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19 was a tough but pivotal year for me.

I started out my 19th year of life living with my parents and attending a local college. I was comfortable and safe, albeit not exactly challenged. I wasn't interested in shaking the boat. However, all of that changed when a natural disaster completely obliterated my hometown. My university was destroyed. So was my house. My patents' jobs were gone. It was a mess. After sleeping in a truck stop with my family for several weeks, I decided to bite the bullet and do something. I contacted a prestigious university across the country that I had gotten into the year before but chose not to attend.

Before then I didn't want to leave my comfort zone. I didn't want to break my routine. Sitting in that truck stop though, I realized that no matter what I did my old life was gone. Things were going to be different. I chose to do my best to make "different" into "better." The university accepted me and the rest is history. My new dorm had a comfortable bed. I got a small job managing lab materials for the biology department. It was a funny thing to go back to being homeless on the holidays... but there was always an aunt or cousin or someone I could stay with. Eventually my parents got a new trailer to live in. I always struggled with school before then. Oddly, not so much afterwards. Maybe left to my own devices I found myself. Maybe I realized that failure would would send me back to that limbo zone. I don't know.
However, this morning I am finishing writing my PhD dissertation while applying for Biology faculty and government research jobs.

I think back about it often and wonder if I have that frightened 19-year-old to thank for all of this. There were many people around me who offered me help in my time of need of course. They are the real heroes. But if you don't reach your hand out, it's harder for someone to help you up.

Last edited by Fern on 21 Sep 2016, 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Was that natural disaster Hurricane Katrina?

Yes it was.

Congratulations on surviving it!

It must have been a great trauma at times for you and your family.

I've heard that Tulane is a fine university. I'm glad you were able to go to another one, and proceed to the point where you're at now.

Thank you for your kind words.
Trauma to me sounds like something that happens acutely, something that strikes and then is gone. While that accurately depicts Katrina as a storm system, the eroding of New Orleans as a functioning society with care for its inhabitants, and the systematic environmental exploitation of the Louisiana coast has been a long-time building and has ruled over more than a third of my life. These problems are still present and will not be gone in the future unless we take more measures to change things.


I didn't attend Tulane. I was never accepted as a high school senior, and didn't bother trying to transfer because it was too expensive. Tulane suffered less damage than my university and was back up and running much faster because they have more $$ and the campus is on higher land.

New Orleans has been an international city even longer than New York has been an international city.

Do you find that it has made a decent comeback since Katrina?

I'm not much older, but 19 was a tough year for me. I didn't have friends and I spent all of my time in my bedroom and I became afraid to leave it. Later in the year, I learned how to drive after I became less afraid to leave the house. My OCD was awful that year and I had to count nearly everything I did. For me, things began to look up after I turned 21.

this thread is making me feel better lol

grounding and perspective is a wonderful thing.

I am a messed up individual who may or not have ASD but since joining here I've realised that so many people have gone through what I have and much much worse - I no longer feel special

I think I could sum up Katrina recovery in about 11 sequential words:

- grey
- piles
- lines
- hazmat
- trailers
- insurance
- construction
- property values
- hipsters
- gentrification

What's the 11th word? LOL

suspence

I was hoping it was something to do with non-hipsters, non-gentrification folks getting a bite of the New Orleans pie, too.

New Orleans must be restored to its former glory!

Haha, it's less deep than all of that. I had to put 11 because I couldn't think of how to say "property values" in one word.

I didn't mean to sound pessimistic. I love my hometown. I'm a 9th generation New Orleanian. We rebuilt our parents' house there with our own hands (I learned so much about construction!). All of my family lives there. I'm not in favor of giving up, quite the contrary. I just think it's easy to whitewash the recovery if you look only at those who were in the best socioeconomic position before the storm. In my response to your question I did not want to exclude the plight of those still struggling, as the past 10 years have in many ways widened the gap between them and the affluent.

Case in point: schools

Before the storm: Orleans Parish public school system one of the worst-performing in the nation, with only 1 or 2 very good public magnet schools (luckily, one of which I got into)

After the storm: New Orleans becomes the highest % charter school city in the nation. Anyone can be kicked out or not accepted from these schools at the discretion of the school administration. Mean grades go up across the city, but the most in-need students have even fewer options than before the storm, just getting tossed out.

Wow!

Ninth generation.

Nine generations of anything is rare in America.

If a generation is between 20 and 25 years then that means that your family first arrived in New Orleans around 1800, or even before,meaning they arrived before (or about the same time as)the US acquired the city as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. So your folks may have been New Orleanian before the were American!

Were they? Do you know? Just curious.

I had just moved back in with my parents, after living for 1.5 years in an oversized group home. Going back to highschool, I was rather hopeful. Than 9/11 happened, it all went to s**t after it seemed.