It's okay to not be okay (and good riddance, Hurricane Helene)

Photo of hurricane damage near my house after Hurricane Helene (via local news)

I usually write and release this blog on Fridays, but it was on Friday morning that I heard that I don’t have a home.

Hurricane Helene had made landfall quite a ways away from my Florida cottage, but she brought with her a swathe of storm surge that hadn’t been seen in decades. By some accounts, eight feet, a literal wall of water, pummeled my small beach community.

My cottage is still standing, but it flooded, along with my neighbors’ houses. I will not get into the minutia here of what happens next, but suffice it to say, I do not have a home to return to.

If you haven’t followed closely, I spend half my year in a small home in Maine (we call it a “camp”). It is not winterized. In other words, it is not possible to live here once freezing temperatures set in (as they’ve been known to a time or two in Maine).

For the other half, I rent in Florida, in a beautiful little beach town that has totally captivated my heart and become a part of me. (And I, it. I ran for city council last winter.)

Without my cottage, I have nowhere to live. While I’ve had kind offers from family and friends in various places outside of Florida (thank you to all who generously offered spare bedrooms), I need a home of my own. In my little beach town.

I’m still in Maine for a few more weeks. By the time I arrive in Florida, I imagine I’ll be but one of thousands of people who are also homeless.

Forgive the long preamble; I don’t have it in me to be pithy today. The point: suddenly without my home, I’ve been propelled back into the liminal zone (the space of in-between, between an ending and a new beginning).

The emotions of this are all raw. The irony is almost too on-point. On Friday, the same day I heard I’m homeless, in fact mere hours later, I kicked off a short course on the liminal zone.

In it, we’re diving into how to hold the uncertainty alongside the opportunity.

In the past two days, I’ve been reminded that, no matter how experienced we are at navigating liminal spaces (and I have more experience both personally and professionally than your average bear), we can’t escape the rollercoaster of emotions of going through it.

So, I’m grappling with that live, in real time, as I convene a wise and thoughtful group of fellow travelers in the liminal zone.

Permit me a relevant tangent here: when I left my longest job of my career, the one that defined a big part of my identity, I immediately got busy with what was next. I buttoned up a big job in a new company and set out on my well-negotiated, extended vacation between roles. I was so busy with what was next that I entirely ignored the fact that I’d just lopped off probably the biggest part of who I knew myself to be: I’d been Amy from IDEO for the better part of a decade. Suddenly, I wasn’t.

But onwards! Said my mind. My body said WTF; I’ve got whiplash! No you don’t, I tried to convince it, until it took over on a particularly treacherous part of the I-5 in California, a place called The Grapevine because of its curving, sharply declining hills (replete with 80mph speeds and many a massive truck).

I had a panic attack on the steepest decline, stuck between an 18-wheeler and a vertiginous drop off. It took all my effort to safely pull off the highway, and it took three hours to drive the last ~60 miles or so to my destination.

That was not my best day. It’s taken me years to get my confidence on the road again. And almost as long to realize it wasn’t a coincidence that that happened after I stuffed my feelings of loss deeply into a corner of my mind.

I think sometimes there’s this notion that an evolved mind sets aside the suffering to focus on the possibility. Culturally, we’re very quick with a “something better will come along.” Or its precursor: “It sucks that X, but you’re so lucky that Y.” And the follow on: “ooh, what’s next for you now?”

My message for today, in this culture of we-can-do-hard-things: of course we can, and we will, but it’s okay not to be okay. And to those supporting anyone suffering the shock of their world changing (whether self-inflicted or courtesy of Mother Nature): it’s okay to let them be not okay.

They’ll pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move forward in good time. But if they don’t acknowledge the pain, it’ll show up at the most inconvenient of times, whipping at them as they, say, descend a mountain at 80mph (as a purely hypothetical possibility, of course ;), wreaking far more havoc than it would have if they’d just let it come when it wanted.