7 Things Tornadoes Can Teach Us About Mental Health
“These storms descend like a dagger from the clouds. . . . And when they lash out at their surroundings, they often seem to act with malicious, mindful intent.” How Tornadoes Work by How Stuff Works
When the tornado hits
Fifteen years ago - May 29, 2008 - around 5:25 p.m. Central Time, an EF2 tornado came tearing through the streets of northern Kearney, Nebraska. The tornado lasted for about an hour, measured nearly 400 yards in width, and had wind speeds of up to 135 miles per hour.
Imagine that—a tornado as wide as four football fields.
It left a 30-mile path of destruction as it headed east through the town of Kearney.
And in that path of destruction, was my mom’s house.
A couple hours before that, my mom had been working at her office in the southwest part of town, when a tornado watch was issued. She drove home quickly to grab my dog (and her grand-dog), Bailey, whom my mom was dogsitting. Mom had been watching Bailey for me so that I could fly to California to meet my best friend’s second baby, and then fly to Ireland for a 2-week trip. Mom figured that Bailey would be scared at home alone in the thunderstorms, so she decided to grab him and bring him to work with her.
Over the next couple of hours, the storm clouds and thunderstorms continued to build, eventually creating what is known as a “supercell.” A supercell is the least common form of thunderstorm, but the kind that has tremendous potential to wreak havoc with strong winds, hail, and tornadoes. If you’ve ever gazed up in the sky during May or June and seen an anvil-looking cloud, you’ve seen the formation of a supercell.
Growing up in Nebraska, supercells actually seemed fairly common, along with their associated tornadoes. I mean, I grew up in a trailer house, which is the equivalent of the Bat signal for tornadoes. And although we were fortunate enough to have never had our trailer picked up and tossed around by a tornado, I did see plenty of tornadoes growing up. I have vivid memories of going to our landlord’s house to shelter in the basement as we looked out the window to see tornadoes dancing by on the horizon.
And there were multiple times driving along Interstate 80 through Nebraska, when we could watch the sky turn a creepy dark grayish-greenish-blue, as little tendrils started to drop out of the clouds like creepy monster fingers from a sci-fi movie trying to touch the ground.
I’ve always been fascinated by tornadoes and often wondered if I could have been a storm chaser.
But the fascination wears off a bit when one of those cloud monsters decides to drop its ass right on your mom’s house.
As the EF2 tornado was forming in northern Kearney, my mom and the guys she worked with were standing outside of their building, watching . . . like any good Nebraskan tends to do. As the tornado formed into this 400-yard beast, my mom stood there yelling at it . . . goading it on: “Come on Mother Fucker!”
My mom, like my brother and me, usually got a rush out of watching tornadoes form.
Well, that tornado must have heard my mom, looked at her, and said, “Oh yeah? Who’s the Mother Fucker now?”
The aftermath of the tornado
Shortly after the tornado vanished back into the skies, one of the guys that Mom worked with came back to the office and said, “Patty . . . you need to go home.” My mom and her guys caravanned to her house a couple of miles away. And when they arrived, what they saw took their breath away.
My mom’s house was the unit on the left. Her bedroom upstairs, where my dog Bailey would have been sleeping.
The top and front of my mom’s apartment that she was renting was ripped off, exposing the inside of her home . . . exposing her life, her memories, her things, to the world. Debris was all over the yard. Shit strewn all over inside the top floor of the apartment, like a bomb had gone off.
The bed - where my dog Bailey would have been sleeping if my mom hadn’t gone to pick him up - was covered in debris.
Oddly, two things remained untouched, unmoved, by the 135-mph tornado winds: the urn with my grandpa’s ashes that we hadn’t yet interred, and a photo of my grandpa hanging on the stairwell wall, completely straight, as if nothing had happened.
That’s the creepy thing about tornadoes: the randomness with which they will completely destroy one thing while leaving one thing pristine and untouched.
Late that evening, as I was in my apartment in Alexandria, Virginia packing for my trip to Ireland, my brother called. His voice was shaky and rattled, mumbling something about Mom’s house being hit by a tornado. It took a couple of seconds for his words to sink in, and when they did, I immediately panicked because he hadn’t said anything about Mom or Bailey.
“Stop, stop, stop! Are Mom and Bailey okay?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, they’re fine,” my brother said. (Way to bury the lead, little brother!).
Once I wrapped my head around what had happened, I booked a flight back to Nebraska.
Before I landed, the amazing team of guys that my mom worked with, along with her fiance, my brother, and my mom, had already cleared out her apartment. They took her belongings to the quonset hut attached to Mom’s office building and spread everything out to dry and sort through.
We were all thankful that no one had been hurt or killed that day - including no one in the town of Kearney. And we were grateful that most of my mom’s belongings were salvageable and, especially, that my grandpa’s urn hadn’t decided to take a ride in the twister. That would have given a whole new meaning to “scattering the ashes.”
I know that my mom was greatly shaken by how, in a matter of minutes, a tornado ripped through her home, her sanctuary, and upended her life. But I don’t know if there were any lasting effects from that traumatic event. Eventually, my mom found a new apartment to move into and we all seemed to move on.
Yet, little did we know that there were more tornadoes hiding in the clouds, on the horizon. That just 4 days shy of the 4-year anniversary of that tornado, another metaphorical tornado would rip through my mom’s heart in the form of a massive heart attack, killing her while she worked late one nite at her office on May 25, 2012.
Because that’s the thing about tornadoes: they “descend like a dagger from the sky,” often with little to no warning, ripping your life apart in a matter of minutes. And, if you’re fortunate to survive the tornado itself, the aftermath of destruction is something that lingers.
The tornado of mental health struggles
Reflecting back on this 15-year anniversary of the tornado that destroyed my mom’s home, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between tornadoes and mental health struggles. So, for this last blog post for Mental Health Awareness Month, allow me to expand on those similarities.
Similarity #1: Volatile or unstable pre-existing conditions
“Tornadoes don't just pop into existence -- they develop out of thunderstorms, where there's already a steady, upward flow of warm, low-pressure air to get things started. It's kind of like when a rock concert erupts into a riot. Conditions were already volatile; they merely escalated into something even more dangerous.” How Tornadoes Work by How Stuff Works
There may be some people for whom mental health struggles just pop into existence. In my experience, however, I feel that there have been pre-existing and on-going volatile conditions that have built like storm clouds over time and escalated into a more powerful storm. And, I imagine that this may be the case for many people.
Volatile pre-existing and on-going conditions in the form of:
Systemic oppression
Racism
Sexism
Abuse
Trauma (acute, chronic, intergenerational, direct, and vicarious)
Ableism
Classism
Financial burdens
Death
Loss
Grief
Health challenges
World events
Natural disasters
Everyone has their own storms that they’ve weathered - literally and figuratively. And often, these storms have ripped something open inside of us, exposing our interiors, much like the roof was ripped off my mom’s house exposing her interiors. We often tend to “soldier on,” pretending like that path of destruction doesn’t exist within us. Then, the next time a storm comes along, it carves the scar of that path of destruction even deeper. Until one day, that supercell storm that has been brewing has enough volatility and instability within it to whip up another massive tornado.
In my experience, our struggles with mental health - whether it’s depression, anxiety, grief, etc. - don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re actually the tornado that has been given form by the pre-existing or ongoing conditions that have been escalating and building for a while, creating the kind of volatile instability that gives rise to a powerful tornado.
(Sidenote: I’m not saying that we, as people with mental health struggles, are unstable. I’m saying there are unstable conditions that give rise to these storms).
Similarity #2: Your life is turned upside down
Tornadoes destroy your life and turn it upside down in a matter of minutes. Although mental health challenges can take longer to turn your life upside down, the path of destruction is no less unsettling.
Mental health challenges like anxiety and depression may or may not work as quickly as a tornado. Either way, they can leave you feeling like your life has been turned upside down.
Similarity #3: All the air is sucked out
You’ve heard the saying “the calm before the storm.” When you’re in the vicinity of a tornado, the air can suddenly feel very still and quiet. That’s because the energy of the tornado has sucked all of the air out of the atmosphere to feed itself.
Mental health struggles can leave you feeling like all the air has been sucked out of the room. Like something larger than you is taking up all the air, all your breath. Which leads me to the fourth similarity.
Similarity #4: The eye of the storm is terrifyingly still
The eye of a tornado is also known as the “death zone.” This is because in the middle of the tornado, all the air is being sucked up, making it very hard to breathe.
The eye of a tornado also has a deafening silence. It’s terrifyingly still as you wait for it to inevitably get worse again as you pass through the middle to the other side of the tornado.
There are less than a handful of people who have survived being in the eye of a tornado. And what they report is how dark it is inside the eye. Although you can look up and see an opening toward the sky, you are surrounded by dark walls of moving air, clouds, and debris. There are lightning bolts firing off inside this wall, and tiny miniature tornadoes forming within the eye.
When I read these descriptions, I felt that they accurately described what it’s like to be in the eye of the storm of anxiety or depression. It’s hard to breathe. You may see some light, but you’re mostly surrounded by darkness, swirling energy, and multiple other storms brewing inside this larger storm. And it can feel deafeningly quiet . . . terrifyingly still as you wait for the other side of the tornado to come bearing down on you.
Similarity #5: The barrelling freight train
When you’re in or very near to a tornado, it sounds like a freight train barrelling through your home. It’s terrifying. Everything is shaking and feels like it’s going to collapse around or on top of you. And all you want to do is hide in your closet with your head between your knees, praying for it to end.
This paints a pretty accurate picture of my struggles with anxiety and depression. When these freight trains come barrelling at me, all I want to do is hide in my closet with my head between my knees, praying for it to be over. Until then, it feels like everything I know is going to come crashing down around me.
Similarity #6: It picks you up and spits you out
We’ve all seen images - at least movie images - of how tornadoes can pick up even the most massive objects, spin them around in its chaotic energy, and spit it out like a monster who just ate something it didn’t like.
My mental health challenges can feel like that at times. Like I’m caught up in the swirl, with nothing to grab on to, just waiting for it to spit me back out. And when I do get spit out, it’s certainly not a soft landing. I land with a thud, bruised and shaken from the spin-cycle experience. Disoriented . . . wondering how I got here and what happens next.
Similarity #7: The randomness of destruction
As I said, tornadoes are weird in the randomness of their destruction. A tornado will completely obliterate one house and leave the house right next door intact.
Mental health challenges also can have a randomness to them. Behind closed doors, I can be fully in the swirl of the tornado. But out in public, it may seem like nothing has disturbed my inner tranquility. I may have hours in a day where I feel like everything is going to come crumbling down, and then a couple hours later, experience some moments of joy or hope.
The tornado’s path of destruction isn’t always logical and it doesn’t always mean total destruction. There can be places and pieces that are saved, untouched by the chaos. In my experience, mental health challenges can function in the same way.
Walking away from the tornado
For those who are fortunate enough to live through a tornado - either as a weather event or a mental health challenge - and walk away, the clear skies that eventually emerge can be met with mixed emotions.
We may feel:
a sense of relief that it’s over,
disoriented by what just happened,
sadness as we look at the path of destruction that’s been left behind,
gratitude for making it through, or
apprehension over when the next, inevitable tornado will appear.
Whatever we’re feeling in the aftermath of our own personal tornado, know this: it all belongs.
The grief,
the joy,
the sadness,
the apprehension,
the uncertainty . . .
all of it belongs.
Because remember, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, it’s all an experience that we are having.
We are not our mental health challenges.
We are not our anxiety . . .
our depression . . .
our grief . . .
or whatever else we may be experiencing.
And we certainly are not the tornado itself.
We are the observer of it all.
So, as we wrap up this series for Mental Health Awareness Month, let me leave you with these invitations:
To see when the storm is brewing inside,
To remember that you are not alone,
And to remember that when we see the storm brewing, the best thing to do is to seek shelter by finding support from others.
And may you know this: when that tornado of mental health struggles “descends like a dagger from the sky,” often with little to no warning, ripping your life apart in a matter of minutes, there will likely be an aftermath of destruction that lingers. If so, all you need to do is keep putting one foot forward at a time . . . one moment at a time . . . to pick up one piece of your life at a time.
Leave a 🌪️ if this has resonated with you.