So my husband thinks I’m in tinfoil hat territory.  My mom has encouraged me to go back to therapy for anxiety.  Why?  Because they think I’m turning into some kind of Doomsday Prepper.  I can’t claim that.  At most, I am prepping to be a prepper.  There’s lots of sites out there that can tell you how to do it, and I am not about that; certainly not now.  Instead I am just starting out and thought I would document a bit of what that looks like.

I don’t know exactly when it dawned on me that something could happen, and I wasn’t ready.

It wasn’t news reports of disasters such as hurricanes Katrina & Sandy, or the tsunami that struck Japan.

It wasn’t the NY Times article on the impending 9.0+ earthquakes due to the Cascadia Subduction (although I am in the PNW, and would be affected by that to the nth degree).  No flu epidemic caused me to panic. Or stories about polar shifts, CMEs and EMPs, North Korean nuclear capacity, or impending economic collapse.

It wasn’t getting mugged and realizing the world was a dangerous place (I wasn’t).

It wasn’t even when we got snowed in for 13 days on especially, unusually brutal winter (and it was mostly just those of us on at the peak of this hilly suburbia neighborhood.  We could only get out on foot, to hike up to the 7-11 a mile or two away to get milk for my daughter’s formula (and for this parenthesis in parenthesis, don’t judge. I couldn’t nurse)).

It wasn’t remembering what it was like when Mt. St. Helens blew up (I was 10) and I was living close enough that we had deep drifts of ash everywhere and it stunk and hurt your eyes and throat.

It wasn’t watching Doomsday Preppers and being infected with paranoia (I never even saw the show until I developed an interest in preparedness and read about it on some web site; then I watched some of the episodes on demand).

I wasn’t raised in this thinking.  I didn’t grow up seeing my parents garden anything, raise anything, can anything.  I don’t think we even had pantries in the homes of my childhood.  Just a cupboard or two of dried and canned goods meant for immediate consumption.

Part of it might be a little bit of worry (paranoia?) about what is happening in my country.  I am halfway convinced if a certain republican candidate takes the presidential election, his dishonest, misogynistic, racist, homophobic and sociopathic actions will set the world against us.  This election season already (rightly) lets the rest of the world look on us as some kind of joke.

Part of it might be that I’m not feeling financially secure right now.  My family has had a more than comfortable life.  My kids don’t really know what it is like to need (or even just want) something and not get it.  But unavoidable large expense after large expense recently has left us with more debt that I am comfortable fielding.

Part of it might be a desire to seek out a bit simplicity in my life. Looking around my home and coming to the realization that we just have too much stuff.  Unnecessary stuff. An urge for a bit of self-sufficiency, a return to simpler times. To make sure I am not raising future consumeriffic self-entitled assholes.

There was no defining moment, no concrete reason.  It just came upon me slowly, like a day that creeps up and it is suddenly morning when you stepped outside with a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the pre-dawn darkness.

I am not a “Prepper”, not yet.  But I do want to be prepared.