In my last post, I detailed my struggles with home construction, sensory overload, and the various ways in which I was struggling with my new home life.
As it turns out, it wasn't that bad. The thick wall separating my room from my brother's turned out to block most of the keyboard noise. Moving my stuff was a lot less emotionally painful than I anticipated, and they weren't even working that day. In fact, they did my entire room the next day, start to finish, in one sitting, so time wasn't an issue either. A few days later I comfortably moved back to my original, now-empty room, and set up my rig again.
But then, you know what happened?
A HURRICANE came in.
Out of nowhere I started seeing these weather reports for an upcoming hurricane called Beryl. I'd been through hurricanes before - Ike, Harvey. I didn't remember having any real difficulty or loss from them. So I thought nothing of it. In fact, my mom said we were in the outer areas of the storm's reach, so it would barely even touch us and we could ignore it.
A few days went by without a second thought, other than seeing numerous reports of how devastating it was going to be on TV. I chalked it up to fearmongering and told myself, again, "it'll happen and then it'll be over in a few hours. Nothing to worry about."
Then it hit.
My initial expectations were correct. My area was on the outermost reaches of the storm, so we didn't experience much damage. One person a few streets away had their fence torn down, but besides that, everyone merely had branches fall in their yards.
The REAL problem was the POWER situation.
You may or may not know, but Texas has a... bad history with power systems. It's the only US state that's not on the shared US electrical grid. It instead has several dozen power companies competing for popularity. From what I've heard, this leads to a lot of deceptive practices, prices not matching up, sudden bills, but worst of all, negligence.
I've experienced this, as, for basically all my life, I'm used to the idea that a single storm could knock out the power for several hours. I only just learned today that it's not exclusive to my area, it's a centerpoint energy problem as a whole. They're apparently noteworthy among customers for poor customer service and very slow repair times for generators. This has led to a lot of frustration as one tiny rainstorm can ruin a perfectly fun day of gaming with friends.
Notably, the power situation in Texas contributed to the "Texas blackout" from a few years ago. I survived it. I can tell you from first-hand experience that people outside Texas had to provide accurate info on the outage, while companies like centerpoint swept problems under the rug and made grand promises (eg. "it's because Texas primarily uses green energy" when it clearly doesn't).
And these fools are in charge of recovery for Beryl.
Now, I understand. I'm not trying to be ungrateful. They do do good work by fixing transformers and generators. They put out safety tips. But they made the utterly stupid decision to remove their outage map, the one thing their customers could rely on in a crisis, during a crisis.
For the ~16 hours I was without power, information was non-existant. I was left alone wondering what was being done to help me. A meme sprung up that people had to use the Whataburger restaurant map as an outage tracker - I can confirm 100% that was necessary.
Anyway, enough rambling. I want to talk about my experience.
For all my life, I've been highly sensitive to physical sensations. All five senses. I've always felt everything more than most. And for whatever reason, be it fibromyalgia, allodynia, some deficiency due to ARFID, or some combination - I get migraines extremely easy.
This was no exception. I came to dearly miss the A/C. The 96°F weather and 80% humidity flooded my home, and immediately proved too much for me to handle. I had a migraine for the entire time the power was out. I practically almost OD'd on painkillers because I was so desperate for it to stop.
Now, my mom and brother were fine. They were uncomfortable from the heat, but they were fine. But I was having head-splitting pain, I was stressed as hell, overstimulated, and I wanted to simultaneously puke and poke a hole in my head to relieve pressure. I was bed-bound for most of the outage.
Another part to this is restlessness. This is partly due to my medication (lurasidone) and partly due to trace amounts of unconfirmed ADHD in me. It was hard to find something to do. I spent most of those hours just staring off into space, battery fan pointed at my face, missing my old life severely. Restlessness is a passive pain on the mind, and it's very hard to cope with without something tactile to do.
The worst part by far was night time. I usually sleep with a sound machine to block out background noise which would normally overwhelm me. But I didn't have that. Instead, I got to hear my neighbors chatting, laughing and playing music outdoors for a few hours, then nothing but wildlife sounds. Which, for a neurotypical, probably even sounds enjoyable, but I cannot stand unpredictable noises and sensory input. In particular anything that "clicks".
I already have a terrible time with sleep. I've had a debilitating sleep disorder all my life that basically ruined my performance in school permanently. And last night, with the heat, the humidity, the migraine, laying on top of my covers, breathing raspily out my mouth, it goes without saying I couldn't fall asleep for more than a minute.
So, yes, it may sound a little priveleged to say A/C is essential to my survival. But with my special needs, it really, really is. Even recently when I've been visiting an IRL friend in her apartment, they don't have A/C and it takes all my strength just to keep going.
Thankfully, the power outage ended today. There was a loud bang and all the power spontaneously flowed back. It took several hours for the A/C to adjust, and for me to exit stress mode, but I got back to where I should be. At least for a while. It seems the internet is only temporarily up, and it's flickering on and off right now until maintenance is done.
At the same time as the outage, I had some appointments scheduled. One for yesterday, which I literally could do nothing about because I had no power, no internet, and no cell. And two for today. The former seemingly got rescheduled to tomorrow by staff - thanks to them. But today I discovered my other two appointments overlapped, and I had to call in and cancel one. I kept the gender visit over the therapy visit, it's way more important.
During this vague period of being only partially aware and wondering what's going to happen, I was intensely stressed and angry. I kept replaying a scenario in my head where I was charged for cancel/no-show despite it being out of my control. As far as I know this hasn't happened (yet), but still, this was very poor for my mental health.
When I finally got in touch with London again I didn't feel like myself at all. I felt so overly negative, so full of contempt for others and upset at my situation and despair at my pain. It took a while to feel calm again - and I could only feel calm once I believed the outage was over, mind you. He really is something special, though. He barely even has to try to comfort me, I feel way better just being around him.
Speaking of, something that really helped was an anniversary* gift London got me, this beautiful little touch bracelet. When one of us taps or holds it, the other one lights up and vibrates. This is great for my autism actually. It's gentle, it's cute, and it fills me with happy chemicals every time. Despite the spotty connection during the outage, this legitimately helped me get through it. Best gift ever, honestly.
So there's some personal experiences from hurricane Beryl for me. The story isn't even fully over yet since it's still technically not over - CE is still doing repairs and maintenance, and the internet is still fluctuating. You probably won't see this post til the disaster is "over".
Wanna know the funny part though? The best thing to top everything off?
The construction work still isn't done.
Not even close. They start again tomorrow.
