Penny Williams [00:00:03]: Just down the road from us, like, literally a quarter of a mile down the road from me, that house was picked up, moved, flipped all the way around, spun all the way around backwards. Their shed is up in a tree, and the boy scout camp is gone. I can walk there from here. I drive by it almost every time I leave my home to do anything. And so that devastation was close, and yet we were so so lucky.

Penny Williams [00:00:35]: Welcome to the Beautifully Complex podcast, where I share insights and strategies on parenting neurodivergent kids straight from the trenches. I'm your host, Penny Williams. I'm a parenting coach, author, and mindset mama, honored to guide you on the journey of raising your atypical kid. Let's get started.

Penny Williams [00:00:58]: Hey there, friends. I am really happy to be talking to you right now, which sounds a little bit crazy, but I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and I think if you have taken in any news whatsoever over the last two and a half weeks, you know that hurricane Helene came through here as a tropical storm and really quite literally destroyed our town and a lot of the small towns around us. Our infrastructure is very compromised in ways that are truly unimaginable. Even now, even living here, it is hard for me to sort of absorb the fact that so many things are damaged. So many people are struggling. So much has changed here. And what I wanted to talk to you about is not just to give you an update about what's going on with me, why the podcast is going to maybe skip a week here and there, and ebb and flow in a little different ways for a while, but also talk about what I have learned through experience now. I've added this layer of experience to my understanding of the autonomic nervous system and what happens in our bodies, our biological responses to stress and anxiety and uncertainty, and what that actually feels like.

Penny Williams [00:02:46]: You know? I I don't know that I have ever experienced being in the red zone of my nervous system before, which is that shutdown freeze mode. Probably, I have a time or 2, and I just don't really recall it. But I I've spent a lot of my life in the yellow activated zone of my nervous system, that activated state, because I have anxiety, because also just, you know, different life circumstances sometimes will put us in that activated zone. But what happened here and in the immediate aftermath of it, I have slipped in and out of that red zone. I find myself trying to work or even trying to shop and pick up some food in the grocery store, and my mind just goes blank, and I just sort of stand there for a minute. And it feels really bizarre to me because it hasn't happened to me before. It's not my usual experience in the world, if that makes sense. And so I have experienced a lot of what I teach about the autonomic nervous system, and it wasn't that I hadn't experienced any of it before.

Penny Williams [00:04:12]: As I said, I have anxiety. I've clearly been in a dysregulated state a lot of the time in my life, but I have experienced it in a completely different way and from a completely different trigger. And I really wanted to share that experience with you all because I think that it really shines a light on what a lot of our kids are going through, what a lot of us go through. Right? This isn't just about neurodivergence. This is about all human beings. We all have this autonomic nervous system, and it gets triggered in different ways for each of us, but a lot of the outcomes are the same. We have those same three states of the nervous system. We're either settled, things feel doable, we're connected, we're in that green, or we're activated.

Penny Williams [00:05:02]: What we often talk about is fight or flight, and we just need to move. We need to do something because we're dysregulated. We've been triggered, and we're in that yellow zone. And then as I was talking about earlier, that red zone, that red state of just shutdown, freeze, things are not at all doable, and it feels like life threat. Red state feels like life threat. Yellow state feels like threat, but not necessarily this full, like, life threat that sort of I'm things might come to an end for me right now. Right? That's the red. And it's really interesting.

Penny Williams [00:05:48]: I'm just gonna kind of share some of the timeline and what has gone on for us since September 26th in our area, and then I'm going to overlay as I tell the story some of my nervous system experience, some of my mental and emotional experience. Because, again, it's not about me. I'm not sharing it about me. I'm safe. My family is safe. Our home is safe. My sister's home was safe. My parents' home was safe.

Penny Williams [00:06:18]: We're all doing okay. A lot of people in Asheville are not doing okay. There are still a lot of people as I record this on October 15th. I think it's day 19, maybe day 20, that still don't have running water, still don't have power, still can't drive out of their homes. There are, I think, still hundreds of missing people in Western North Carolina. There are even many people here in the morgue who haven't been identified. Like, here in Buncombe County, in Asheville, we had the most deaths from this storm because it came in in a way that is unimaginable. There is a map floating around on the Internet that shows the different levels of flood from, like, a 50 year flood, 100 year flood, 500 year flood, and at the very bottom of it, as far as it counts, is a 1000 year flood.

Penny Williams [00:07:20]: So it's a 1000 years or more years flood. This flood here was in that 1000 years plus flood. It had never been recorded here. It had never happened anywhere near this extent in this location as long as people have been telling stories and writing things down. And so the magnitude and that unimaginable part of it creates an even bigger layer of uncertainty and a bigger impact for everyone here. As I said, we are safe. We have utilities. We have to boil water.

Penny Williams [00:07:59]: That's gonna be for a long time. But I have water coming out of my pipes to boil. I have water coming out of my pipes that's safe to shower in. I can do laundry in my home. People around me are standing in hours long lines to get a shower in a shower trailer or at the YMCA. People around me are standing in hours long lines to do laundry. People are standing in hours long lines to get a hot meal, to come in and out of shelters. It it's really there are places here that look like a bomb has gone off.

Penny Williams [00:08:35]: And I feel like saying these things is an exaggeration because usually that's an exaggeration. When we say something looks like a bomb went off in the United States or in more developed countries, we're, you know, we're using colorful exaggerated language to try to get our point across. When I say that about Asheville right now, it literally looks like bombs went off here. And you're gonna hear me, like, just sort of lose my train of thought like that. And, normally, I would edit these things out, but I'm not editing them out here because I really want you to get the full experience of what it's like in the aftermath of a trauma because this is what your kids experience so often. Because being a marginalized individual in society is traumatic. So if you are neurodivergent, your experience in some ways at sometimes at least is trauma. It's trauma.

Penny Williams [00:09:45]: And so our kids have experienced trauma. Many of them continue to experience it by having to go to school when they don't feel safe or things like that. And so, you know, I just want you guys to really feel the aftermath in the difference of how I'm talking to you or if I blink out or, you know, if I start crying, which may happen in this conversation, and rarely happens on the podcast in general. You kind of have this basis of comparison so that you can really internalize what might be happening for your kid and how to give them grace and how to recognize when they need lower demands, when they need less pressure, when they need time to avoid even. And I'll talk a little bit about avoidance as a coping mechanism here as well. So I'm gonna go back again and try again to start at the beginning of this story and kind of outline what my experience has been like. On September 26th, which happens to be my sister's birthday, Helene came to Asheville, through Asheville, through Western North Carolina, over the state line in Tennessee. They have experienced a very similar impact.

Penny Williams [00:11:09]: The town of Erwin, Tennessee, I think, is mostly rubble as as it seems to be here, and there's loss of life there and so forth. So it's not just Asheville. It's not just Western North Carolina, but this region had kind of a similar impact. And so leading up to September 26th, we had a ton of rain here, a ton of rain, more rain in a couple weeks than we had had in many, many months combined before that. Our ground was already saturated. Our rivers were already high, And then Helene came through and dumped an enormous amount of rain really fast on top of that. And so everything flooded. The center of Asheville is Biltmore Village.

Penny Williams [00:12:05]: It's where the Biltmore Estate is. It's where, all of or many of they're not all existing anymore, but many of the buildings that were created for the workers to build the Biltmore Estate mansion are there, and it's all on the Swannanoa River. It runs right through the heart of Biltmore Village. And back in 2004, I had lived here for about a year, and 2 hurricanes came through back to back. And, again, they come through as tropical storms because we are hours from the coast. But the rainfall and a lot of rainfall in a short period of time is really bad here. And so Biltmore Village flooded back then. We were actually renting a home that flooded at the time and had to move because the landlord didn't wanna cut out the drywall and the carpet.

Penny Williams [00:13:01]: He just wanted to leave it all to mold, and the smell was horrendous, and we were getting sick, and we had to move. And my husband's work got flooded, and they had to move permanently. So we were impacted. My daughter had been in kindergarten for, like, a month. We had to move to a different school district. She had to start again, and she had a really hard time with rain. Every time it rained for years after that, it was very upsetting to her. And so, you know, we knew that there were impacts.

Penny Williams [00:13:27]: We knew that it was going to flood in that way. We had no idea that it could be worse and how much worse it could actually be. And so on September 26th, I was starting to, like, see news alerts, weather alerts coming through and saying, you know, flood watch, which we have here all the time. Like, all the time. Not only does the Swannanoa River run through Asheville, but the French Broad River runs through Asheville also. So we have two main rivers that cut through a huge portion of town. And so I started seeing these, weather alerts, these articles or social media posts from meteorologists who would say, like, this might be worse than 2004 in 1916, but that's all they would say. And I'm like, well, what was it like in 1916? Because I didn't live here because I didn't you know, 1916 is well before my time, before my parents' time, even before my grandparents' time.

Penny Williams [00:14:25]: And so I started googling trying to find photographs of Asheville during the 1916 flood, and I only found a couple, and they were right along our river district on the French Broad River. And I was like, well, you know, we know that's gonna flood, and we were trying to sort of get an idea of what that looked like, but it was really hard. And nobody was saying, like, this means that these areas will be underwater. This means that roads might wash out. This means that our entire water system might be destroyed. None of that. We had no idea. Like, it literally looks like here something that only someone writing or creating a sci fi movie could think of.

Penny Williams [00:15:10]: And, again, I'm not exaggerating. This is literally life right now here. My home and my area of town is not like that, but the majority of our county is. We were very, very fortunate here, and I'm gonna talk about all the feelings that come with that too in a minute, but I wanna get back to that timeline. So we knew that it was gonna flood. We knew that we would probably have power outages. We'd probably lose Internet. You know? Things would be uncomfortable for a few days maybe.

Penny Williams [00:15:42]: And that was about the extent of what we expected, especially in our home, because we are not close enough to the river to flood. Now I'll tell you, a quarter mile down the road, the river flooded, and it picked up a house off its foundation, floated it down the street, and flipped it backwards. The boy scout camp where my son went to boy scouts, right next door to that house, is gone. The only thing that's standing is a chimney and a whole lot of debris from all over the region. So, you know, there are impacts very close, but we knew that our house could not flood, and so we knew we were safe in that respect. When we woke up on the morning of 26th, it was a Friday. I mean, 27th. I'm sorry.

Penny Williams [00:16:28]: That Friday morning, the storm had come through. I had kind of had a hard time sleeping because I was worried about the wind. And I remember, something like 4 or 5 AM probably 5 AM because I think the sun was just barely starting to lighten up the sky a little bit. And we have a row of cypress trees lining the back of our house. It's a barrier for road noise out in the front of our neighborhood, and I was really worried about those trees coming over and coming over on the house. And I remember looking out, waking up, and peeking through the blinds and seeing these trees, like, just bent over horizontal. And I thought, wow. You know, there's gonna be some trees down there.

Penny Williams [00:17:08]: There's gonna be probably some trees on houses, and, it doesn't look great, but, you know, it'll be okay. And when we got up, we realized we didn't have power. And okay. We expected that. We'll be okay for a few days without power. No big deal. We didn't have phones. We had no cell service.

Penny Williams [00:17:32]: No calling, no texting, no Internet. Our phone where it would typically say LTE or 5 g, it said SOS. And sometimes we didn't even have SOS. So we had no information outside of our house. And my husband had got not been gone to work that morning because he says things needed to be done, and it didn't look so bad, and so he went to work. There was power in our house when he left, and he could not get home. He got stuck where trees were starting to fall across the road. He literally had a tree fall in front and behind him at the same time and nearly I mean, I I can't even think about what would have happened if it had fallen on him.

Penny Williams [00:18:20]: He would not be alive. Somehow, he was right in between them, and he was able to drive through a yard and get to the other side, but he had to do that on the side away from our house, the opposite side from the tree of where we live. And he just kept driving to the grocery store and spending, like, an hour, and then he'd come back and see if anybody gotten the trees off the road yet. Not realizing, because we had no communication with the outside world, that our town was being destroyed. And it was actually it got worse where it was flooding on Friday because we're in the mountains. So all of the rain that falls, not only falls, but it also rolls down the mountain and accumulates in the valleys. And so people's houses were still flooding and washing away with them on their roofs. You know? Roads were washing away.

Penny Williams [00:19:16]: Trees were falling. Most of the trees falling were uprooted because the ground was so saturated that it could not hold the trees upright anymore. There are 1,000, if not tens of 1,000 of trees uprooted in our region. It is unbelievable. And so, you know, my husband's not here. I have no idea that he is, like, you know, can't get home. He didn't have any gas in his car, so we couldn't try to find the long way around. And the other road that we would typically take home, we knew the river was over.

Penny Williams [00:19:54]: And so, like, I'm like, well, there's one other way, but there's no gas because there's no power, and he has no gas in his car. And so he was out there, and he just kept coming back every now and then, trying to check and see if the tree was removed, and nobody was showing up to do anything about the trees. And, my daughter and I started to get kind of antsy in the house, and so we took off on foot with our phones trying to see if we could walk to a place where we could get a little bit of phone service. And so we were walking down the road in our neighborhood aways and starting to see, like, pieces of gutter wrapped around trees and, you know, little things again because our neighborhood, especially at the bottom where we are, we don't have a lot of trees, and so it wasn't nearly as impacted. It was giving us a really false sense of what was happening in our community. But I did I was able to get to a place where a text came through, And it was my husband, and it said, trees down. Can't get home. I was like, oh, okay.

Penny Williams [00:21:02]: Well, I tried to call him. The call just kept breaking up and dropping, but I basically got the gist that he, you know, just kept checking as he as he could and that he felt like, eventually, somebody's gonna clear out training. He's gonna get home. And, you know, every couple hours, we would walk down again and try to get some communication. I was trying to call my parents to check on them and my sister and check on them, and I wasn't able to at the time. And I finally said to my husband, I'm like, I think you might have to walk. And he did not like that idea because the grocery store where he was staying was about 3, 3 and a half miles probably. I mean, it's not a short walk, but it's not across town.

Penny Williams [00:21:48]: And he, you know, he really scoffed at it. And so I hung up and walked back home and figured, you know, he was just gonna keep doing that. And then I finally was like, man, I'm not sure how long. Like, if nobody has come in 6 hours to remove this massive tree from one of our somewhat main roads, I'm not sure that it's gonna happen today. So my daughter and I got in the car to drive what we felt like with a long route around to see if we could go around and get him. And, we actually got about a mile down the road, and there he was walking and picked him up. He he realized that I was right after hanging up, and he started walking home and just left his car on the side of the road by where that tree was. There were a few other people that had done that at that point as well.

Penny Williams [00:22:38]: They had stopped there and just walked the rest of the way. And it turns out that there were many, many trees down, and the river was completely over the road by the airport, we never would have been able to get around to him that day or a couple of days after that. So it was good that he had walked, and we were finally here together. But we had no power. We had very little food. We did not prep for the storm. That will never happen again in this house. We will be very prepped.

Penny Williams [00:23:09]: We will be the people buying the water and the bread and the non perishable food. And so starting on that Saturday, we had to start going out and trying to find food. Like, we didn't have much here. We couldn't cook our stove while it is gas, does not work without electricity, which is dumb, and I promise you I will never buy a gas stove that doesn't work without electricity again either. And and we didn't have a grill. So we were, you know, just trying to eat whatever was still good in the refrigerator, like lunch meat and bread and crackers, but there just wasn't a lot. And so I knew that we were going to have to find some food, some water, some ice, you know, things to get by until things got better. And so we took off in 2 cars trying to figure out, you know, divide and conquer because we had no idea where we could get anything.

Penny Williams [00:24:10]: Power was out everywhere. Every traffic light was dark in this town. So many roads were blocked by trees that you kept having to go and turn around and try a different route and turn around and try a different route. And we were able to find a workaround to get down to one of our regional grocery stores, and there were people there in line. There's a long line across the front of the building, and they were without power, without water. They were just literally pulling the electronic doors open and closed to let people in and out and offering the bottled water, the ice that they had, and you could grab a few other things. And so I grabbed, like, peanut butter and crackers and, like, anything. I bought the world's most giant jar of peanut butter.

Penny Williams [00:25:05]: There's probably bigger ones at Sam's and Costco, It's literally the biggest jar I've ever seen in a regular grocery store because I thought that might be what we had to live on for a while. And there's 4 of us, 4 adults in here who needed to survive. And so we stood in line there about 2 and a half hours. We were able to get a pack of bottled water and some non perishable foods, a couple of, like, fruits, like a pack of, oranges and things like that that I knew would be okay without refrigeration for a while. And as we stood in line, we just started hearing all these stories from the people around us and how a lot of people don't have water. And a lot of people are wondering how they're gonna, you know, have enough water for their animals and for themselves, and not being able to communicate with their loved ones, feeling so cut off. And again, we were in still this bubble, not understanding that homes had washed away, roads had washed away, the water system had been destroyed. We had no idea about this stuff still because we had no real connection.

Penny Williams [00:26:18]: As we stood in line there, we did have some Internet cell service. So we're starting to see just a little bit, but it was very little bits because our communication system was down. So it's not like everybody could post on Facebook what was going on for them and everybody else would see it. Right? We were all pretty cut off. We were seeing a little bit of, like, local news stuff posting. And at that point, they still had no idea the gravity and the enormity of the damage and the situation here.

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Penny Williams [00:28:11]: So we got, you know, the water. We got some non perishables. We didn't get a lot. And so my daughter was with me, and I said, we just need to, like, drive down this road toward this town called Brevard because I knew that there was at least one farm stand on that main road that was where the people who run it also live. And I thought if they have food, they're probably gonna be out there selling it because all they have to do is walk out the front door and and open up the stand and at least take cash for it. And this is turning into a very long story, which I did not intend for it to do, So I'm gonna try to really get more succinct here. There's just so much to say, as you can imagine. We did find the farm stand.

Penny Williams [00:29:01]: It was open, and the woman basically had apples and tomatoes. And I looked at my poor daughter who doesn't eat a lot of different things because of texture. And I said, you might have to eat stuff you don't like, and she was like, that's okay. There were no tears. There was just this resolve that we were gonna figure this out. I was not panicked. I was very focused and very driven. You would think in the situation that, you know, my anxiety would get the best of me, and I would be really freaked out.

Penny Williams [00:29:38]: And my, you know, my other family members would be really freaked out and crying and panicking, and, you know, there is someone in my household who I'm not allowed to talk about but has panic disorder and even got through without panic attacks. There's just in our system, our nervous system says, hey. There's a threat here, and it sends information to our adrenal glands, and our adrenal glands go, oh, here you go. Here's a big old dose of adrenaline so that you can move through this threat and that you can be okay. And that's what happened for, like, 4 or 5 days. I was just running on pure adrenaline, and I didn't realize it until it wore off. And then I was just crying, and then I was just completely overwhelmed and kind of numb. As we got more information, you know, there was a lot of grief, but there was still this adrenaline that was pushing us forward to deal with what was going on that moment that day.

Penny Williams [00:30:48]: You know, we were able to get food and water, obviously, as I've said. Grocery stores started opening as power started coming back in some of the main areas with very limited supply, you know, everything that was perishable in the stores perished. It was many days without refrigeration and power. And so what you could get was pretty limited, but you could get it. It was available. After we sat in a gas line a couple of times, the first one was about almost 3 hours. Couple days later, the next one was about 45 minutes. Couple days after that, you could get gas without a line.

Penny Williams [00:31:27]: But in the beginning, people don't know when there's gonna be more. And so, you know, 2 of our main interstate routes in and out of North Carolina have been destroyed. They there were landslides. The road's gone. So, you know, we're we're getting messages that we can't leave even if we want to. And so it creates this frenzy for supplies, but it did get better slowly but surely. Our power came back on, I think, on the 5th or 6th day, and that was amazing. Then we could shower.

Penny Williams [00:32:02]: We could, you know, do laundry if we wanted to. We could cook. And now we knew that we could find some food that we could refrigerate and cook, and that was big. And so I was going to my sister's house every day because she had 5 g phone service. She didn't have power. She didn't have running water, but she had some Internet that I could hotspot and do that anxiety summit from. And then, you know, things slowly but surely came online. We learned once we were able to get some information when we were leaving the house that we needed to be boiling the water, and we're still doing that.

Penny Williams [00:32:39]: And I think it's gonna be a very long time, but we were so lucky to be on the one water treatment plant that didn't get destroyed and didn't, go down. And, you know, there's so much so much guilt around that. I can't even tell you the amount of overwhelming, really heavy guilt that comes with being in this little bubble of fortunate area where our power was restored pretty quickly. We didn't lose running water. You know? Our streets were cleared to, you know, grocery stores and things like that within a few days. Internet came back on on the 8th October, so I've had Internet now for a week as I record this. Not so stable at first, and it got better. We can do calls and texts from our phones at home now.

Penny Williams [00:33:41]: And so, you know, we have connection again. We have the ability. I have the ability to work. We have the ability to see our therapists who are trying to do telehealth even though, like, my therapist, a couple days ago when I talked to her still had no power, no running water. It is so hard to live like that. I don't think people recognize, and I certainly even didn't. It's not like roughing it or camping, because when you do that, you're prepared. In this situation, you don't have the ability to, you know, flush a toilet.

Penny Williams [00:34:17]: Like, that's something people really take for granted. When there's no running water, there is no flushing a toilet. Like, you go way, way back as far as modern conveniences are concerned, as far as hygiene is concerned. But, again, we're so, so fortunate in this spot that we're in in the county, and the guilt from that is enormous, especially because we moved from across town. We lived in Swannanoa, the first, like, 8 years when my kids were little, and that area is completely destroyed. The road going to our neighborhood was completely destroyed. It also goes to one of the water reservoirs, and it did get at least temporarily fixed and passable pretty quick because of that. But the whole area of Swannanoa, main 5 lane roads, washed out.

Penny Williams [00:35:07]: Like, it's really, really bad there. And just thinking about, you know, what it would have been like if we still lived in that house and the fact that all those people are going through that in that area where, you know, my kids played and did all of these things, and it's just washed away, and it's rubble, and it's it's really heartbreaking. But what I started finding was that the guilt and the grief was very, very heavy, very heavy to carry. And, you know, my nervous system had done me a great service in feeding me tons of adrenaline and helping me get things done to be safe, to be okay. But when all of that wore off, then I just had this red zone numbness and shutdown. The first time I went to Target, we just took a break, and we went to like, we were trying to find some CBD oil for anxiety that we had run out of, and we heard that Target was open and at least was giving out water. And so we just went down there just to, like, have some normalcy almost, but just to get a break because I was trying to work and get the summit done, and it was super stressful. And every day about midday, I just had to get up and walk away for a little bit and do something.

Penny Williams [00:36:30]: And so this day, we just went for a target run, and we walk in, and I'm like, okay. This feels a little normal. Like, they had power back. They did not have water. You know, the Starbucks in there was closed. The bathrooms were closed. All these things, there were tons and tons of trucks. Half of the parking lot was cordoned off for disaster relief organizations, trailers of waters, trailers of supplies.

Penny Williams [00:37:02]: There were gas tankers there that were helping all of the power crews refuel trucks. That was crazy to see. And as we pull in the parking lots right by the airport, and we're just seeing these giant military helicopters come in and out, in and out, And that's all that's all that was going in and out of the airport. I remember reading a couple weeks ago in The Washington Post, they said that the sound of the is it Chinook? I'm not sure. I'm probably saying it wrong, but those big military helicopters with 2 propellers had become the soundtrack of life in Asheville. And it's so true. We are next to the flight path here, and so we hear them. And it used to be when big helicopters came in, it annoyed me because they're loud.

Penny Williams [00:37:49]: And now I'm just so grateful. I'm so grateful that that is the soundtrack here, that there is help coming in for all the people who need it. I noticed this week that I'm not hearing as many helicopters, and I know that it's because it's not as needed. We have a lot of connection to the outside world now and that there are people in other areas now with hurricane Milton in Florida who need that help as well. But, you know, even going to Target, I thought was gonna feel normal, and there were little blips that felt normal. But for the most part, it was just a reminder of what has happened here and the suffering that is happening around me. And so I walk into Target, and we make a turn down that first main aisle. We were going to look for some snacks and some chocolate because, oh, boy, did I need some chocolate.

Penny Williams [00:38:44]: Right? I didn't have any chocolate in the house. That will definitely be part of my storm preparation kit chocolate because that's who I am. But, anyhow, we start walking down that main lot aisle, and there are just palettes and palettes and palettes of cases of bottled water and palettes of cases of ramen noodles and, you know, empty shelves of sort of supply things and all at once, the whole thing just came crushing down on me. And as I'm walking through Target, I'm having a little bit of trouble breathing, and I'm trying to hold it together because my kid is with me who doesn't do well with, like, any sort of maybe medical emergency, and so I'm like, this has got to just be the stress or the chaos or whatever. Like, maybe the adrenaline's wearing off. And as we kept walking through the aisles and seeing, like, people with carts with just water and ice and, you know, peanut butter and bread and the there's the basic, basic staples that they really need to get by right now. It just kept getting heavier and heavier, and I started to feel weak. I honestly thought I was going to potentially faint in Target, and I was crying.

Penny Williams [00:40:13]: And I was trying to hold it in, and I was just crying. It was the first time I had cried through the whole ordeal because, again, that adrenaline, that yellow state of active working on finding a solution and becoming safe had been in control, but now it wasn't. And now everything was so heavy that it was shutting down. I looked over at my kid, and I said, I might have to find, like, a little spot in the corner to sit down. I'm feeling really weak. I don't know what's happening. I think it's emotion. It's just overwhelm, but I'm trying to keep going.

Penny Williams [00:40:49]: But, you know, you need to know that this is what's happening, because they could tell at that point that something was going on with me. I was able to do some of those wonderful breathing exercises that we talk about so much when we talk about our nervous system and anxiety and dysregulation and calm my heart rate a little bit and start to not feel so faint and dizzy and get on with it and get through it. And then when we got out to the car, you know, tears again. I mean, the whole time in Target, I was in tears, and I kept trying to hide it because I was like, I'm okay. Why is this happening? You know? But there was a reason. It's because my biology had shifted from survival mode to shutdown mode to this is too much, and and I can't do anymore right now. Right? And, you know, think about our kids in these in not in this situation, not in a natural disaster, because it doesn't happen all the time. But think of your kids in daily things that do happen that are hard for them, and how easy it is when things get overwhelming to just shut down or to just avoid.

Penny Williams [00:42:02]: And, you know, there's kind of 2 camps here. There's a bunch of people who are out there helping. There are people volunteering who've lost everything, and they're just helping others. They're volunteering with, World Central Kitchen to prepare hot meals. They're volunteering to hand out water. They're doing anything and everything they can. And then there's another camp of people who are just like, I don't wanna go to that part of town. I don't wanna see it.

Penny Williams [00:42:29]: I can't see it. It's too hard. It's too bad. And that's not who I am, which is part of the reason that this experience has been so monumentally, emotionally, and mentally difficult for me. I am wired with way too much empathy. I have empathy for every human being in one way or another. I may not have empathy for the circumstances that they find themselves in, but I have empathy for every human. I have empathy for every struggle.

Penny Williams [00:43:07]: I watch, like, all the documentaries about all the bad things, because, one, I'm interested in human behavior. Right? I'm a student of human behavior. It's always interested me. I majored in sociology and minored in criminology in college, and I've just always been really, really interested in that sort of thing. And so I have always been interested in in hearing people's stories and understanding what's happened to them and how they got through it and why things happen and why people do certain things. And, you know, my kid will say to me, I don't know why you do that to yourself. That stuff's so hard. But I am just wired to bear witness.

Penny Williams [00:43:51]: I just am literally compelled to bear witness. I need to see people. Right? I just need to provide that, even if they don't know that I'm doing it. Like, watching a documentary about, you know, hurricane Katrina, for instance, Those people don't know that I saw them, right, that I made sure that I knew what they went through. But to me, it still matters, and it matters a great deal. And so, you know, I have just had this enormous amount of empathy and grief for the people in my community and the people outside of my community in Greater Western North Carolina and Erwin, Tennessee and, you know, South Carolina, just over the border from us, and Greenville, South Carolina. They had a lot of flooding. They had a lot of storm damage too.

Penny Williams [00:44:49]: And I just feel such an enormous grief for the loss here, for the devastation here, for the fact that no person in my community will ever be will ever be the same again. It's a big thing. It's a really big thing that has happened, and we're not even close to getting through it. These roads will take a year or more. The water system to get back to normal where everybody has water and nobody has to boil it, and we all sort of take it for granted again is gonna be potentially months. And then you see things like the economic tool. Like, we're not just talking about people who, you know, lost all the food in their refrigerator and freezer and had to rough it without power and water for a few weeks. We're talking about loss of business, loss of employment, loss of our economy.

Penny Williams [00:46:03]: Asheville is a tourist town. Our economy is based 100% on tourism. The biggest time of the year, the biggest influx of tourists is October, because everyone comes to see the fall colors, to see the leaves change. And even the Biltmore Estate is still closed right now. There's no tourism to be had in Asheville's immediate area, and so businesses are starting to fold already. Businesses are saying, we can't come back from this. We're done. Those businesses employ people.

Penny Williams [00:46:44]: Those people need to work. The entire arts area of Asheville washed away. It was completely and utterly destroyed. It was one of my favorite places. My daughter, who's an artist, her favorite places, my husband, the bar that he volunteers at, that he plays at, that the people who run it and the people who frequent there are like family to him, all of that was destroyed. Every place that we went for self care, that we went for joy is gone. And not just gone. Like, it's not like, you know, they just decided that they needed to close their business.

Penny Williams [00:47:29]: These people were devastated. These artists lost everything. These business owners lost everything. We're talking about, you know, 50 to $500,000 to get back. Right? And if you're a small business, there's no free help. Like, if your home was damaged, you have to get a loan for that. So you have to add insult to injury to come back. Not every business can do that.

Penny Williams [00:47:57]: And so there's grief for all the people who can't work right now, and what's gonna happen to them. I had that fear myself in the beginning, and it was really tough, but it was resolved quickly. For a lot of people, it's not going to resolve quickly. The economy here is going to take a massive hit, which means the people here are taking a massive hit. And just knowing that and thinking about that and worrying about those people Like, it's so funny that I tell coaching clients all the time when I hang up with them, especially if I don't know if they're gonna be kind of a frequent or continued coaching client. Sometimes people just want my input for a meeting or 2 to get some direction. And I always say, like, please, please email me and tell me how you're doing, how your kid's doing, because I am going to worry about you. It is my nature.

Penny Williams [00:48:54]: It is the way I'm wired. I cannot help it. And in a situation like this, with devastation all around me, with hardship and struggle all around me, the grief is enormous. The survivor's guilt. I never thought about using survivor's guilt to talk about not near death experience. Like, I get survivor's guilt when, you know, the boat sinks and 2 people live and the rest die or something like that. Right? That's what we would consider a typical survivor's guilt kind of situation. But I can tell you, myself and many, many people I know here, we are experiencing enormous survivor's guilt.

Penny Williams [00:49:47]: Not that we just lived when people died, but that we weren't as impacted, we weren't as devastated as other people just down the road from us. Like, literally, a quarter of a mile down the road from me, that house was picked up, moved, flipped all the way around, spun all the way around backwards. Their shed is up in a tree, and the boy scout camp is gone. I can walk there from here. I drive by it almost every time I leave my home to do anything. And so that devastation was close, and yet we were so, so lucky. I saw a local reverend post on Facebook just a couple of days ago, and I think it's gone viral at this point, a new term called guiltitude, where we smush the enormous gratitude we have for being fortunate with the enormous guilt that comes right along next to it. The guilt and the gratitude are like besties right now.

Penny Williams [00:50:57]: And, again, it's not as hard as what a lot of people are dealing with, but it is hard. It's really hard. It's so heavy to carry this amount of empathy and this amount of grief and guilt. It's it's super tough. So, you know, I'm gonna end here. I'm gonna wrap things up. I went on way too long, and there were a million more things I could have told you. Like, the amount of time that it would take to explain the last 18 or 19 days is you know, I keep using the word unbelievable, unimaginable.

Penny Williams [00:51:38]: But we're okay, and I'm getting back to podcasting. And I'm thinking about having more guests here to talk about grief, to talk about how trauma impacts us, how we get back to thriving after something so traumatic. So keep your eyes and ears open for some episodes on that in the near future. If you do want to help, there are so many funds available for people outside of town to donate to and help. The United Way of Asheville is 1. Red Cross is another good one. World Central Kitchen, you can always donate to them. They are here providing hot meals.

Penny Williams [00:52:26]: There are so many restaurants that couldn't open and would just get grills out in the parking lot and cook whatever they had and give it away so that people could eat. There's so much good going on here, but it is going to take a long, long time. And we're already seeing the outside interest in helping start to dim, start to fade. So anything that you, you know, can find, if you're open to it and willing and you're able, you know, if you can spare something, it would be great. It doesn't have to be the Asheville community. It can be anywhere. Just be a helper in the world. You know, I talk all the time about how much gratitude I have for getting to be a helper in the world in the parenting space, in the neurodivergent space, and it really brings such joy for me.

Penny Williams [00:53:24]: And even if you can only do something tiny, maybe this this episode can inspire you to just be a helper in your world just a little bit. That's all it takes. If we all just do a little bit, think about how much better we would feel and how much better our communities would would feel and how much better the world would feel, honestly. So I appreciate all of the well wishes. I've been emailing those of you who are subscribers as I was trying to navigate whether or not the anxiety SOS summit would happen and what that new timing would look like and so forth. And so I have shared via email, and I just wanted to share here too because I felt like the internal experiences that I was having, that my nervous system was in charge of, were really valuable experiences for you as the parent or educator or professional who cares for a neurodivergent kid or teen or young adult. And so I hope that it's given you a little additional sort of perspective or insight on that that's gonna help you with either your kid or yourself or both. As I said at the beginning, we all have the same structure of a nervous system, and everything is true for all of us in regards to how our nervous system operates and what it sort of triggers or what it means for us and feeling safe and unsafe and all of those things that I talk about so often.

Penny Williams [00:54:59]: You can go to the show notes page for this episode.

Penny Williams [00:55:05]: I may not have much there. It might just be a description and a link to other resources there, but it will be there nonetheless. And it will be at parentingadhdandautism.com/286 for episode 286. And I will see all of you on the next episode. Please take good care.

Penny Williams [00:55:29]: Thanks for joining me on the Beautifully Complex podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share, and don't forget to check out my online courses and parent coaching at parentingadhdandautism.com and at thebehaviorrevolution.com.