8 Days Until the Bottom of the Hopeslope & Katrinaversary 20 is at our door.
Coping. Changing. Contemplating. Rest. All in the wake of the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
It is hot and quiet. Stagnant.
A bird is squawkity-cawing somewhere down the block. The A/C hums gently in the background. Clouds drift to block the sun. A welcome relief from the heat, even in the shade.
My skin is sticking to this fucking chair. Again.
8 days to go until the bottom of the Hopeslope.
8 days until the anniversary.
I ground:
I am safe right here, right now. I am safe. I am ok. I am safe and allowed to define what success means to me. Quietly. Privately. Loudly. Publicly. Whatever. I am safe and allowed to feel. I am ok and allowed grief. I am ok and allowed to be anxious. Feeling my feelings is in fact a side effect of being well. Even when those feelings aren’t pleasant. My feelings are my compass.
I am safe to admit that I’ve been so tired lately. How much of it is the heat? The grief? The amount of rest I’ve needed in the past 5 weeks has been challenging. The amount of rest in the past 10 days even more so.
I tried Reiki for the first time a couple weeks ago. Tried to do something to help myself further. An effort to cement the emotional relief I had painstakingly re-created for myself.
Another way to further prepare for this anniversary.
In so doing, I had experience I didn’t expect. Honestly, it was one I couldn’t have fathomed beforehand.
I got so many memories back. It was beautiful. It was intense. It was horrifying. I’m still recovering.
Hindsight says what I was already doing was working so well that I should have just stopped there. Instead, I felt good enough to push it.
Of course I did. I wanted more.
Wanted to hold onto finally feeling ok again after Jury Duty knocked me the fuck down, the week before my last post.
12 hours of grilling in voir dire led to 2 weeks of waking up not knowing where I was. How old I was. Drenched in cold sweat. Flash backs. Body pains. Dead spots. Aches.
The caterpillars decimated my passionflower vine and it died.
Late July I began to get back up. Painstakingly started recovering. I’ve gone to enough therapy where my therapist had nothing new to offer. I know how to do this. I know the strategy. Created it myself.
I guess here’s another chance to further hone the drill.
Grounding in safety. Gratitude. Affirmations. Journaling. Emotional Processing. Yoga. Breathing. More exercise. This time I created chakra meditations to help the healing along? That’s nice.
Intensive. Slow. But it works. Well.
Depression waned. Anxiety Lessened. Grief became a manageable companion.
August dawned.
I need a break. But all that counts as rest, right? I wasn’t making money so it must be rest. That’s how that works. Right?
Fuck.
My understanding that all of this is work blurred in the heat mirage of Louisiana summer. Right perception lost in the shimmering summer haze, until the reality of success became a phantom and I started wanting more.
So I pushed it, trying to help myself further prepare for these days, and instead fell on my face.
I didn’t need more. I just needed rest.
Today it all makes me sad and frustrated. Thinking of the past 6 months makes me sad and frustrated.
I’ve been trying so hard to move forward these past 6 months. Made tons of strides internally. Externally I keep getting pushed back. Every time I take a step it feels like I’m swat down. Like a giant psychological cat paw. Or maybe a celestial one.
Move. Friend dies. Smack. Move. Jury duty. Smack. Move. Reiki. Smack.
Almost like I’ve been working to create something new on the downturn of the Hopeslope as I’m deeply grieving.
In my mind all of this should have been easy. Working only on myself. By myself. For myself. This time should have been a time of ease. I’ve wanted it to be. I’ve tried to tell myself, teach myself that it is.
But it hasn’t been.
Trudging along with only silent, private results for some long-term, far off goals. Trusting that it’ll materialize. It’s so fucking hard.
Trying to remind myself that everything will start to move again once September comes. That’s the way it works. Right? Right. New opportunities arise. Income will start to flow again. I have plans in October, November, next April that I need income for. This can’t fail. Won’t fail. I know it’ll happen. I know it’ll align. I know it’ll all be ok.
I’ve done this before. Year after year, my entire life.
Ground. Ground. Ground.
But for now it’s still August. I’m in the trough and still have further to go. I’m sitting in a cloying soup of uncertainty full of grief and deep despair.
It’s so hot I can’t see straight. Sometimes I forget what I’m trying to build. I have no energy. I’m exhausted. I can’t get hydrated to save my fucking life. My plans keep falling apart. I’m critically under-incomed.
I’m terrified. Keep trying to affirm that I’m not. Is that lying, manifestation, or mental health maintenance? Yes. Sure.
I’m not sleeping. I’m out of hope. It’s hurricane season. Bills are astronomical. It’s so shit that sometimes I just start to laugh. Out loud. Out of the blue.
It’s so fucking hot. Did I say that already? Maybe? Fuck.
The plants are wilting. I’m wilting. I’m kind of surprised my neighbors haven’t asked me to tone down the wailing. I guess that’d be an awkward conversation: “Hey, can you keep the crying down?” Sure. No problem.
Maybe they’ve been crying this loudly daily too. Who knows.
Now the government wants more info on my home. They say I have a permit violation from 2013. Why is this the first I’m hearing of it, 15 years down the road?
Living here is a sickness. This fucking city makes me want to choke.
Molten hurt courses through my veins. My head. My heart. How can I contain so much grief in my being? In my bones?
I cannot hold onto the ephemeral whips of joy. What a joke.
It’s too scorching to even go for a walk. Unless it’s night. But then the bugs are out to fiercely that I’m covered in bites just from taking the trash out.
At least this year we’re not in a drought.
I remember it’s always this bad in August. I realize it’s never this bad in August.
Part of living here is self-defining how much you can stand before you have to leave. Before you tap out. Fuck, I want to get away so badly. But I cannot dessert Her. New Orleans. Not this year. Not ahead of what’s coming up. If I left I wouldn’t forgive myself.
Hurricane Katrina hit 20 years ago, 8 days from now.
I was 11 then. I’m 31 now. I’ve thought about it daily for the past 6 months.
I wonder how much that’s contributed to all these false starts. The mental anguish around how hard I’ve found adjusting to and accepting my slow, private progress. Probably a lot.
8 sweltering days to go.
I need to sit with Her through this. Sit with this land. My home. Spend this anniversary with Her. This summer I chose to be here. An intentional need fulfillment. Needed to experience the madness. Really feel what it’s like to ride hopeslope all the way down.
Why?
An act of honor? Remembrance? Because I don’t have the money to leave?
Yes. All that.
I hate this. I love this. I’ve done this to myself. This is my home. This is my culture.
What does fuck does that even mean, anyhow?
I miss my friends. Most everyone I want to see is out of town. I think the last time I really left my house was sometime in July? Was it for mid-summer’s MOM’s? Or maybe a fundraiser for the Human Horse Races?
Who knows. I’ve got swamp brain, memory melt.
How can I help myself?
Over these past months and weeks, I keep looking at the puzzle pieces of my life. All the ways I’ve been trying to put them together. I can’t go any faster.
In fact, what I need is to just stop. Pause. Rest. Let it be. Take a bath. Take care of myself.
Soak in an epson salt bath. Contemplate the detestable heat. Marvel at its cruelty. Turn off my phone. Do chakra meditation. Stare at a fucking wall.
I can’t believe we don’t siesta here yet. How many more years until that becomes inevitable? Not many if the heat keeps increasing like this. The heat will keep increasing like this.
I just need some rest. I just want to go outside. I can’t go outside.
8 more days til the bottom of the Hopeslope.
My heat warped perception is of reality skewed. Mirage off the pavement. I know I’m repeating myself. How many more summers can I take?
8 more days until the 20th anniversary where everything changed.
In these final days leading to this milestone trough, I am in mourning. I grieve so fully for all that was lost, with the storm and since. It is deeply personal. It is incredibly communal.
Hurricane Katrina hit Buras, Louisiana on August 29th, 2025, after initially crossing Florida on August 23rd. It decimated much of Southeast Louisiana, Mississippi. The Gulf Coast. Our delta. We do not know exactly how many died from the storm and subsequent flooding, with estimates ranging from 1,245-1,836.1 Approximately $125 billion in damages occurred.
It is a common misconception that New Orleans was all that was affected. It most certainly was not.
It’s just what I have a touchstone to.
I mourn that I’m not 10 years older. That I never had the chance to really know New Orleans — this fucked up, great love of mine —before the storm. I mourn the Red House, our Frenchman Street. I mourn the Neutral Ground when it was on Danneel. I mourn city park: the golf courses when they were reclaimed sprawling wildernesses. Those tiny frogs that would be out on those paths right now.
I mourn the squirrels and birds that were lost. Those many months where no squirrels played in the oaks in the neighborhood where I grew up. I cried and cried the first time I saw one again in late-2006.
I mourn my grandfather. Hurricane Katrina killed him, it just took 17 years to die. Another painstakingly slow, harrowing, hopeless decline.
I mourn all my friends who’ve passed away. So many of us. So young. Indirect deaths from coming of age in a post-Apocalyptic city.
I mourn that it was ever post-Apocalyptic. I mourn that it’s not post-Apocalyptic anymore.
I mourn the fantasy of who I could have been had Katrina not hit and my family had different traumas to reenact. I mourn the idea of the woman I would be by now had the levees hadn’t broken. I mourn the smell of spilt beer on dirty warehouse floor. What real change, true help could I have enacted if I had the weight of a historic institution at my back?
I know this is all a fairy tale full of unicorns. One that was under 8-15 feet of water for 3 weeks 20 years ago.2 One that never would have existed to begin with. Even without the storm.
I guess that’s what coming of age has done to my grief this benchmark anniversary. Added an element of perspective that did not exist even 5 years ago. Nothing changes without change. And oh what changes when change comes. Just look at this town.
With this, I’ve come to realize that the idealized version of that me in that other life is not so different than who I am now. How I choose to remember this anniversary — maybe even how I grieve in general — is something that’s encoded in my soul.
What does it mean to be a New Orleanian if not to look grief in the face and celebrate? Joy is a form of resistance. And so in 9 days I’ll open my home to honor, remember, celebrate with my friends, neighbors, family. We’ll do it together. In memory for all that was lost. All that was rebuilt. All that remains. For the fact that we’ve been through hell and high water, yet we’re still here.
That’s our culture too.
So I guess, storm or not, I’ve turned out to be who I am, regardless. And there is solace in that. Even in these days of hellfire and swampass.
My passionflower vine has sprouted back up. Started to climb. It needs to be watered twice daily, just like everything else. Our mayor was indicted last week.
8 days til the bottom of the Hopeslope.
9 days until the turning point. A new assent. Another climb. A new beginning to the slow return of hope.
We are exactly where we are. Everything is right on track.
This piece was written 8/20-21/2025… or perhaps 8/29/2005-8/21/2025. It is a reflection of real-life occurrences and the experience of experiencing the before, during, and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
If you have something to say, I ask that you please be kind.
This is dedicated to all those we lost, throughout the entire gulf-coast.
The structure of this piece was inspired by a SOAE (situation-obstacle-advice-encouragement) Tarot Pull on 8/21/2025
Situation: VI of Wands (reversed) [self-defining success, private achievement]
Obstacle: VII of Pentacles [sustained work, long-term view, perserverence]
Advice: The Empress (reversed)
Encouragement: Ace of Pentacles [new beginnings, new opportunities, especially career or abundance]
Cards are linked above to more substantial interpretations on Biddy Tarot.
The city of New Orleans was under varying feet of water for varying lengths of time after Hurricane Katrina. 8-15 feet for 3 weeks refers to my personal experience with the post storm flooding. It is NOT in reference to the city rit large.
Thank you for being so honest as I am sure it will resonate with so many who call New Orleans home. Take care.