I woke up to the sound of one of my appliances singing its notification jingle. Then all was silent and very dark. I checked the clock. 6am. That’s when the power went out on September 27, right when the winds of Tropical Storm Helene were ramping up toward their peak in Weaverville.

For the first half of the day, I still had cell service and was able to notify work that they might not see me online for a few hours. I checked in with my parents to make sure they were ok. I checked in with friends and everyone was fine, but without power and running water. Cell service gave out at some point that afternoon.

Initially, I figured power would be restored by the end of the day, but when that didn’t happen, I knew things were more serious than what I could see out my window. When the wind finally died down in the evening, I took my dog for a walk, and got a tiny glimpse of the severity. A small fallen tree blocking the driveway. Branches scattered all over our normal walking route. Everyone’s power out. But with no cell service and no internet, the true force of the destruction was still largely unknown.

The functioning of my home depends entirely on electricity. None of my appliances are gas powered. We’re on well water, but the pump does’t work without electricity. We have solar panels, but no backup battery. So without electricity, we have no way to cook food, no way to keep perishable food from perishing, and no running water. 

All of that is inconvenient of course. Thankfully, we had the sense to purchase a 5 gallon jug of drinking water the day before the storm. We also have a rain catcher, so we had non-potable water for flushing the toilets. And my parents, who live a quick 10-minute drive away, have a barbecue, so we made our way to their place in the evenings for our one cooked meal of the day.  We were doing ok.

What struck me during that time, was everything I loved about the power being out, with no cell service, and no wifi. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that weekends feel like a frenzy. There’s so much I want to do, both for fun and to take care of my life, my home, etc, that I sometimes feel more stressed on the weekends than during the workweek. With the power out, and knowing that the roads weren’t safe, there was no frenzy. I finished a home project. I sat in the sun with Nica. In the evenings, Fern and I read books on the couch. I wrote long entries in my journal. I had a creative breakthrough for an art project I’m cooking up. 

It reminded me of my teenage years, living in Cairo, Egypt in the 90s. We weren’t online. We didn’t watch tv because the only English stations were CNN and MTV Europe. We didn’t have cell phones. Instead, we were incredibly social and creative. All my friends had their thing. I was into painting, so I spent a lot of time in the art studio at school, or drawing in my sketchbook. My best friend was into poetry, and had a writers group that met at an outdoor cafe beside the Nile river. Theater was a huge deal at my school, and I always did stage makeup while many of my friends were actors or dancers. And of course, we were teenagers and found plenty of ways to party and get into trouble. The point is, absorption into screens was not an option, and the result was a fun and creatively fulfilled life! I was pining for that life. 

I reflected on time and what eats it up, beyond the necessities of life (my full time job, taking care of my dog, working out, cooking, and cleaning) and I zeroed in on my love-hate relationship with Instagram. When it’s absent, I naturally gravitate toward activities that both fulfill me and help me feel calm, much like I did as a teenager. When it’s present, there’s an annoying little voice in my head that convinces me absent-minded scrolling helps me relax, zone-out, and disconnect. I don’t spend hideous amounts of time on it. Yet I’m keenly aware that I have other things I want to accomplish, especially creatively, and mindless absorption in a screen is ultimately not satisfying. 

Almost three days after the initial outage, the miracle of electricity and wifi returned to my parents’ home, while we were there for our evening dinner run (power at our house came back a few days later). It was thrilling and we jumped up and down and screamed with joy. That joy was quickly replaced with shock and horror as we took in the images of all the devastation around us. We had heard about it on the radio, and Fern and I saw some of the flooding when we ventured out on the freeway in search of cell service. But the images of entire neighborhoods underwater, and towns demolished, was unbearably heartbreaking. 

Over the next few days, social media became an invaluable communication tool for information and resources to help people access basic services and get help to people stranded. Yet in no time, my evening ritual of reading and writing by candlelight was replaced with doomscrolling and survivor’s guilt. Instead of playing cards with my parents, we were all sucked into our screens. The neighbors across the street with a generator who had generously made water available to their community, pulled in their garden hose and replaced it with their « do not turn in our driveway » sign. 

I am extremely grateful that electricity is flowing and I’m reconnected to the world. I’m not ready to renounce modern conveniences, but I am ready to grab hold of my time in a new way, and not whittle away precious moments scrolling, consuming, being sold to. It’s not all doom-and-gloom on the socials, but it is a lot of advertising. It’s a lot of cute dog videos, yes, but it’s also a lot of distraction. It’s a lot of helpful information, but that information is available elsewhere without all the negative consequences. 

All of this is helping me to let go of bad habits, and do the things I think about, instead of just…thinking about them. I really appreciate that I feel compelled to blog again, and in an in-between moment, instead of reaching for my phone to scroll, I reached for my iPad to write this post. I installed new towel hooks in the bathroom that have been sitting on a shelf for months. I rearranged my plants in a way that makes much more sense for their needs. These are small things that are easy to neglect and put off and say there’s no time, but there is. It’s just a matter of how you choose to use it.