It’s been a while since my last blog post, email update, or even a social media post, and if you’ve noticed, you’re not alone. More time has passed than I’d like to admit. I wish I could say that I’ve been busy with travel, partnerships, or discovering new restaurants, but the truth is much heavier than that.
As a lifelong Altadena resident, I was deeply impacted by the Eaton Fires that began on January 7. I spoke briefly about it on Instagram Stories as events unfolded, but once the emotional weight hit me, I did what I had to do: I disappeared. I needed silence, distance, and to be unreachable so I could breathe, navigate this experience, and begin to process.
By late April, I realized I was getting lost in that silence.
I gave myself two months to work toward the version of myself that was no longer in that silence. That journey includes returning to this website, Follow My Gut, and to the passions that have always helped me feel whole. Whether or not I share the full details of what happened during the fire and after is still undecided. But what I can share is this: the past six months brought displacement, burnout, a blogging pause, and a complete redirection of what I want my life to look like moving forward.
Displacement, Burnout, and the Toll of Starting Over
Life since January has been unimaginably hard.
As someone who evacuated from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I thought I had already lived through my hardest natural disaster. I was foolish to think that I wouldn’t live through any natural disaster. Because who actually thinks they will live through any natural disaster, let alone one of that
scale. But after Katrina, the thought was that if I had to live through one and if I did live through one, which I did, I would only live through that one. I was wrong.
I watched the Eaton Fire run across mountains and destroy parts of my neighborhood from my bedroom window for hours before evacuating at 4:00 a.m. the next morning. In that time staring at the blaze, inhaling the smoke, and eventually dodging ashes, I never realized how deeply it was impacting me in real time and what do to me thereafter.
Spoiler alert: I’m still struggling mentally.
After evacuating, I thought I would be out of my home and city for a few days. Turns out, I was displaced for months—first living in a Culver City hotel, then staying with my uncle in Baldwin Park. What followed was a chaotic wave of insurance claims, remediation, toxicity testing, clothing restoration, and throwing out things that I couldn’t hold onto any longer. While that was a full-time job on its own, every day (and many weekends) I still showed up for work. I tried my best to hold it all together and a few times I didn’t: I silent cried at my desk, cried with my boss, and had to excuse myself from a team meeting as I (you guessed it) cried.
To say I was unraveling would be an understatement.
The emotional weight made it difficult to blog, to visit restaurants, hang out with friends, or to even consider joy. Any spare moment went to family, trying to get back home, or sleep. Self-care was off the table. I carried so much guilt whenever I did something outside of solving fire-related issues or working. Add to that, because my home was intact (although I couldn’t live there), I found myself staying quiet about what was happening. For many people, if your home didn’t burn, you were fine. The only thing I could do at the time was to keep it inside and talk about it with people who were in my situation.
Despite it all, I was lucky to escape on two short trips, one of those being to Death Valley (pictured here). But even those felt like I had to drag myself to go and remind myself that I should try to enjoy it. That’s when I realized that somewhere in the process, I lost myself.
Hobbies like traveling, photography, piano, woodworking, and boxing began to feel like foreign languages, skills I used to speak fluently, but now needed to relearn from scratch. But here I am, slowly finding my way back.
Looking Ahead: A Return with Purpose
There’s no way around it: the Eaton Fire changed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I grieved the woman I was before January and now I’m learning to embrace the one I’m becoming. This post and anything I do moving forward isn’t about going back to who I once was. Instead, it’s about discovering a new version of myself and going forward with intention.
I’m easing back into the things that bring me joy:
- Exploring restaurants with my camera in hand
- Reconnecting with my friends
- Traveling to the places I used to daydream about
- Engaging in my beloved hobbies
- Writing again, on my terms
The past six months tested me. But now that I’m on the other side, I see everything differently. I have even more reasons to live life fully and to document it with curiosity, heart, and gratitude.
To many of you I say thank you. Thank you for being patient with me, for checking in, and for giving me the space to heal. I’m back in my home and taking baby steps towards living a life I’m proud to call mine. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll stick around as I share what comes next—because I finally feel ready to begin again.
Beautifully written, I can hear you in there and I’m here to listen. Anna 💜