Storms

Panic. . . . Anxiety. . . . Uncertainty. . . . Hurricane Season. It's all the same.

Storms make my son nervous. He doesn't delight in the strength of nature - in the absoluteness of weather the way I do. He doesn't like drama. I don't either, but I do like definitive; statements of clarity. To me, storms are like nature's most definitive behavior. For my son, they represent potential chaos, destruction and personal harm. He's right. I'm probably the one who should be more wary than I am.
He's right to be nervous about storms that boil up in the middle of the night fueled by the build-up of heat throughout the day and the clash of cooler air that the evening brings.

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His way to deal with this type of uncertainty is to gather all the information he can and make his own determination. He needs to know; to find certainty where there isn't going to be any. This aspect of his personality hasn't changed since he was a toddler. He has always realized the extreme subjectiveness of opinion as well as the muddy disguise of opinion testified as facts within most media avenues.
Unfortunately, storms are simply not something that will ever be 100% predictable; and he really needs them to be.

Hurricane Season is a dated time of the year. In other words, it has a specific term. There is a time when it's over and it's on a calendar. That's definitive. When storms erupt outside of these quoted dates, he needs to know why.This is what he respects about this time of the year.

"The Gulf has been pretty quiet this year" is all he will say so far. He knows the water temperatures in the Gulf are up but there's no moist cool air this year to fuel a storm. He's waiting in his quiet, pensive yet very alert sort of way.

Now that the cooler weather has arrived, he is less provoked by anxiety concerning storms. Where he once would close all the curtains in an "If I can't see it - it's less there" attempt, put his earphones on and surf weather channels, and bombard the local meteorologist with email questions concerning weather patterns, storm tracks and "upper-level lows," he now consoles himself by posting weather updates on Face Book for all his North Texas "Friends."

We had a storm last night. His last FB post was at 1:32am (complete with radar links and volatility forecasts). While I'm not crazy about him staying up well past midnight on Facebook - I have to admire is ingenuity in dealing with his anxiety in a way that is both helpful to himself as well as potentially to others. And by posting these storm warnings, he is able to gain an immediate barometric reading of how others are feeling about an impending storm. If he gets quite a few comments, he knows that it's not only he who is watching, waiting, maybe even concerned just a bit. If nobody else really cares (comments), then it might be okay if he didn't become quite so anxious either. In a way, his posts are a self-designed method of calibrating his anxiety level in accordance with a much larger population without actually asking everyone he knows why they aren't more worried about the storm heading our way.

I am amazed that he is trying to hard to define 'normal' and fit himself into it. I am amazed that he is so inwardly conscious of the fact that he doesn't fit 'normal' in such absolutely subtle ways. I'm sad that he feels he needs to change to be better accepted by his Facebook generation.
Never in a million years would I have come up with this strategy.

But I am so much more confined by my personality than he is.