Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
Thank you for being here with me!
My dear reader.
One thing that has helped me immeasurably in recent years is the commitment I’ve made to be discerning about context. Here’s what I mean:
Let’s say you see a popular newsletter or social media post that goes into detail about how to “best” schedule one’s time, and that post is written by a single, child-free man in his late-20s with no chronic health conditions who is financially resourced and self-employed. If the context of that person’s life is different from your own in any way — say, if you have two young children or a disability or a job with inconsistent hours that leaves you little agency over the flow of your day — then those “best” practices might not apply. They might even make you feel like shit, along the lines of “what’s wrong with me that I can’t perform at X level like this other person??”
I use this example as an intro to today’s letter to emphasize that context matters, in hopes that you can keep that in mind as I share with you some of the things I have chosen to do (and been able to do) in regard to emergency preparedness — all of which are influenced by my own constellation of circumstances, privileges, and beliefs. If there is something here that feels resonant for you, great! If not, that’s totally okay! You know yourself way better than any writer on the internet ever could.
Okay, here we go.
Breaking the binary
For many years I thought preparedness (of any kind) was not for me, because I’m not the bunker-building, gun-loving, right-wing-survivalist type.
That’s the image that had been planted in my mind of who emergency prepping was for, and since I’ve never identified with that archetype I assumed all this prepper stuff had nothing to do with me.
I find it very easy to get caught in this kind of binary, either/or, all-or-nothing thinking (with everything), but of course in this case our choices are not to either a) build a bunker filled with ammo and dehydrated meals and then protect it violently in times of crisis, or b) do absolutely nothing.
I am grateful to folks like
who talk so clearly about preparedness as a way to build more resilient communities, and about how the more prepared you are (personally) in an emergency the more supportive you can then be for others.1This resonates with me deeply, especially since it breaks that false binary of “be a billionaire with a bunker and an escape fantasy” or “roll your eyes at said billionaire while ignoring the fact that emergencies can and do happen all the time, and that preparing however we are able can bolster the odds of our collective survival.”
Just because I can’t do everything doesn’t mean I can’t do something
Oh perfectionism, you strike again! That voice that says that if you can’t afford to buy a year’s worth of food to keep in your basement, there’s no point. Or that if you don’t have a basement at all, you’re screwed.
This is where that discernment of context comes in, because of course someone with ample storage space and extra money and time autonomy will be able to do things differently or at a different pace than someone without one or all of those things. But I truly do believe that all of us can do something (however small that something might seem), and that our small actions and decisions will add up over time.
Perhaps this week you can buy two extra cans of corn for your pantry. Or maybe the money isn’t available for that right now, but you do have 15 minutes this weekend to talk to your neighbor about the skills and resources you’d both be able to offer each other in the event of your area’s most likely emergency (power outage? earthquake? hurricane?)
You get the idea — we start where we are.