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Crisis Center.
Recently, I've been thinking about the Northridge Earthquake. It's not because there was a very minor tremor just a few hours ago, it's because of another LiveJournaler, whom I am reluctant to name directly.
This person has a major crisis going on in her life, leading to much angst, quite a lot of it centering around whether or not she's doing the best thing or acting in the appropriate way. I don't know her very well (for values of "very well" equal to "at all other than what I've read, really"), so I'm reluctant to say anything directly, but I'm still thinking about it.
I can relate to a lot of what she writes about, not so much the specifics, as the instincts and reactions to crisis. Whenever a major crisis happens, my instinct is usually to get out of the way. Whenever an argument arose in the house, I just walked out and into my room, letting the others sort it out. The first time I consciously noticed was when my mother had a cancer scare, and I spent days and days in my room reconstructing every jigsaw puzzle I had.
But it's one thing to say, "Everyone reacts differently to a crisis," and quite another to see it in action.
The earthquake woke me up at 4:30 a.m., along with the rest of the city. Somehow I went from supine in my bed to standing in the doorway in two steps and two seconds. I was in high school, a sophomore, and I was on my way to sleeping in: it was a holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and my friend's birthday. My birthday had been a week earlier.
I'd felt earthquakes before, most notable the Whittier Quake in 1987. (This was the one that gained local notoreity for Kent Shocknek, earning him the nickname Kent AfterShocknek.) But that one had been farther away, and the hard rock surrounding the San Fernando Valley had acted as an insulator keeping some of the energy waves out.
But this time, with the epicenter within the Valley itself, that same rock was keeping the waves in. In '87, a picture fell off its hook. In '94, a garden wall collapsed, the china cabinet shattered and the liquor cabinet and pantry disgorged their contents in a a smelly, bottle-breaking clamor. (I later joked that our house smelled like Italy.) After a few aftershocks, which came fast and furiously for quite a while, everyone in my family found some shoes and moved outside. Once everyone was safe, then the craziness began.
My mother was worried and anxious, and she would stay so until the phones started working and she could reach her family (my aunts, uncles and grandparents). My sister wanted anyone to stay with her and talk with her. My father demanded that everyone sit in the living room to show that nothing was wrong. And I lay on a towel on the driveway looking up into the early morning sky, now clear of light pollution and listening to Enya. (I was in my first high school theatre show, at the time. I was, thus, very into Enya.)
These patterns continued through the day. My father tried to clean and insist things were fine. My mother called everyone she could to make sure they were all right. My sister went to hang out with her friend across the street. And I took a five-mile walk around the neighborhood. It might have been longer, actually. I most clearly remember walking over to the Topanga Plaza and seeing one side of the department store gone. The cliche would be that it looked like a doll house, or a doll department store, but this actually looked like what it was. One clothing rack that had been leaning against the wall now teetered on the edge. In several places, pipes jutted into space leaking water. Eventually a man told me to leave the premises. He wasn't mean, he just didn't want any "civilians" crushed in an aftershock, especially not on company property.
I walked on. Walls separating backyards from the street had fallen everywhere. Stores were dispersing ice, water, batteries and anything else useful they could find. Gas stations were either closed or gouging. The church tower had been shaken, and would later be condemned.
And everyone was completely insane. Including me, walking around for no reason at all, watching the near accidents at every stoplightless intersection.
I suppose that the attacks on the East Coast nearly a year ago had a similar effect on those areas, although it's an overstatement to say that they had that effect everywhere. They certainly didn't here. People were scared, but it was a hysterical fear, not a deep, knowing fear. It was more like a hook to the jaw than a rabbit punch to the gut. It hurt, and it shook people up, but it didn't rearrange one's insides in subtle ways. Not in L.A., at least.
The fact is that people don't always bind together in a crisis. They do if they need to, of course. Sometimes immediate survival depends on it, but most of the time, people bind together because that's what they feel they need to do, instinctively. They try to connect with everyone, and quite a number of people also say, "no thanks, I'm fine, thank you for asking," and just move them along. Major crises don't bring people together, they just make everyone crazy at the same time instead of spread out randomly.
When a crisis is only happening to yourself, and all of your friends are in a non-crisis mode, it's easy to feel like an aberration. And when someone else is responding to an entirely different crisis, it sometimes seems even more alienating. But when everyone is acting like a temporary lunatic and everyone knows the reason why, it's simpler to see that your own personal insanity is, if not normal, expected.
On the day of the quake, I saw a couple try to bribe the man at the 7-11 to get extra bottled water. Everyone was lined up outside the store and the manager stood at the door taking the orders and keeping the money while to helpers searched the aisles and back rooms to find supplies. Certain things were limited, though, water, ice, batteries and food to a certain extent. (I assume the magazines had no limit.) But really, no one in line was upset at this couple. That's just how these people react.
So whenever something really awful happens, I try to just let it happen. Trying to change the way I react just leads to inaction. And locking myself in a room and mastering Tetris eventually helps more than trying to be out and about while also being absolutely miserable in addition to everything else.
Addendum: While trying to find photographs of the damage to Topanga Plaza, I found "Twenty-One, Counting Up" by Harry Turtledove. Three months between me and the protagonist made this an eerie read.
This person has a major crisis going on in her life, leading to much angst, quite a lot of it centering around whether or not she's doing the best thing or acting in the appropriate way. I don't know her very well (for values of "very well" equal to "at all other than what I've read, really"), so I'm reluctant to say anything directly, but I'm still thinking about it.
I can relate to a lot of what she writes about, not so much the specifics, as the instincts and reactions to crisis. Whenever a major crisis happens, my instinct is usually to get out of the way. Whenever an argument arose in the house, I just walked out and into my room, letting the others sort it out. The first time I consciously noticed was when my mother had a cancer scare, and I spent days and days in my room reconstructing every jigsaw puzzle I had.
But it's one thing to say, "Everyone reacts differently to a crisis," and quite another to see it in action.
The earthquake woke me up at 4:30 a.m., along with the rest of the city. Somehow I went from supine in my bed to standing in the doorway in two steps and two seconds. I was in high school, a sophomore, and I was on my way to sleeping in: it was a holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and my friend's birthday. My birthday had been a week earlier.
I'd felt earthquakes before, most notable the Whittier Quake in 1987. (This was the one that gained local notoreity for Kent Shocknek, earning him the nickname Kent AfterShocknek.) But that one had been farther away, and the hard rock surrounding the San Fernando Valley had acted as an insulator keeping some of the energy waves out.
But this time, with the epicenter within the Valley itself, that same rock was keeping the waves in. In '87, a picture fell off its hook. In '94, a garden wall collapsed, the china cabinet shattered and the liquor cabinet and pantry disgorged their contents in a a smelly, bottle-breaking clamor. (I later joked that our house smelled like Italy.) After a few aftershocks, which came fast and furiously for quite a while, everyone in my family found some shoes and moved outside. Once everyone was safe, then the craziness began.
My mother was worried and anxious, and she would stay so until the phones started working and she could reach her family (my aunts, uncles and grandparents). My sister wanted anyone to stay with her and talk with her. My father demanded that everyone sit in the living room to show that nothing was wrong. And I lay on a towel on the driveway looking up into the early morning sky, now clear of light pollution and listening to Enya. (I was in my first high school theatre show, at the time. I was, thus, very into Enya.)
These patterns continued through the day. My father tried to clean and insist things were fine. My mother called everyone she could to make sure they were all right. My sister went to hang out with her friend across the street. And I took a five-mile walk around the neighborhood. It might have been longer, actually. I most clearly remember walking over to the Topanga Plaza and seeing one side of the department store gone. The cliche would be that it looked like a doll house, or a doll department store, but this actually looked like what it was. One clothing rack that had been leaning against the wall now teetered on the edge. In several places, pipes jutted into space leaking water. Eventually a man told me to leave the premises. He wasn't mean, he just didn't want any "civilians" crushed in an aftershock, especially not on company property.
I walked on. Walls separating backyards from the street had fallen everywhere. Stores were dispersing ice, water, batteries and anything else useful they could find. Gas stations were either closed or gouging. The church tower had been shaken, and would later be condemned.
And everyone was completely insane. Including me, walking around for no reason at all, watching the near accidents at every stoplightless intersection.
I suppose that the attacks on the East Coast nearly a year ago had a similar effect on those areas, although it's an overstatement to say that they had that effect everywhere. They certainly didn't here. People were scared, but it was a hysterical fear, not a deep, knowing fear. It was more like a hook to the jaw than a rabbit punch to the gut. It hurt, and it shook people up, but it didn't rearrange one's insides in subtle ways. Not in L.A., at least.
The fact is that people don't always bind together in a crisis. They do if they need to, of course. Sometimes immediate survival depends on it, but most of the time, people bind together because that's what they feel they need to do, instinctively. They try to connect with everyone, and quite a number of people also say, "no thanks, I'm fine, thank you for asking," and just move them along. Major crises don't bring people together, they just make everyone crazy at the same time instead of spread out randomly.
When a crisis is only happening to yourself, and all of your friends are in a non-crisis mode, it's easy to feel like an aberration. And when someone else is responding to an entirely different crisis, it sometimes seems even more alienating. But when everyone is acting like a temporary lunatic and everyone knows the reason why, it's simpler to see that your own personal insanity is, if not normal, expected.
On the day of the quake, I saw a couple try to bribe the man at the 7-11 to get extra bottled water. Everyone was lined up outside the store and the manager stood at the door taking the orders and keeping the money while to helpers searched the aisles and back rooms to find supplies. Certain things were limited, though, water, ice, batteries and food to a certain extent. (I assume the magazines had no limit.) But really, no one in line was upset at this couple. That's just how these people react.
So whenever something really awful happens, I try to just let it happen. Trying to change the way I react just leads to inaction. And locking myself in a room and mastering Tetris eventually helps more than trying to be out and about while also being absolutely miserable in addition to everything else.
Addendum: While trying to find photographs of the damage to Topanga Plaza, I found "Twenty-One, Counting Up" by Harry Turtledove. Three months between me and the protagonist made this an eerie read.
no subject
agreed.
crises are things i tend to be scared of thinking about ... it's good to do so, however, because it's inevitable that each of us has at least a few of them in our future.