178: Real Recovery Is Slow And That Is Normal

One screw in a piece of drywall doesn't usually feel profound. This time it did.

Standing in a gutted house in Altadena, California, more than a year after the Eaton Fire, I felt the absurd weight of wildfire recovery and the despair that comes from doing something tiny to address an enormous problem.

Then my mind shifted: rebuilding is not made of big, triumphant moments. It is made of the next screw, the next sheet of drywall, the next task you can actually do.

We talk about what disaster recovery really looks like: homes still stripped to the studs, insurance disputes dragging on, and many families still displaced. From there, we zoom out to mental health after disaster, including the second disaster that can hit months later when the urgency is gone, the news cycle has moved on, and survivors are left with paperwork, grief, and a long road. We name the human realities: insomnia, nightmares, avoidance, and the way housing instability can intensify stress long after debris is cleared.

Finally, we get honest about the systems around recovery. Deadlines, application windows, nonprofit metrics, and donor expectations can pressure people to perform healing on a schedule, then blame them when they are still struggling at 18 months, 3 years, or 5.

I share what a healthier long-term recovery infrastructure could look like, and why resilience is not a personality trait or a finish line. It’s a practice, and it’s usually invisible.

If you’re navigating trauma recovery or supporting someone in the long tail of a disaster, listen through and share this with a friend who needs it.

Subscribe to Notes on Resilience and leave a review so more people can find the steadier, truer story of how healing happens.

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Transcript

A Gutted House And One Screw

Manya Chylinski 0:00

I'm standing in a gutted house in Altadena, California. The walls are stripped to the studs. There are no kitchen appliances, no bathroom fixtures, no ceiling in most of it. Outside, not far away, the neighborhood looks like a disaster area because it is. And I'm standing there holding a drill and I'm looking at this screw that I just drove into a piece of drywall. One screw. And for a moment, it is all just so absurd. And I feel this anxiety and this despair because I'm looking at this house and I'm thinking about the neighborhood we drove through to get to this house. And all I can think is one screw. How is that making a difference? How is one sheet of drywall really making a difference here? We're nowhere. And we're going to be nowhere in terms of this recovery for a long time. And then something changed. And that's what I want to talk about. Because I think it has everything to do with the way that we as humans actually recover, whether it's a disaster or anything, it's how we truly have to rebuild.

The Eaton Fire And Altadena’s Roots

Manya Chylinski 1:17

Hi, welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. Today I'm talking about recovery one step at a time. The Eaton Fire broke out in January of 2025. By the time it was contained, it had burned thousands of acres and destroyed thousands of structures, homes, businesses, churches across Altadena and the surrounding communities. Altadena is a historically black neighborhood in Los Angeles County, and it's one of the few that has survived the decades of discriminatory housing policies, redlining. This community had deep roots, multi-generational homeowners, families who were able to build something in a place that was often trying to push them out. And of course, the fire didn't care. It was going to burn through history, it was going to burn through memory, it was going to burn through what these families and this community had built for generations. I went there as a volunteer, as I've done in another case after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Disaster relief work is not glamorous. It's slow, it's repetitive, and hard work. You're not swooping in to save the day. As a volunteer, I am one person doing one task, in this case, in one house among thousands of houses. And what I was thinking about when I was in Altadena, beyond the scale of the damage, which is immense, was the timeline. This is a year plus after the fire. And when you haven't been part of it, I think people think of disaster recovery as fast moving, because that's what we see on the news. The emergency happens, aid arrives, people rebuild, they move forward, and life goes on. That's what we think from far away looking at the news. But in reality, that's not at all what it looks like. A year later, as I'm recording this, so many homes and businesses are still not rebuilt. Some aren't even close. Some families are in temporary housing, some people left and they're just not going to come back. Some people are probably dealing with insurance disputes, and that's going to outlast most of the volunteer efforts. Recovery is longer than we want it to be. That's true for almost any kind of recovery. It always takes longer than you want it. And I think it's stranger and more uneven than we think it is or want it to be. So when I was standing there in that gutted house holding that drill, I just felt the weight of all of it. And I hadn't expected since I'd been to another disaster area and helped, I felt that gave me an understanding, which it did. But each disaster and each home is unique.

Why Rebuilding Has No Shortcuts

Manya Chylinski 4:37

So a standard sheet of drywall, some people call it sheetrock, is four feet wide and eight feet tall. And to hang it properly, you have to drive the screws in roughly every 12 to 16 inches along each of the studs on the wall. Depends on the zoning, depends on the part of the country that you're in. But that can be six to eight screws per stud. And a wall might have six, seven, eight studs, depending on how big it is. So you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 screws per sheet, just to hang it, to get it to stay on the wall. And that's before anything else, before you tape it up, before you do the mudding, sanding, priming, painting, put the trim up, everything. And when I did the math in my head that day, standing there with just putting that one screw in, it almost was overwhelming. But I kept coming back to there is no other way to do it except one sheet of drywall at a time, one screw in that sheet of drywall at a time, right? There's no version of putting drywall where you can skip the screws. There's no shortcut from looking at the studs in a gutted house to one that is warm and sealed and painted and safe. Somebody has to drive in every single screw. Somebody has to put up every single piece of drywall. Someone has to tape every seam. Someone has to stand every imperfection. These steps don't look like a lot from the outside if you're watching. These aren't the photographs that people necessarily want to see after a disaster. And they don't feel triumphant. It doesn't feel like you're accomplishing anything necessarily in the moment. And this isn't a new observation. I'm sure other people have said this. Other people have thought this. But there is something about knowing it intellectually, knowing, of course, one screw at a time, one sheet of drywall at a time. Standing in the home, watching other people putting up other sheets of drywall, doing other tasks to make the home livable, when you're standing there physically, and it just feels different. You can look at the whole house, you can look at the whole neighborhood, you can do the math on how long it will take, which is going to be years, if not decades. But I chose to look at that one sheet of drywall in front of me, that one screw in front of me. And I drove it in and I picked up the next one and I drove that one in. I still think about the larger problem. It's hard to deny, especially in that neighborhood. But I did understand in my body the only way through is through. That one screw in front of me was the work. One screw at a time. And real recovery is unglamorous like this. It's made up of these little moments. One decision, one phone call, one piece of paperwork, one therapy session, one day where you got out of bed and that was all you could do. This doesn't necessarily look like progress from the outside to others, friends, and family who may be witnessing it. And sometimes they don't even feel like progress on the inside. But that's how it happens. One step at a time.

The Second Disaster Of Mental Health

Manya Chylinski 8:24

And now I want to zoom out from Altadena and think about the mental health side of a disaster. So I think we can all agree that the consequences of that, something like the eating fire, the mental health side doesn't end once the flames are out and the fire departments have gone away. They don't end when the debris has been cleared from someone's property or they've filed an application with FEMA or a local organization to get assistance. Sometimes the psychological distress actually intensifies in the months after a disaster because that urgency has passed and people see the reality of that long road ahead of them. Sometimes in the early days, we're so focused on resolving the tragedy, resolving the disaster, dealing with the short-term implications that for some people we put our emotions aside. And I can't deal with that now. I'll deal with that later. And then it hits months later. People who study post-disaster mental health sometimes call this the second disaster, the prolonged phase of recovery where that solidarity and community response that you get at the beginning has faded. And the news has moved on, and there's much less outside attention. And survivors are left on their own. They have to navigate bureaucracy, they have to deal with insurance and deal with their own emotions and the grief of their loss. Housing instability alone is a strong predictor of mental health struggles after disaster. And in a place like Altadena, where many families were already navigating high housing costs and limited options, that instability, it's not a short-term issue. And what does this look like in real human terms? Like a woman who's living in her daughter's spare bedroom 15 months after the fire, and she can't sleep through the night because she can still smell the smoke in her dreams. Or the man who has rebuilt. He did everything right, he got the insurance, he hired the contractor, and he still can't bring himself to step into the building because it just doesn't feel like home. Or children who won't talk about the fire at school, but they wake up crying. People who seem fine by all the things that we see from the outside, but they're not fine at all. And this is a normal human response. And this is where resilience comes into play. And it runs on a timeline that the rest of the world just doesn't like to think about and rarely is able to accommodate. You know, the cultural script about disaster recovery is something like this. So event happens, people struggle, people bounce back, people are stronger for it. And that's a great story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has an emotional resolution. People are better at the end. It fits the news cycles, it fits for fundraising campaigns or documentary. But as most of us know from any kind of recovery we've had to do, the real work doesn't fit that kind of story arc. It looks more like what I described with a drywall. 50 screws to hold up one sheet, showing up on a day when nothing feels different from the day before, but doing the next thing anyway, screwing in the next screw, putting up that next sheet of drywall. That therapy session where you don't have any kind of breakthrough, but you just sit with something hard for an hour. Or choosing again and again and again and again and again to just keep moving forward and stay in the process. People who navigate disaster and don't avoid the pain and actually kind of navigate through it are people who have found a way to stay present to that one screw at a time, who don't wait until you feel like doing it to do it, who found meaning in the small acts, not just the milestone moments. And this is not a personality trait that you either have or you don't. It's not a piece of resilience that you have or you don't. It is a practice. And like any practice, you only learn by doing it. And it's imperfect and slow, especially at the beginning, and a lot of moments where you stand like I was standing in that gutted house, and you just feel the weight of everything that isn't done yet, and it seems insurmountable. What are the implications for people going through recovery and for organizations and institutions and communities that are working to support

When Systems Compress The Timeline

Manya Chylinski 13:31

them? The single biggest mistake that I see institutions and organizations make after a disaster is trying to compress that timeline. Right? Insurance companies, they have deadlines. Government programs have application windows. And that these things make sense. Nonprofits have metrics they have to measure. Donors want to know that their money solved the problem. And that creates a tremendous pressure on survivors to perform, to perform recovery on a schedule sometimes. And that has nothing to do with how recovery actually works. And when people can't meet that timeline, when they're still struggling at 18 months or three years or five years, we have this tendency to either kind of write them off that they just couldn't figure out what to do, or withdraw support. We stop asking. We assume that they've moved on. Certainly some people have, but not everyone. Or we decide that the problem is their resilience or lack of resilience rather than the way we're looking at the timeline and the our understanding of what recovery really looks like. So what would it look like to actually build a recovery infrastructure around that real timeline? Well, mental health support that is accessible in the acute phase and the long tail of recovery, financial assistance programs that are flexible and not necessarily deadline driven, community check-ins, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, some number of months, not just in the weeks after. And asking people, what do you need now? And continuing to ask until their answer is maybe I'm set. Nothing. I don't need anything now. I don't know what the house looks like today. I don't know if the family has come home yet. I don't think they have. But I think about that moment standing there holding that screwdriver a lot.

Resilience As A Daily Practice

Manya Chylinski 15:46

When I had a brief moment of anxiety, and then I brought myself to the present and an understanding of what I and my team were doing. From looking at the whole job, which was impossible if you look at the whole thing, to the job that I could do, the thing I could accomplish in that moment, put up that piece of drywall, and then pick up the next one and put it up. Resilience often gets talked about like it's a destination, a place you arrive on the map or a date on the calendar, and you're finally recovered. And certainly that's how I thought of it when I first started to think about the need for my own resilience. But I realize now it's a practice, it's a journey. It's daily, perhaps, rarely glamorous, quite often invisible. It's staying in the work, it's making that one step, then the next step, then the next step, putting up that sheet of drywall, then the next one. You're not looking for that place on the map. You're not looking for that date on the calendar. It is the journey. That's what resilience is. One screw, one sheet of drywall, one day. That is the work. And if you are in the long tail of something right now, you're in recovery that's taking longer than you or anyone around you seems to think that it should. Hear this. The timeline that you're on is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a sign that what happened to you was real and big and significant. And you are driving in the screws one at a time, putting up the drywall one sheet at a time. So just keep going.