Prepper-Come-Lately – Not Happy About Prepping?

NOTE: This article was previously posted on Your Preparedness Story. 

One thing I have learned is that there is no One Size Fits All when it comes to Prepperhood.

Recently some one asked me what kind of Prepper I am, and I couldn’t readily answer.

Having now given the question a little thought, I would have to say first, that I am not a Happy Prepper.

I believe there are Happy Preppers— wise people who long ago opted to a life-path of preparedness and self-sufficiency, and who enjoy with satisfaction the various activities entailed in such a life-style.

While I heartily applaud Happy Preppers for their wiseness, independent spirit, and integrity,  I myself can make no such claims to wisdom and foresight.

I am a Prepper-Come-Lately who stumbled into it quite unwittingly and without initial enthusiasm.

About 18 months ago I was in a dental office, engaged in a polite conversation about the weather, and I casually said something about chem-trails and dotgov trying to kill us all, and the young woman behind the reception desk gasped and said, “Omg, you must be a Prepper!”

That was the first I had heard of such a term, and I had no clue what a Prepper was, let alone why I would be suspected of being one.

I looked up on-line the word ‘Prepper”,  and promptly keeled over into a state something like overwhelm, or shock.    [See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivalism  ]

I was a senior woman  living alone,  with scant resources and limited abilities, whose life was already in a crisis of sorts.  And my adult children and neighbors pretty much  thought I was nuts as it was.

I couldn’t imagine myself  capable of doing anything like becoming a Prepper.

Yet, the alternative course of action — that of just giving up and doing nothing — was completely unacceptable.

I couldn’t just lay down and politically-correctly die, lying and pretending on my deathbed that I didn’t know what I do know (about the fraudulent history of our country and what is in fact happening to our nation).

I couldn’t just ‘go down in the night without a fight’, as the song says.

No.    I had to stand up for the survival of my people, and my little ones.  Somewhere along the line, I realized that Prepping is the only viable course of action open to me.

This must be done, and I will do it, was/is my attitude.

Thus, I became a grim, resolved, pist-off  Prepper-Come-Lately, and in a few months, when opportunity presented, I got when the getting was good, and I bugged out,  to a permanent  bug-out location  a thousand miles away, from which there is no retreat and no turning back.

This is where I take my stand.

Some stories are too long for one telling, so I will just shorten it up for now, by saying that the re-location practically tore my heart out.  It was very much TEOTWAWKI on a mini-scale, for me personally, and some of its’  effects were strange, oddly debilitating, and entirely unforeseen.

I lost my inborn sense of physical direction, for one thing.

Here, everything is turned around, and Sun and Moon no longer rise in the right place in the sky, and I have to be very careful not to loose my way in the woods and so forth. Driving is impossible as I cannot tell which way to turn on unfamiliar roads.

After living  fifty years at sea level, I was suddenly cast upon a high mountain elevation, and became  so short of breath I could hardly move.  It took 3 months to grow enough new red blood cells to acclimatize to the new terrain and to feel somewhat normal again.

Somehow I also lost great unexpected swatches of my sense of self, as if I suddenly didn’t know who I am.

And there was deep beyond-words mourning as my whole life died away behind me and slowly faded into the rear view mirror of history.  (I know this sounds a bit dramatic, but that is how I experienced it. It may be,  that when SHTF for reals, others may experience  effects they never anticipated, either;  who knows.)

A thing I really dislike about my b.o.l. is the silence.

Even though I have lived alone for many years, I was always surrounded by the sounds of normal human life  — distant voices, church bells, somebody slamming a screen door somewhere, dogs barking, muted traffic, the train whistle….

Here, the winter silence is gawd-awful.  Deer move soundlessly thru the forest.  There is only the hush of wind in the trees, and an occasional owl passing in the night.

Nonetheless, digging around in the bottom of my battered old barrel to see what is left, I do find some things that are worth bringing to this party, that will likely offer me  joy in the morning of springtime, and may, God willing, contribute yet  to the wellness of the world.  I hope to become a Happy Prepper.

Together we can do this.

Later,
Max

This article first appeared on Ed That Matters.

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