Disaster and Me

Well, it has been a trying week to say the least. In case there was any doubt it got erased quick when my best friend said, "What's next? A plague of locusts?" and I could only agree. From the late night emergency visit to the animal hospital 2 hours away to the flooded apartment, it's felt like the Bataan Death March of petsitting. Extreme coping skills were the order of the day.

So it was ironic that my audiobook was Amanda Ripley's facinating The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. The title pretty much says it all-why do some people rise to the challenge of a disaster while others crumble under the pressure? Ripley posits that personality is part of it but also lays lots of blame on official sources for not preparing people well enough. It's not enough to say we are at Level Orange for example, what does Level Orange mean? And what should I be doing at Level Orange?

There lots of food for thought here though. How people frequently waste time gathering things before evacuating (or even, crazily, trying to bring luggage down the emergency slide in a plane crash), how there are stages of coping that have to be gone through, rather like the stages of grief and how the faster people can work through them the better off they will be.

The one thing I quibbled with was the characterization that people who can disassociate easily are less able in a crisis. I can do that, I think most imaginative people can, but I have proven to have a cool head in the crisises I have encountered (admittedly no 9/11 sized ones). I may fall apart a bit after but then the danger is past. It's kind of like the crying thing. Crying is my go to response but it's just the first step. Tears don't mean I'm going to pieces or not coping-rather the opposite-they allow me blow off steam before I buckle down and do what needs doing. Yeah, I'd like to be more stoic, but I'm a crier-what are you gonna do?

Armed with the lessons of Unthinkable, hopefully I'm armed for the new week. I say Bring It!