Initiation by Fire: January 2025 from a Los Angeles native
First things first -- put on your oxygen mask
*Opinions and experiences are my own. I do not speak for any group, community, or demographic.
As someone who currently lives in the same Congressional District as Altadena (the location of the Eaton fire) in Los Angeles County, I wrote an update on January 14:
I was 28, living in Washington DC, on 9/11/2001. That was the closest catastrophe I can correlate to how these fires felt to me. Everyone I know in LA knows someone or multiple people who lost it all.
The love I have for the way the city has rallied around those who were affected makes me extremely proud of my home for all its flaws. To see how our city was being attacked by the right wing media machine and conspiracy theories added to the chaos and confusion.
On January 7th through 9th, I was nonstop checking the Watch Duty App and downloaded a bunch of other weather/wind/safety apps including FEMA. In the early hours, before the incredible mobilization effort by our local, state, as well as volunteers from across the country and world (Thank you Mexico and Canada), we were filling in informational gaps with panicked posts via text group threads with friends and family, the NextDoor app and local Facebook groups.
The local news (KCAL, KTLA), was truly heroic through this, cutting through the sensationalistic, vague nonspecific headlines from the national mainstream news giving voice to opinions that had no relevance to the reality of the current situation. My aunt and cousin who live in an apartment complex near the Hollywood Bowl had mandatory evacuation and other friends and relatives across the city were all on edge as we tried to glean the best information we could pool together.
As the Republican fascist deluge of horror, distractions, and lies are intentionally trying to overwhelm and exhaust us, it has never been more crucial to find trustworthy sources of truth and sources of inspiration and hope (as Mr. Rogers famously said “Look for the helpers”):
Going back to living through September 11, 2001 in my twenties in Washington DC. I was working in the public health consulting field as a junior program manager with a government contracting company. The culture in these interchangeable companies was corporate, bureaucratic, and cut throat. I was just happy to have a job that paid me enough to pay my bills, my massive student loan debt, and rent to live in a group house with three other single people. As a person in her late twenties, I was not coping well with life, trying to find my way to some sort of mental health and peace of mind after a lifetime of trauma. I was continually returning to my self-medicating ways. I finally hit a point where I knew it was time for me to try something new and I entered therapy and 12-step programs to try to find some peace of mind and a new way of approaching day to day living.
I found going to meetings paradoxical in so many ways, there were no “leaders” (leadership is voluntary rotating service positions), yet they ran smoothly. Everyone who wanted to speak could do so but no one insisted (there are no rules, only suggestions). No one commented or countered what anyone said (cross talk is considered disrespectful). No matter how much time I didn't think I could spare to go to a meeting, my time seemed to expand to meet my needs if I did go. There was and continues to be mystical, miraculous, and the truly democratic exchange of mutual aid in these recovery communities.
Being in recovery is a process of unlearning my tendencies to not trust myself and my own observations. Growing up around active addiction, lies and gaslighting are par for the course. You are told something is fine, but in your bones you know it’s not. So you begin to just go along to get along and deny your feelings and truth. It’s easier than facing the truth.
As a kid growing up with an alcoholic father, I remember my dad's face changing from one of very happy-go-lucky and gentle to intense and wild eyes.The way I reacted was to think that if I said or did the right thing, I could somehow change his behavior. If only I could find the right intonation, the right word, the right explanation, I thought that I just needed to figure out how to communicate with them better to get what I thought I needed from them.
Most of the tools we learned “in the rooms” are not new. They are self care routines, developing a rich inner spiritual life, slowly building trust with oneself, learning how to build authentic human connections.
For me, before recovery, relationships felt so barren and lonely because I was a stranger to myself and had no ability to trust anyone. But I felt urgently whipped around by the abusive behavior of the addicts that surrounded me. So my whole existence was reacting urgently to chaos and invented crises. It took me many years of practice to set boundaries and trust that I didn't have to figure everything out yesterday. And I’m still working on it.
By putting my proverbial oxygen mask on, I can meet whatever challenges come to me each day, while developing the discipline and discernment to decide what my next individual contribution to any collective response should be.
In this national crisis we are in, we each have to decide what news sources are trustworthy and edifying. I find a lot of coverage not relevant to giving me the information I need to take the next best action in my realm of things I can control. The reality is we are dealing with extremely unwell people in an extremely unhealthy culture of abuse and trauma and we need to not waste too much time and energy being shocked or outraged by the onslaught of psychopathy. During the fire, I just focused on two questions: “how can I take care of myself?” (put my own oxygen mask on first) and “how can I be of service?” I have posted on my notes feed A LOT of resources, good sources of independent news, as well as hope and self care and inspiration ideas. Please add any resources in the comments section, and I’ll compile them in my next newsletter, which I’m aiming to try to publish twice a month.
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On Courage
“There are tragedies.” My Honduran grandmother Zoila would say that to me all the time in her heavily accented English. She would drink wine and recite Pablo Neruda poems by memory and tell me that my generation knew nothing of adversity. I thought I knew a little and was always trying to “get” my family to understand what it …