Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about an old saying, one that I’m sure everyone knows—originally said by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and also used by Kelly Clarkson in a popular song, about which I have no opinion.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” It’s now just another platitude that carries less weight than it ought to. You could put it on a generic inspirational poster, is what I mean. Or use it in a pop song.
But it doesn’t mean there isn't still a profound truth hidden inside it. The writer Andrew Solomon once gave a talk about how the hardest experiences in our lives are what ultimately give us meaning. The struggles we face may alter us, but the burden of overcoming those struggles is a challenge we can meet to forge meaning in our lives, and therefore to build our identity.
Similar to a metaphor found in the myth of Sisyphus which I’ve talked about before in previous blog posts: that of Sisyphus doomed to push a boulder up a mountain forever and ever, and every time he reaches the top of the mountain, the boulder rolls back to the bottom. But the philosopher Albert Camus writes about how we can choose to imagine Sisyphus happy: the very burden that defines his existence can be what gives him meaning, can be what fills his heart.
I want to talk about the Almeda Fire of Southern Oregon and my experience of it, but I want to preface by saying: This is just one experience. I live in Talent, Oregon. The day of the fire is—and quite possibly, will always be—the scariest day of my life, and I know this is the case for several people of Talent, including many of my neighbors. However, I am one of the senselessly lucky ones. I had a home to return to. So my experience, though terrifying, is in no way a comprehensive description of the fire, or necessarily what it was like for others.
But with that said, for me, it truly was the scariest experience of my life. And even as I write this, I acknowledge that I don’t know exactly what to say about it, or how to write about it. My mind still doesn’t know what to do with some of the images that are seared in my memory from that day. And yet, in processing what is essentially the trauma of that day, there is much I’ve learned from working through it.
For most of us in Talent, there was no official evacuation warning. I remember trying to stay updated on the emergency alerts, but there were no alerts specific to the Talent area. Police officers were going door-to-door in certain neighborhoods telling people they needed to evacuate immediately—the fire was raging on the other side of Highway 99 and getting closer—but for me, and many others, the warning came in the form of the approaching plume of smoke. My brother, whom I live with, was in Northern California with our parents. It was me and my brother’s girlfriend, Alex, in our house in Talent. When the smoke started to turn black, implying it was burning more than just grass and trees, we realized we needed to try and get out of town. The smoke was headed right in our direction, after all.
It is the next few hours that I talk about when I talk about the day of the fire. The chaos and panic, the first responders trying desperately with their minimal resources to direct us to safety while helicopters flew back and forth through the smoke and the fires raged through the town.
Alex and I drove in separate cars, following each other, and were on and off the phone for much of those hours. We planned to head north, to a family member’s in Central Point, but we never even made it to Phoenix, the next town over. Sitting in traffic, northbound on Highway 99, I remember seeing flames to our right, and realizing how fast the fires were moving: they were jumping ahead of us. Buildings in the fields to the right reached their flashpoint and essentially exploded—I remember how the flames shot upward, higher than I would’ve thought possible from a single building. All the while, firefighters were trying to hold the line to keep the fire away from town. But fires seemed to be starting everywhere around us.
We were turned around on the Highway because, by the time we were halfway there, Phoenix was already on fire. I asked the police officer who turned us around if there was any way forward, but I didn’t need his answer. Up ahead was dark smoke and flashing red lights.
The scariest moments, the ones that have stayed in my mind, occurred in the next couple hours.
There was at least one moment, when we were sitting on the highway trying to move forward, when there was fire off to our left—the source of the wild smoke rising and darkening the sky. And to our right, as we moved slowly and hoped desperately that the line kept moving, I remember watching a barn catch on fire. It was literally seconds until the entire structure was consumed, the flames fueled by the relentless winds that day. I never imagined myself in a position like this, the kind you read about: sitting on a highway, scared and uncertain, with fire on both sides. Alex and I were on the phone through much of this, supporting each other, keeping each other calm, helping each other with all the split-second decisions.
And this is something I learned about myself that day.
As I’m sure anyone who experiences general anxiety can relate, my mind has a tendency to cycle through worst case scenarios in any imagined or anticipated situation. It’s something I’ve grown accustomed to, something I’ve learned to navigate and know about myself. My mind will present to me the worst case scenarios, it will go to troubling and dark places, it will insist I be on edge and be prepared to act or react inside of these worst case scenarios and fabricated predicaments. The trick to not being an anxious mess all the time, for me, is to let my mind go through these scenarios, but also to not let it dwell inside of those dark places.
And as a writer, I often put myself inside of intense or life-threatening situations for the sake of trying to find the emotional truth within fiction. For the sake of writing a believable story, this is part of the creative process: to imagine yourself, or a version of yourself, inside the situations you write about. For me, it’s about doing this just enough to imbue a character with enough life so I can make them feel more alive, for myself and for the reader.
But it’s impossible to really know how you’ll act in a life-threatening situation—until you’re actually in one.
That’s what I learned about myself the day of the fire. I discovered that, even though I suffer from general anxiety in most other situations, in a crisis I am, apparently, calm. I didn’t feel calm on the inside, in fact I felt as though panic were bubbling just under the surface, and the things I was seeing were truly terrifying and I was scared. But on the outside I was calm. I was in a kind of crisis mode I’ve never felt before. My mind wasn’t cycling through worst case scenarios or imagining what might happen—with few exceptions—rather, all I could focus on was what to do next, what route to try next, and to monitor how much gas was left in my car and how much battery was left in my phone. By the end of our hours stuck in Talent, I had roughly a gallon of gas left, and my phone battery was at less than 10%.
I won’t tell the whole story of that day, but there are a few moments that stand out as necessary to speak about, to write about, in the same way my mind still doesn’t know what to do with them.
Moments like asking a police officer how to get out of town, asking if the backroads were safe as a fire was starting in the nearby field, and the officer saying to me, “Look, we don’t know which way the fire’s gonna go. But if the wind turns and the fire comes this way, we’re all out of our cars and running.” I couldn’t believe that was the answer I’d gotten from an authority figure, but it made me realize: they’re as uncertain and as terrified as we are.
Moments like calling my parents and explaining that I didn’t know what to do, there wasn’t a way out of town that we could figure out: the backroads were jammed and the fires were too close; the main intersection to the freeway was blocked by traffic and an abandoned semi-truck; the Highway was blocked north because of the fire. And I explained to my parents that I wanted to try and get back to the house, because if there wasn’t a way out, I’d rather wait there than in a car in traffic. This, they’d tell me later, was probably the worst and scariest phone call they had ever received in their lives.
Moments like sitting on Talent Avenue, surrounded by houses that we had no idea would be gone within the next few hours, unable to get back to our house, and hearing explosions coming every few seconds from the highway.
And then being turned toward the highway and stopping, because the other side of the highway was a wall of fire. Businesses I’d been to, walked by, frequented, were dark shapes in the flames. I remember slapping a hand over my mouth with shock and tears filling my eyes, and having to take a deep breath and tell myself, “We can make it out of this. We have to. We’re going to make it.” I told myself these things, but knew that I didn’t know this for sure. I just knew we were in danger. Everyone was.
And then, when we found an unlikely opening to the freeway at last, we drove straight into glowing orange smoke, under power-lines on fire. That is one of the images that stays in my head: fire arcing along power-lines above us.
It was only once we were on the freeway, southbound this time (another way we were incredibly lucky, to have a place to go), it was only then—when I knew we were safe—that all my panic and fear and wild uncertainty bubbled to the surface. My mind dropped from overdrive and I couldn’t quite think straight, just enough to drive. My hands started shaking, my breaths became labored, I was on the edge of tears, staving off a panic attack. I called my parents, and then a few people whose voices I needed to hear, before my phone died.
At a gas station on the drive to my parents’ house in northern California, I remember waiting in line for a bathroom, shaking and trying to breathe steadily. A woman asked me if I was stuck trying to get north. I shook my head and told her I was from Talent, trying to get away, and I remember the wide-eyed look she gave me: sympathy and shock intertwined.
My parents and my brother were waiting for us in the driveway of the house, nearly as shaken as Alex and I were. They had been waiting by their phones the whole time since the first call, waiting for updates, feeling more and more afraid and in disbelief that there was almost nothing they could do. Being able to see them again and hug them and then talk through our stories over the next few days was a nearly indescribable thing.
What I didn’t expect was what I experienced over the next few days—and some things that would linger in my mind and in my body for weeks. And this is really what I want to talk about: the nature of trauma according to how I experienced it, and some of the important personal breakthroughs I endured on the path of healing from it.
For the first few days, talking it all out wasn’t just something I felt I wanted to do—it was a literal need. This is something I believe is different for everyone: for some, it will help to talk about it as much as possible, all the way through; for others, maybe it’s best not to until you’re ready. As for me, I needed to talk about it, and I have only gratitude for those who not only listened, but wanted to listen. The more I talked about it, the more I realized: it was all real. All of that had really happened.
And during the first few days—roughly the first week, I’d say—I had flashbacks. I’d find myself paused, staring into space, memories playing vividly in my mind. Memories of the wall of fire across the highway. Memories of the power-lines lined with flames.
When the flashbacks subsided as days went on, I’d still find myself experiencing fairly constant waves of physical anxiety. And this would persist even past the point when I thought I had mentally processed most of the emotions and memories. I’d find myself unsettled, uncomfortable, and it wasn’t until later that I realized what was happening. I felt mentally okay, for the most part, but the body stores emotions just as much—if not more so—than the mind. And my body was deeply affected by the trauma of the fires, and was still experiencing the anxiety and the fear and the uncertainty. My body felt, much of the time, as though it were still sitting in the car, on the highway, with fire all around. This made it impossible to feel like myself. Made it impossible to feel at ease in almost any situation.
I know what trauma is, in the literal sense. I’ve read about it. I’ve witnessed others go through it. But I’d never been through it myself to such a heavy degree. To experience it in my body as much—if not more so—than in my mind. To find myself feeling trapped in everyday life in my own body, my body which was still stuck back in time, stuck on the day of the fire, still going through the gripping physical terror over and over again.
Healing through this took time, and it took patience with myself, and the willingness to let myself sit inside of my own discomfort. It’s easy to ignore these kinds of emotions, easy to distract oneself and find ways of avoiding it. But the most healing I did was when I felt the anxiety, felt my body going through the emotions and the sensations from the day of the fire, and I let myself accept it and sit within it. Which was hard, and took more courage than I would’ve thought, but it’s how I eventually began to heal.
And it was only recently that I came to a realization that allowed me to take the next steps in healing from the trauma. It was a breakthrough of sorts, a realization that has been the single most important thing I’ve learned in the healing process from such an event.
I learned how the trauma of an experience is felt not merely in larger, expected expressions such as flashbacks, physical anxiety, flashes of random fear or a vague sense of disturbance. Trauma—as well as things like anxiety, and depression, and fear—seeps into everyday life and speaks to you in the form of your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own mental and emotional signals. It disguises itself as you, and makes you think what you’re experiencing is normal, and not a symptom of the problem.
Which is to say, I was looking at my life—and every aspect of my life—through the lens of the trauma. I was looking at my life as if I were still in the car, on the highway, uncertain if there was a way out.
I didn’t understand why my everyday life felt so urgent until I came to that realization. Aspects of my life that normally brought me peace were suddenly anxiety-inducing and difficult to focus on. My writing, which became one of the ways I was eventually able to articulate my own thoughts to myself and map a narrative of my healing, my writing was even difficult to focus on because it was hard to think about anything other than the fire. Even in regular conversations with friends, coworkers, family, etc, I felt as though nobody understood what I was going through no matter how I tried to communicate it. It felt that I had something pressing from the inside, an urgency in my blood. I couldn’t reconcile the rhythms of everyday life with the very present, very intrusive memories of September 8th, especially the parts when I had suddenly become uncertain if everything was going to be okay.
I interacted with people in everyday life, and even if I projected normalcy on the surface, underneath my thoughts was a boiling urgency. I felt like I was burdening everyone with my need to talk about the fires, because it was so present and so suffocating in my own body and my own mind. I kept wondering, how do people do it? How do you go through a life-threatening experience and re-adjust to everyday life? How do you not think about it all the time?
I didn’t feel like myself. I couldn’t seem to focus, couldn’t seem to calm the erratic nature of my emotions and thoughts. Unconsciously, I didn’t know how to feel normal again, not when there were memories in my head demanding attention, memories of the sudden uncertainty of survival—both mine and Alex’s survival.
Which is how I learned that it is so important to talk about your fears, your pain, your hurt, your trauma. It will sit in your body and continue to hurt until you learn how to let it go—and a good way to begin is by speaking it, by sharing it. We all have these stories inside of us that we want to tell and sometimes need to tell. We’ve all been hurt, or afraid, or traumatized. We all have those stories, and we can help each other, and grow closer, in sharing them.
The important thing for me about realizing this about myself—realizing that I was, on some level, still stuck in that car—is that it was a profound step away from the trauma, and a step toward healing. Awareness is like a light shined on a dark place, and trauma is a dark place. It’s the brain getting stuck in time, stretching a moment out for as long as it feels is necessary. I was in my car for maybe three hours, in Talent, but for me it lasted for weeks—almost months. This, I believe, is what trauma is. It’s one moment, or a series of moments, stretched through time. A part inside that our brains can’t reconcile, can’t adjust to, can’t seem to process, and so the brain creates a loop that makes you relive the trauma over and over.
This is, I think, why some people who live through a traumatic experience—and this includes emotional trauma—can remember the experience years later, and the emotions are still vivid and fresh. It doesn’t matter how many years go by; if you haven’t processed the trauma, it will feel as though it happened just the other day. It will still be that fresh.
It’s like the brain, and the body, is calling for help in the only way it knows how.
And learning how to face it involves overcoming not just the pain of the original experience, but the fear of what it’ll be like to open the wound again. That’s how it was for me.
Talking about it with those who cared, those who listened—as well as, for me, writing about the experience—was one way I made it real for myself, one way I began to make it small. The longer it sits in your body and in your mind, the bigger it grows and the more unsurmountable it will feel.
But I like to think: I would rather endure the raw, unbearable pain of facing it and trying to reckon with it, to heal from it, than live with the pain stretched out across the years.
And simple awareness of the problem is another way of beginning the process of healing. For me, awareness of what was wrong, awareness about the nature of my feelings, became a way of holding myself accountable. I knew what was wrong, but knowing is just an early step. The next is to engage with the pain and the effect it’s having on your life. You deserve to realize you’re brave enough to face it. You deserve to live in the present, without an experience becoming a loop that you relive over and over.
For me, once I began to truly feel like myself again—when all of the urgency and the anxiety became, instead, simple grief for what had happened to this town I love, once I could sit still and feel normal and at ease in my own body again—there was a lot I needed to re-adjust to. But the main takeaway, in my own healing process, was the part when I realized why I wasn’t healing the way I thought I would: Because I was still looking at my life from the perspective of the trauma.
It’s a natural tendency, I think—at least for me—to fall more deeply into struggle than I realize. As someone who suffers from Depression, in the past I’ve struggled to emerge completely out of a depressive episode. I find myself looking at my life, then, from the perspective of my Depression—and that is no way to live. It’s not pain itself that distorts or even ruins our life, it’s when we identify with the pain and look at our life through its lens.
I had to learn how to do that through Depression: how to separate my mind from the Depression so I wasn’t letting it distort my worldview.
And I had to learn how to do the same with my trauma from the fires. Once I disconnected my thoughts from what it was making me feel, I was able to see myself more clearly, and gently guide myself in the direction of healing, and look at life outside of that perspective.
I do not intend for this to serve as a map, necessarily, out of trauma, since every person’s experience is incredibly unique and subjective. However, what has always helped me through a difficult experience is knowing that I’m not the only person to have been through something similar. What has helped me, always, is simply knowing I’m not alone. And I never was—but these kinds of experiences, whether we’re talking about trauma, or depression or anxiety or anything like that, these kinds of experiences have a way of making you feel alone. And it can make a big difference to know that you aren’t.
In darker times, it’s hard to remember there is light. But eventually you may come to realize how the darkness makes you appreciate the light so much more, and makes it seem all the brighter.
For me, it means there are emotional truths I’ve lived through that will, without doubt, find their way into my art. Which is one of the primary ways that I forge meaning through the dark parts of my life. And it’s through hardship, through burdens, that we learn how strong we really are. And it’s through healing that we learn to forge meaning from the hardest things in our lives. And it’s through the meaning we forge that we create who we are.
That is what is meant by that tired old saying: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. On its own, I don’t think that’s true. But we can choose to make it true for ourselves by choosing not to look at our life through the lens of our pain, our past, our fears, our depression, our trauma. We can choose to try and heal, choose to forge meaning from what we’ve lived through, and stand up all the stronger because of it.
Here is a link that will take you to resources, whether you are someone in need, or someone who wants to donate or volunteer to help those in need from the fires:
https://www.ashland.or.us/Page.asp?NavID=18041