I Don’t Feel Normal, But This Is Normal Now

It's now been two months since our summer of fires has concluded. It was more than just the Chuckegg Creek Fire. It was also the Jackpot Fire, and all the other ones south of us that affected evacuation and supply routes. Here is a quick, brief, but honest look into where I am currently at. And I want to be clear at the outset, I am not looking for a thank you or for sympathy, I'm sharing this for everyone that doesn't feel normal in their current situation.

I have always struggled with the term ‘normal’.

I have always considered myself as a normal person, while also realizing that I never fit the standard mold. I was taller, or fatter, or more stubborn, or more lippy, or more literal, or more clumsy, or more fidgety, never great at anything but competent at virtually anything that was thrown at me.

As a kid this drove me nuts, thinking I was normal but realizing that I wasn’t as normal as the rest. While I was attending college at NAIT I realized for the first time that me being different was maybe a good thing, and not a bad thing. I realized that although my math and algebra skills were about the worst in the class (not ideal for an engineering program, but one can simply memorize every equation in a two year diploma program), there was rarely a concept that I didn’t understand. I realized that I had a different problem solving process than virtually everyone else, and although I couldn’t always solve the physics problem, I could explain the problem, the components, and what needed to be done to my classmates, who then quickly solved the problem.

Once I entered the full time, professional, workforce it again took a while to find my place. Still thinking I’m just a normal guy, but realizing again that I had a different approach to problems and management than most others. In the workplace it is much harder to see this as a benefit, and at times I still struggle with it. But I am after all, just normal.

I provide this brief background and snapshot of where I come from in order to provide some context to the question I have received most frequently over the last couple months, after we dropped our State of Local Emergency (SOLE) and we went back to our normal jobs after nearly three months dealing with wildfires.

I am asked, almost daily, if things are back to normal. I don’t know how to answer this question.

No, lives were not directly lost, most homes and livelihoods were spared, so what’s the problem? And I don’t know if I have the answer to that either.

No, things aren’t normal, but they have been consistent now since early August. Does two months of consistency constitute normal? I’m beginning to believe that it does, and the best answer I can give to the ‘are things back to normal’ question is to say ‘I think so, but it’s a new normal’.

It’s no one item throughout the event that changed things for me. I have no specific trauma; there are no deaths on my conscience, no images I can never unsee, or anything that is stereotypical of a disaster event. So it’s easy to ask what is the problem, and the answer is that I don’t know, but many of my colleagues feel the same way (but I won’t speak for them).

I think it comes down to its not normal to be called back from vacation/conference trip (I had taken my wife along and we spent a few days in New York before we were going to head to Quebec City to attend FCM, with a quick stop in Toronto for a Jays game on the way home) at midnight, and spend the night confirming flights and driving to an airport to catch a 6 am flight home from New York. It’s not normal to work 16+ hour days for days on end (I still cannot remember where I slept for about three weeks of the event). It’s not normal to evacuate your hometown and then put up police barricades to keep people out. It’s not normal to find out months after the evacuation what your own wife and kids did during the evacuation (I knew where they stayed but that’s it). It’s not normal to have the authority that a SOLE provides for an entire summer. It's not normal to enter Unified Command three separate times and mash organizations together. It’s not normal to ignore every approved county project and priority for an entire summer. It’s not normal to evacuate employees and their families and then obligate them to come back to work. It’s not normal to have your own three year old child get excited when talking about sleep overs and have him blurt out ‘maybe dad can come for a sleepover and sleep at mom’s house too!’

I ignored my family for 2.5 months. I have no idea what it’s like to be evacuated, because I wasn’t home to be evacuated. I don’t feel right about leaving my family for 2.5 months. But I’m thankful for my wife being as strong, resilient and independent as she is. I don’t feel right about not providing any leadership to county staff for 2.5 months. I don’t feel right about ignoring projects for 2.5 months. I didn’t exercise or ride my bike, and I still don’t want to. I couldn’t be bothered to exercise. I went and bought bigger clothes recently (something I had vowed never to do), and I was excited that I had a reason to buy new clothes.

I simply don’t feel right. I am not normal Byron. Things are not normal.

I think it is this cumulative effect that has changed what I call normal. There are days that when my phone rings I instantly feel rage, so I know not to answer the phone. There are days that when my alarm clock rings I say ‘screw it, I’ve given enough’ and roll over and go back to sleep. There are projects that I haven’t touched since before May long weekend, and I can’t say that I care. And there are dozens of less extreme examples of this that come up every week.

When people ask my wife how I’m doing, her answer has become something along the lines of ‘Byron’s doing ok but he really doesn’t give a crap about anything anymore’. I think this is right (rumor has it that a wife is always right). There are days I care, but many days I don’t. I react to situations differently. My wife is learning how to deal with a different version of her husband, my boys are learning a new version of their dad. My employees are learning a new version of their supervisor. I’m learning a new version of me.

I hope that this new version of me will be better, but right now I don’t feel it. Right now I feel like a guy who’s lost his drive, his passion, who doesn’t care about unfinished projects, who doesn’t care about public perception, who doesn’t care about pissing people off. And all of this because I gave everything I have to serve the community, to serve people, to be the bad cop so that others could be the good guy, to make the hard decision so that others didn’t have to. This irony is not lost on me.

One simply cannot make the decisions that I needed to make this summer and not be changed by it. My primary role throughout the fires was to solve the problems between jurisdictions. When any one entity didn’t know how to resolve issues with another jurisdiction, I was the guy that usually got the call to fix it. MLAs, municipal councilors, wildfire, AEMA, AHS, media, structural protection units, county IMT, and individual factions within some of those roles. I chewed out more people this summer than I have in my entire life. I’m a candid guy by default, but I took that to levels that I didn’t know I had in me. And it was effective, but it wasn’t normal.

I ruined relationships that were years in the making because that’s what was required in order to solve the greater issue at the moment. There are many that now have a very specific perception of me. Some recognize and respect the role I played, while others see me simply for the jerk that I had to be. But someone needed to be that guy, and I didn’t hesitate to do it. And I could correct some of these perceptions now, but it means that I have to out people. It means that rather than generalizing names into broad categories like I did above, it means naming names and explaining details. And that's something I will never do publicly. It's my job to do what I did.

And this ties back to my time at NAIT, where I realized in college that I view problems differently. I’m confident that my perspective served my community well this summer. I realized that I had the ability to step back and recognize gaps in jurisdiction, process, service delivery, communications, etc., set the bar where it needed to be set, and let the people in charge of that task then work together to reach that bar.

I also learned that the fastest way to effect this change was to observe and learn as much as possible (for never more than a day, often only an hour or less), and then jump to conclusions and make accusations and assumptions. Without fail this would result in a candid, frank and defensive response, usually with reciprocal accusations thrown my way. Now everything that I needed to know was on the table, I would make a few suggestions as to what I could live with and what I expected the other entity to live with, and I would walk away having provided the remaining parties with the information and foundation that they needed in order to solve the problem.

At times I feel like a piece of my soul was ripped from me this summer. And then the next time I say that, it sounds like some overblown exaggeration.

A large portion of my days or weeks are still spent on disaster recovery. Whether that’s a formal debriefing or gathering DRP information, or dealing with the after affects of staff being stretched and pushed in ways that we’ve never demanded of them before. And if it’s none of that, my mind doesn’t stop reflecting, questioning, wondering how we could have done things differently with the constraints that we had. Pondering how I move forward and how the organization moves forward. What is recovery when visibly there isn’t really anything to recover from? What is normal?

I was told today that the experience I received this summer is something I could never buy, that there will never be a situation thrown at me again that I can’t handle. And right now I am not grateful for that. I wanted to ride my bike, play in the pool, be a dad and husband this summer since I’d had (at least I thought) such a busy previous six months. I still want to, but I can’t because it’s nearly winter and the pool is drained and the community has moved on, and so have the needs and expectations of me.

But through all of this, I keep coming back to that I think this is normal now. This is my new normal. But I don’t know this version of me, and how I respond to situations, and how I feel about situations. I don’t feel like me.

I don’t feel normal, but this is normal now.