One year ago, a EF3/165 mph tornado hit my neighborhood. 

This week (Easter Sunday) marks exactly 365 days since that tornado. 

The American Red Cross commemorated the anniversary with this post.

This article shares pictures–almost all of these are from my neighborhood, one or two from the street I lived on, all things that I saw in person when it happened. 

This video shows drone footage from over my neighborhood.

I already shared a little of my tornado experience in this post, but this week I want to share what surviving a tornado did to my friendships.

People died. People lost their homes. People were hospitalized.

And I struggled with survivor’s guilt. 

You know what survivor’s guilt did to my friendships?

Anger

Senior prom was a few weeks after the tornado. I didn’t want to go. 

How could I dance the night away after everything I had seen and experienced? 

I went anyway, and one of my close friends saw my neighborhood since the tornado for the first time when she picked me up that night.

A few Prom pictures for fun. 😉

My friend said something about it being worse than she thought.

But:

• the route she took showed the least damage
• it had been almost a month
• I told her it had been declared a natural disaster zone–what did she think I meant?

She saw NOTHING. Nothing. 

And I saw nothing compared to somebody else. So I felt guilty about my anger.

But also, no matter how much I showed her or talked about it, she couldn’t understand.

There’s no way to explain what it’s like to see the places around you every day turned to unrecognizable wreckage. It’s surreal.

It should be called survivor’s lament, because it’s not just guilt.

Withdrawal

It’s painful to know your friends can’t understand–it’s enough to make you withdraw.

But I also strive to be a ray of hope and it backfired on me. Natural disasters are traumatic. Here’s what I told myself: They didn’t experience it, so I don’t need to drag them through it with me.

That wasn’t necessarily wrong, but the mindset makes self-isolation easy. 

“I’m in pain that no one else understands, I should feel guilty for it, and I’m going to try not to bring anyone else down by talking about it” is a VERY dangerous mindset.

Survivor’s guilt is a blow to your emotions. And the ice pack is grace.

Survivor’s guilt is a blow to your emotions. And the ice pack is grace.

When your emotions get bruised, they swell. (Seriously, they get big and wild and hard to explain or control.) And emotions aren’t just a concept to explain experiences, they physically exist.

For example, our bodies produce three kinds of tears: basal, reflex, and emotional. This study on tears caused by emotion from the American Academy of Ophthalmology explains the unique aspects of emotional tears.

With big wild emotions, with grief and guilt and fear and anger layering like grime on the walls of your mind, it can be hard to function in a friendship.

I wish I’d asked my friends for grace instead of shutting off parts of myself.

Now

The parts of myself that I shut off still breed anger in my friendships. 

My friends can say, “that’s awful” about things that happen to them and I can’t. 

I stifled that freedom. And then I’m frustrated when they can say that a little everyday thing is awful and I can’t even acknowledge that a traumatic event is awful.

The tornado still means a lot more to me than I want to admit. (Luckily I’m a writer, so I can write a book about it someday.) Even writing this post in a space shared by my friends brings up so many emotions that I don’t know if I should supress or express.

If I need to draw a lesson from my experiences, it’s this: One of the most important parts of friendship is giving each other grace.

Ask for grace when you need it. Give your friends grace when they need it. It’ll all be okay.