A Series of Unstable Events
A Robbery, an Election, a Tsunami, or Another Day?
Several weeks ago, on Thursday at 11 PM, my boyfriend and I woke to the sound of someone repeatedly buzzing our apartment unit and banging on the door to our building. In this new building, in this new city, there is no front door camera and no intercom - no way to communicate with who is trying to get inside. The old building has an old buzzer system - the sound of someone ringing our apartment is a jarring bell. DING DING DING.
I peel back the bedroom curtains with a shaking hand, taking a glance at the building entrance below. A person is energetically tugging on the front door. Around the corner, a group of men stand around with the trunk of their car open. DING DING DING. I close the curtains.
I’ve never been robbed before, but I imagine that the scene could look something like this. I don’t know what to do. I slide on sweatpants and take out my retainer. My boyfriend and I clumsily grab pepper spray and a kitchen knife and reluctantly dial 911. We explain the situation and they tell us to call them back if the intruder gets inside. We head for the back stairwell of the building, just off the kitchen, deciding to go up to the roof to get a better look. Suddenly, heavy footsteps thump up the stairs. We hurry back inside and call 911 back, telling the dispatcher that whoever is trying to get in is now inside and that they need to send someone immediately. We don’t feel safe and we don’t know what to do.
The dispatcher tells us that officers are on their way, clear annoyance in his tone. He stays on the phone with us. I watch the street outside with bloodshot eyes, saying small prayers as the DING DING DING pierces my ears again and again. The police arrive and park across the street, exiting their car leisurely. They slowly analyze the building numbers on the other side of the street and I hastily tell the dispatcher that “these dumbasses need to cross the street.” They eventually do, slowly and easily approaching the people banging on the building door. The alleged intruder hands over his ID and the cops take a quick glance before returning it. They’re all laughing. I ask why they’re laughing, what’s going on.
“It’s your neighbors,” the dispatcher tells me. “They’re locked out and were trying to get in.”
“Oh my God. Okay.”
The police leave and my neighbors finally get inside the building. The restaurant underneath our apartment had a key to the back stairwell and had let one of them in, which is what the heavy footsteps were. The guys by the car with the trunk open were just hanging out and had since left.
I breathe a sigh of relief and let out a small laugh. In haste, my boyfriend and I, flush with embarrassment, scrawl an apology note with our phone numbers in the event anyone gets locked out in the future. The last thing we wanted to do was call the cops - especially on our neighbors, especially in a perfectly safe situation.
We tell a few lighthearted jokes, trying to make the other laugh. I crawl back into bed and my heart is still racing a million miles an hour. I take more breaths, I say more prayers. For the next several weeks, I have several nightmares about violent armed robberies. My boyfriend has a couple too. I add some new decor around the living room, I burn some candles.
This incident occurred just two nights after the election. That night, I retired to bed at 9 PM PST, hoping for a miracle, and trying not to think about much of anything at all. Leading up to November 5, I tried to push the thought of any expectation out of my mind, starting the day from the truest place of neutrality I could muster. When I awoke to the results on Wednesday morning, tears unexpectedly spilled out of me like a flooding sink. Involuntary, heavy, and hopeless. A key had once again found its grooves in a lock, a door flinging open. Confirmation that the United States was settling into an increasingly terrifying place - for women, for undocumented people, and for the working class. I am fortunate enough to remain in a bubble. I have the privilege of this anxiety and heaviness being more abstract than material. It’s anxiety nonetheless.
A couple of weeks after the false alarm robbery, I feel at ease in my new apartment. I have a peaceful morning routine, a great running route and dance studio that I frequent, and some budding friendships. Every day, I sit at my desk and spend an hour or two writing in front of a bay window, the Transamerica Pyramid in my eyeline. I glance down my street and see rich blue water on the horizon. My brain has rewired its associations with my apartment and nighttime, I no longer fear getting robbed - most of the time. My unit feels less like a temporary stay and more like a home.
One week after the fake robbery, I am working at my desk by the window when my phone emits a blaring alarm sound, like an Amber Alert. I look at the screen and see an emergency alert that reads:
The National Weather Service has issued a TSUNAMI WARNING. A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now.
You are in danger. I turn it over in my mind a couple of times. I glance out the window - blue skies, puffy white clouds, people walking with their dogs and grocery bags. These don’t look like conditions under which a tsunami might occur. But then again, I’ve never experienced a tsunami - I’ve never experienced any dire natural disaster. I’m from Western Washington where people lose control of their cars in an inch of snow.
A tsunami, a typhoon, those are different? I’m dumbly remembering. I live close to a body of water. I text my boyfriend who is on the other side of the city - he is unconcerned. I Google “SF tsunami” and learn that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake occurred fifty miles off the Northern California coast just fifteen minutes ago. I send the link to my boyfriend who is now slightly concerned. He drives home and picks me up and we head to an adjacent neighborhood on top of a hill, much more protected. Hordes of people have gathered at the top of the hill, staring down at the San Francisco Bay, waiting for the wave to hit. People are laughing, jovial - perhaps these types of warnings are nothing new to longtime Californians. Perhaps I will get used to them over time. Just as I’m beginning to relax, someone in the crowd announces that the “tsunami is canceled” - they called off the warning. A chorus of groans from the crowd.
As we head back down the hill, we’re much more relaxed - breathing sighs of relief, cracking lighthearted jokes. When I get home, I order an industrial flashlight and batteries. The next time I’m at Trader Joe’s I pick up a couple extra cans of chickpeas and tuna.
As a little kid, I worried about disasters, as many little kids likely do. My childhood bedroom was closest to the front door and at night, when I was supposed to go to sleep, I would drill holes into the door with my eyes - waiting for some kind of lightning to strike and feeling personally responsible for fending it off. Suburbs are designed to be seamless and uniform and make residents feel safe. But sometimes, growing up there can have an inverse effect when residents finally exit their cul-de-sacs. When you’re rarely exposed to friction, you’ll jump at the soonest sight of it. You don’t know how to discern which anxieties are legitimate and which are solely in your head.
When I was a little girl, I was scared. But I was also lucky enough to feel like the adults in my life would protect me - if anything should happen, my parents would swoop in and save the day. It would all work out. Growing up, realizing that I am now solely responsible for taking care of myself - I’m a different kind of scared.
Cognitive behavioral therapists will often tell you to use language to outsmart your anxiety. My therapist would often encourage me to “look at the evidence." You are still standing today, you’ve had similar worries in the past and have survived them? Why would this time be any different?
It only takes one catastrophe to allow this carefully built block tower of logic to tumble. To disprove the contradicting evidence. What do you do when disaster strikes? How do you remain steadfast knowing that it will likely strike again?
And what to do about the close calls? What am I supposed to take from those? I’m glad that I didn’t get robbed, but I now know that the police would take a long time to get to me if I did. A typhoon didn’t flood my apartment, but the threat of the “Big One” - the imminent megaquake that’s slated to occur in the Cascadia subduction zone in my lifetime - looms heavy, and my fear of it is reignited. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been jumpy at the sound of every bump in the night, every table rattling under someone’s shaky leg. I look at myself in the mirror and notice my gums receding. I wonder if this mole was always here. I wonder if the smoke alarm in my building is working. But nothing has actually happened, everyone reminds me. But how do I keep it that way?
There is - as there so often is - a flip side to this. People have survived catastrophes since the dawn of time - and have found themselves, unfortunately, most united during times of strife. Humans - a selfish species - like to think that they’re living through the beginning or the end of the world. The bleak and freeing truth is that we’re likely living through the middle of it. We will all suffer personal misfortunes and many of us will remain witnesses to a world that keeps turning - even as it burns.
Every couple of weeks, one of my younger sisters sends me a perfectly normal picture of refrigerated rice in a Tupperware or a bruise on their calf and asks “Does this look okay?” I laugh to myself before replying that they’re perfectly fine. I know how to examine food leftovers and broken blood vessels after years of living. I wonder if and when I’ll acquire this next wave of wisdom - when I’ll obtain a similar understanding of what to worry about. When I’ll firmly know if I’m living through a rough patch, the end times, or just another day. Where to place my worry, where to place my concern - how much of it is because of a heightened influx of information, how much of it is genuinely new?
“Just eat the rice, mind the bruise. You won’t get sick, you’re not dying,” I tell my sisters. With my blessing, they eat, they walk, they live. They’re okay.
Thank you all for reading. These days, I’ve found that one of the most surefire ways to curb feelings of fear, anxiety, or instability is to help others. I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions, but in 2025, I’m setting a personal goal to volunteer at least once a month (and publishing that goal here to keep myself extra accountable). I have some organizations in mind and have been surfing Volunteer Match, but if you work with any SF-based nonprofits/causes that need volunteers, feel free to private message me or leave a comment for all to see. Happy Holidays <3
Your excellent post reminded me of the event September 11 2001. Watching the WTC towers fall on TV in the early morning. All 300 million + people were frightened and wondering what to do.
I also live in SF, but work in the South Bay. The tsunami alert happened and I looked outside and the closest hills were the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I thought, where do I go? Growing up in Oregon, we did tsunami drills at camps at the beach. I knew you never drive, you run. But here I was with nowhere to run, really. The roof, perhaps? I called my husband who works from home and he was also not sure what to do. The apathy of others around me was also concerning, as everyone in my office ignored it. They seemed to think that being near the Bay and not the ocean protected them. All I could think was, that’s not how tsunamis work???!!!
I realized I need a plan. It may not save my life but it will give me something to do when I don’t know what to do.