On this day one year ago, about 40 minutes after midnight, began the most memorable night of my life.
I was in bed, but still awake, when a tornado warning popped up on my phone. That’s not common in Tennessee, but it’s also not terribly unusual. Like most people, I pay some attention when the weather is bad, but I’m not terribly concerned. It’s not like it’s going to happen to me, right?
When I saw the alert, I thought I’d be safe and pull up the @NashSevereWx feed on Twitter just to see what was going on. When storms are really bad, they put up a livestream and give minute by minute updates, so I pulled that up too. As soon as the broadcast started, I heard the voice say, “If you live west of Five Points on Woodland Street, Holly Street or Russell Street, you need to get in your safe place RIGHT NOW! Do not wait, do not stop, you have one minute. Go right now!”
I live west of Five Points. I live on Woodland Street. They meant me. I had one minute.
The house I live in is pretty open. There isn’t an interior hallway to go stand in and most of the rooms have big windows. I chose my next best option, the corner of our dining room. The electricity went first. Then the cell connection died and my link to the radar stream I’d been following. I stood there in the dark corner of my kitchen and I was alone.
Weirdly, it felt kind of peaceful for a second. It felt like the signal of the whole world just dropped. I wonder if that’s what it feels like to be on the moon or in the eye of a hurricane. Just quiet, but eerie.
Then the storm came. I could hear it rattling the windows and I remember thinking, “Is this it? Is the roof of my house about to lift off and fly away? Are the windows going to shatter? Am I going to die?”
And then it was gone, and I was okay.
The rest of the night is a complete and total blur. I know my roommate and I went out to survey the damage. (He rode the storm out in his closet, which was a much wiser choice for a tornado shelter.) I texted my family and friends to let them know I was okay. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to drive to my grandparent’s house in south Nashville at 2 AM, a drive that that required me to navigate the path of destruction left by the tornado. I didn’t feel safe, but I needed to and that was the only place I could find safety. It didn’t matter if it was stupid. I just needed to go.
In retrospect, this was not the wisest decision I would make on March 3rd. In fact, very few of the decisions I made on March 3rd made any sense at all. I was running on instinct. I spent most of the next day hopping from distraction to distraction. I met up with friends. I tried to be normal. That night I even went to a basketball game with my grandpa. He told me that it was okay to cancel, but I was insistent, bordering on reckless. I was so exhausted that I nearly fainted in the stands.
But I needed to feel normal. I craved it. And this was normal. This was safe.
A few days after the tornado I talked to one of my friends and they tried to explain to me that what I’d gone through was a kind of trauma. For a while I bucked against that word. After all, nothing actually happened to me. My house was fine. My power was out a few days, but that’s not so bad. A lot of people had it way, way worse. I wanted to distance myself from that word because I didn’t feel like I’d earned it.
But they were right. My experience might not have been as traumatic as others, but it was traumatic. And here’s the funny thing as I look back on it. I thought it would feel more different. I thought it would be clearer. For some reason, I expected the experience of trauma to be like the difference between red and blue. Stark, obvious, identifiable. But it was more like the difference between red and a slightly darker shade of red. Noticeable, certainly, but only if you’re paying attention and not easily describable. When I think back on that day, it was like I felt everything at the same time and like all those feelings made me feel numb. It was like a part of my mind detached and left the rest of me to continue on autopilot.
I cried a lot in the days following the tornado. I cried at times that didn’t make any sense. I’d get mad at myself for crying. To be honest, I’m still crying while I write this and I’m still a little mad at myself for responding this way. In some ways, I know that what I went through was a traumatic event. I know that it’s okay to feel the way I feel. But in other ways, I feel like it happened to other people and I was just living in the house next door. I don’t entirely know how to process that divide between being a victim of a disaster and being someone who watched a disaster happen.
That complicated feeling has only deepened over the course of the last year. I think a lot of us can relate to this during the pandemic. It’s been bad for everyone. No one has had a good year. But I think a lot of us feel guilty when we feel the pain of the last year because we all know that it’s been harder for others. We don’t feel like we’ve earned the word trauma. That word is for other people who go through other, more difficult things.
But that’s what the tornado was for me and that’s what the pandemic has been for millions of us. It’s okay to feel the way that we feel even if we know that we didn’t get the worst of it.