude the least amount of energy possible to minimize the sweat produced. We have three dogs, who all needed to cool off too. It was miserable, and I cannot imagine what it would have been like with human children.
When someone asked what I needed, I could only answer from a basic needs perspective.
But what about from a mental health perspective?
I wasn’t prepared for how to cope with this mentally. I realized through it that the few friends who either checked in on me daily, shoved gift cards in my purse, or kept pestering me to come over to stay or do laundry, were really the heroes in this story.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but going through this type of misery can feel very isolated and alone, especially when your hope is depleted. Having others stay in contact with me helped me keep my spirits up. It made me realize that we do not always think to prepare for staying connected with people during these times.
Even after I regained power, it was “back to normal.”
But I didn’t feel normal.
I still felt like a zombie the week after.
And then it hit me. I realized that I hadn’t stopped to recharge my social battery.
We think we’re “back to normal” when the power comes back on, but that is not always true. I realized that we need to pay attention to the transition period as well. Especially when it pertains to people and our connections to one another.
So when the power comes back on, don’t assume your friends or family are “okay.”
Keep checking in on them, and schedule to spend time with them.
Natalie Frazier, LMFT
Natalie's work is primarily focused on Couples and Individual Adults. She is experienced in grief and loss counseling, traumas (sexual and life-threatening), marital relations (including communication skills and infidelity), and emotion regulation (such as anger management and depression). She seeks to be an ally to all communities.
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