This Might Hurt a Little: How do I survive the apocalypse?
How do we survive?
Welcome to my advice column This Might Hurt a Little, a regular recurring guest in the Pretend it’s a Newsletter universe. All questions are reader submitted and answered to the best of my ability. My qualifications for this are as follows:
In a ceremony hosted by my friends I was awarded the Pick Me Up Mom, I’m Scared! Award for Strength and Stability and presented with a spray painted gold phone to mark the victory.
Today’s bit of advice will hopefully bring some levity to your Thursday morning, and will help you survive the apocalypse, zombie or otherwise.
Dear Chelsea,
What do you believe are the most useful skills to develop to increase survival in an apocalyptic catastrophe? Will charisma save me or should I learn some textile mechanics?
Dear reader,
If Charisma doesn’t aid you in the apocalypse, then I am also cooked. Jokes aside, charisma alone will save neither of us, so I think learning some other skills is important. Certainly textile mechanics would be a good trait, but I’d start with just learning to use a sewing machine if you haven’t ticked that checkbox yet.
Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about apocalyptic skills a lot in a way that aren’t all that bleak. I’ve been tossing this over and over in my head since 2020, just after the stay home order. The night that things started to look really bad, my best friend Stephanie and I went to Target and filled our cart with anything and everything we thought we might be able to use in the coming weeks at home. This was back when we thought it might just be weeks, back when we thought a government could get the pandemic under control quickly. We now know that it really couldn’t, and I personally was home for over a year, and got my vaccine and booster before I braved the outside world masked. The pandemic is very much still raging on, and we’ve all adapted in different ways. Still, the helplessness I felt that first night staring down at my cartful of black beans, bread, hot dogs, toilet paper, microwave popcorn, frozen pizza and candles still sticks with me.
In the first weeks of the pandemic a friend of mine started making masks on his sewing machine and asked if he could drop some by for my household. My workload was greatly diminished and I started wondering what skills I had to make my world, which had gotten much smaller, a little bit better. I wasn’t great at sewing, but I had a bunch of beads from making necklaces and I saw some mask chains online that I thought I could make. I ordered some clasps and stretchy string, and I began making mask chains for my husband, my best friend and myself. Then I began making them for their coworkers and our friends.Then I began mailing them to people who followed me online. It was a joy to have something to do, that would maybe brighten someone else's day just a little bit.
To try and make my stay at home experience more cozy, I burned a lot of candles and eventually it didn’t make sense to keep buying them. I had worked at a candle maker when I’d first moved to Austin, and so I knew that I could make them because I’d done it before, but I couldn’t remember anything about the process or the materials needed. I learned through tutorials online, and found a recommendation for a soy wax and some science behind the temperatures everything needed to be, and I began making candles. Lots of them. I gave them to all my friends, and again sent them to my husband and best friend’s coworkers (they worked at the same place.) Eventually, people online were reaching out to ask if they could trade me things that they made for candles.
That was my first big foray into the trading economy.
A few weeks later, I implemented this into my business. None of the self-employed folks I knew were working much, so I decided to offer up what I had for free or for trade. I was bored and I needed to feel like I was contributing to my community in some way. I’d been a consultant for a while, advising small business owners who were trying to pivot or who were fighting burnout. I didn’t have a magic 8-ball, but I could at least hear people out. I offered 10 consulting sessions a week for free, to anyone that needed to talk through small business problems. And each week they’d all book up. I didn’t accept payments, but I received several thank you gifts. I wear a pair of earrings and a ring every day that were gifted to me from consulting clients, both fantastic jewelers.
In 2021 I bought a house in Nashville and got into gardening, then I got curious about canning food. I grew up in the Appalachian region of North Carolina and I'd always been curious about connecting with that part of my lineage since I helped my grandma can green beans as a child. I bought a fantastic book that has foolproof recipes that will protect you from botulism if done correctly, and I learned how to waterbath can from my mother-in-law. Now I can make jams and jellies like it’s no problem, and I can preserve things seasonally.
Then this past year I began reading sci-fi, much of which has to do with the end of the world. I’ve spent most of my life being terrified about the concept of the end of the world, but now I think I’m just fascinated by it. I think I use sci-fi as a sort of escapism. The truth is, with climate change, political unrest, and increased wealth disparity, my mind is on the possible unraveling and what that might mean. I don’t think that it will be the kind of apocalypse that we find in fiction, but if you’re reading this you survived a global pandemic so you are aware of the possibility of total devastation and how swiftly that can come about. We’re aware of the ways in which our systems could fail us. This was almost certainly in the back of my mind when I sought to buy a house, learn to garden, and learn to preserve food. I joked about how many preppers were showing up on my For You Page, but aren’t we all, in our own ways, scared of the same things?
One of the reasons that apocalyptic fiction has mass appeal is because it makes us face the parts of ourselves that might come out in the event of a disaster. It provides a lense through which we can see ourselves in situations that feel bleak and outlandish. We can’t help but put ourselves in the shoes of the narrator. In identifying with the struggle and the impossible scenarios in these stories, we also find ourselves searching for what hope there is to find in them.
I leave you with this, from the queen of Science Fiction and of the idea of the apocalypse, Octavia E. Butler.
“All that you touch
You Change.All that you Change
Changes you.The only lasting truth
is Change.God
is Change.”
My suggestions for a zombie apocalypse or an apocalypse of any kind are: handicrafts that you enjoy, getting into gardening, reading science fiction, and being ready to embrace change.
This combined with charisma should be a winning combination.
If you’re looking for some excellent science fiction regarding the apocalypse might I suggest:
Parable of The Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman
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