Mental Health, The Other Side of Prepping

In my former life as a teacher, I’ll never forget this one essay a graduate student wrote narrating the trauma of a bad prom night. By all measures, he said it was pretty much the worst thing that had ever happened to him, his date showing up in the wrong color dress and his friends picking a restaurant he didn’t like. I almost didn’t believe him. I thought he had to be hiding something.

I don’t think so.

Sometimes, people assume I’m new to doom or I’m one of those sheltered suburban types who’s never endured hardship. Most people don’t want to hear about it, but I’ve got to remind them that I did grow up feeling unsafe in my own home. I grew up with a parent who suffered from severe schizophrenia, the kind that brings patrol cars and ambulances to your house in the middle of the night and makes your neighbors wonder what’s going on.

At the age of 14, I knew what it felt like to spend entire nights in emergency rooms and then go to school the next day and lie to your friends. I knew what it was like to lock your door and cross your fingers. I knew what it was like to reach out to family and watch them turn their backs on you because your problems were too much for them to handle, and they had to abandon you. I knew what it was like to be a parent, because I had to take over my mom’s duties and help raise my brother. While my sheltered friends were freaking out over prom, I was buying groceries, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, helping my brother with his homework, and trying to get my mom to take her meds. My senior year, I spent many nights and weekends working as a cashier, dealing with strangers at the height of their entitlement. I wasn’t a very good surrogate parent, but I tried.

Even if I’ve forgiven my mom for all the chaos and violence, the fact remains that I don’t have many fond memories of her. What I remember is being six and hiding under the bed as she screamed like a poltergeist and slammed her way through the house, ranting about something I’d done or fighting strangers who weren’t there. I remember her telling me I was a space alien, and she had to kill me, or the CIA was tapping our phone—that kind of stuff.

So, when I think about everything that’s going on, I don’t mourn what I’m losing so much as I mourn what I’ll never get to experience, despite all the hard work and investment—a little bit of certainty.

A lot of my prepping isn’t about me. It’s about giving my daughter the childhood I didn’t have, in a world that’s falling apart.

I’m not writing this to solicit pity. I’m writing it because I suspect a lot of people out there need to hear that someone else has gone through all this, and so someone else does know what you’re going through on some level and knows how it feels. When we talk about prepping, we often don’t talk about mental health. We don’t talk about the emotional aspects of it. We should.

So, let’s do it.