The Rubber Band Named Michael: Part One

From week to week I try to help students get past roadblocks.  Because of this, you can imagine my shock of reaching one myself.  Read on dear reader…In the end you may empathize way too well.

It has to get better…right?

After the hurricane, we were pretty much homeless.   This does not mean we had no place to stay.  This just means we didn’t have a home.  We had a place for our stuff.  We had a place to sleep.  Alas, these things do not equal a home.

What’s home got to do with it?

A home, that place where you long to be, is special.  Home is welcoming…usually.  Home is where you feel safe and at rest.  Ok, so maybe not all the time.  I do venture to say most people do for most of the time though.

The point is, we were not in that place.  Because of that little fact, we were very unhappy.  We tried.  Everything we could think of as a matter of fact.  All we could do was just get along.  Survive.

Survival of the fittest…

Survive we did.  Day in and day out.  Go to school, come home, do homework.  Toss in work and you have our schedule.  Because being lost in the schedule was what we had.  We didn’t think about the tragic events that brought us to where we were.  We were where we were and we moved on.

I don’t know that it could be said that we truly moved on.  I do know that we did get through one day to get through to the next.  We simply existed.  Like a rubber band attached to a newspaper, we were stuck in position… until it snapped.

Snapping the rubber band

While our existence moved us along, life sped past us.  Some watched their lives come together quickly.  Ours, not so much.  Eventually though it did.  A home was finally available to us.  We were finally going to get back to normal.  Whatever normal we recognized anyhow.

We began packing and moving.  Load after load, we watched our things make their way.  As this happened, something strange happened.  Something I was not quite expecting.  I began to feel.

Now we are bringing feelings into this?!

In the end, when the rubber band snapped, the bandage went right along with it.  All of the things we lost right after the hurricane.  All of the things we lost because of the hurricane.  We were finally beginning to wipe the dust of our depression and numbness away.

We fought so hard to “get back to normal” that we never took the time to just feel.  The time to feel the pain. The time to feel the awe and fear.  A year later exactly, and it all just hit me like the pain you feel after snapping a rubber band.

What does all this mean?

We (you, me, my wife, our friends, everyone) deal with things differently.  Because of that one simple fact, we are all in different phases of healing.  We are going to go through things that may open the not-so-repaired wounds.  In my case, it led to me getting overwhelmed.  It caused my homework to fall further behind than normal.

My best advice to you is that you let yourself feel.  Things happen and you are not alone when they do.  Physically you may be, but we are here.  By “we”, I mean your friends, family, co-workers, and professionals.  You are not alone.

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