Weather Stricken: The Emotional Toll of Climate Change
Looking back on 2018, I remember the floods vividly. First, Hurricane Florence. Before the storm hit, we waited for days, watching the news tracking the hurricane’s path. Florence stalled on the coast, and then crawled inland. It was painful to watch on TV, and it was painful to wait for it to arrive. As someone who had never lived through a hurricane before, I was armed with a pitiful hurricane kit consisting of batteries, candles, some snacks and a few bottles of water.
When the rain finally reached us in central North Carolina, the water came down in thick, heavy sheets. Our baby was sleeping soundly in her crib, despite the noise of the rain outside. During Hurricane Florence, I remember sitting up late with my husband Marty, watching a movie, and periodically we would check the yard, which had begun to resemble a swollen river, and we would go downstairs to check for any water coming into our basement music studio.
Everything seemed fine until Marty went to check downstairs and called urgently to me. The water was rising, he exclaimed, it was coming up through the foundation! Suddenly our whole music studio floor was a giant puddle, and it was getting worse by the minute. We stayed up all night hauling speakers, stands, keyboards, drums, computers, boxes and equipment upstairs, and luckily we only lost a few cables in the flooding. We had to tiptoe the entire time so we wouldn’t wake the baby. We spoke to each other in hushed, jagged sentences, fretting over what to save and where to put it.
I remember sweating and crying quietly as we lugged my electric piano up the stairs. I didn’t know if our house would even be livable the next day. I worried about how quickly mold would form, and whether the baby would breathe it in. Time passed slowly and each hour was fraught with new concerns. We attempted to be calm.
We were fortunate that we didn’t have to evacuate during Florence, and our upstairs remained fine, and the water in the basement finally receded after three days, which was lucky compared to other huge swaths of the state that were underwater for weeks. During the days that followed, we had a seemingly endless stream of contractors coming in and out of our house for various interrelated tasks: hauling ruined carpets, abating old asbestos tiles, testing the air quality, demolishing and removing all of the moldy wall panels, making bids on all of the drainage improvements that needed to be made. Our insurance company was helpful, at least.
The damage was a lot to digest, but I naively attacked it with zeal, hoping maybe we could prevent future catastrophe by making our house a little more flood-proof.
Less than a month later, we were in the middle of the long list of repairs when the second big storm hit rather suddenly. We were not truly prepared; we were still traumatized from the previous storm, and the thought of more rain would make us either panic or shut down. It was a strange form of emotional paralysis indeed. I remember my relatives texting me, asking if I was ready for this next storm. Sadly, the answer was no, accompanied by a crying / laughing emoji.
Hurricane Michael came with more tons more rain, and pummeled us with gusts of strong winds. The rain had nowhere to go, since the ground was still soaked from Florence, and the creeks were still eroded and torn up. We lost power for 5 days and temporarily moved into my mother-in-law’s house nearby. Our basement flooded again, but at least it was empty this time. We filed another insurance claim, this time because our roof sustained damage from the wind, and we ended up needing an entirely new roof.
I think the second hurricane was worse than the first one. I was starting to compartmentalize certain overwhelming emotions as I began to transform into a steely-eyed weather warrior. There were days where I felt a strange combination of grief, dread, exhaustion, perseverance. I have no other words to describe my experience except for feeling weather stricken. That unique combination of sorrow, anger and worry about the future will certainly affect millions of other people as our world’s climate events become more extreme due to rising temperatures.
I have found that processing my memories related to climate grief is very important to be able to confront what next year’s hurricane season will bring. I am trying to assess the enormity of climate change and how it will continue to affect our species. I believe it’s important to talk to those around us about being weather stricken. I have found that many people around me are not prepared to have this discussion. Their eyes glaze over from the boredom of this topic, not knowing what to say, or perhaps not knowing how to deal with such a terrible problem.
This year also saw devastating wildfires in California, some of the worst in the state’s history. I wonder how the people there are dealing with such loss, and what social and emotional problems arise out of such trauma, and what innovative solutions can help in the coming years.
I remember a pair of Jehovah’s witnesses knocking on on my door a few weeks after Hurricane Michael. They asked me what I thought about the recent weather events and in the same breath, asked if I was prepared to receive the second coming of the Lord. I found this line of questioning to be extremely problematic. It showed me that some people welcome these extreme climate events, seeing them as God’s will rather than man-made. This fearful kind of thinking steers us away from the complex underlying issues that causes the crisis: burning fossil fuels leads to global warming and rising sea levels, which has a multitude of different effects around the world.
I believe that being weather stricken can transform a person in positive ways and also in harmful ways if left unaddressed and ignored, just like other mental health issues. We may all need to eventually become steely-eyed weather warriors, ready for what the future may bring. But before that, we need to talk about the emotional toll of climate change on ourselves, our friends and families.
