Three Disasters. One Decision. One Website Built for Every Woman Who Was Ever Caught Unprepared.

I was fast asleep on Staten Island when 9/11 happened. I worked nights in Manhattan, so my body was on a different clock than the rest of the city that morning. What woke me wasn't an alarm — it was sirens, a wall of them, layered on top of each other until they became one continuous sound. Then the smell hit. Smoke, but not campfire smoke — something heavier, that settled into your clothes and didn't leave. It covered all five boroughs like a fog that wouldn't lift. My mother worked in midtown. I had no way to reach her. Cell towers were overloaded, landlines were jammed, and information moved at the speed of word-of-mouth and a television that wouldn't stop replaying the same footage. The not-knowing stretched into hours. That kind of helplessness teaches you something a checklist never could: that you can be the safest person in the room and still be powerless if you have no way to reach the people you love.

Two years later, almost to the season, I was headed to a lab job in Manhattan when the entire Northeast went dark at once. Not a flicker — a sound. Wooommm. The unmistakable sound of electricity leaving a city that depends on it for everything, and not coming back. Traffic lights died mid-cycle. Subways stopped between stations. I navigated home to Staten Island on instinct alone, no GPS, no working phone, no one to call for directions because no one's phone was working either. My power came back in two hours. I remember feeling almost guilty about that, because for millions of others across the Northeast, it stayed dark for days.

Both times, I told myself the same lie: the lights came back on, so I'll be alright, it's New York, this is just what happens here. I didn't yet understand that the lesson wasn't about New York. It was about how fragile "normal" really is, anywhere.

Life moved me south eventually, to Virginia. And on August 23, 2011, a little after 1:51pm, I felt my first earthquake. A 5.8 magnitude shake that lasted only seconds but rewired something in how I thought about risk. It felt surreal in a way the other disasters hadn't — earthquakes weren't supposed to happen on this side of the world, not in my lifetime, not in a place nobody associates with seismic activity. I was home, not at the office. My best friend and roommate was getting ready for work. We felt the ground move, looked at each other, couldn't quite believe it — and then, almost on autopilot, went right back to getting ready. No damage happened where we were. But the quake caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage elsewhere in the state, and it left behind a thought I couldn't shake: next time, we may not be so lucky.

That was the first earthquake of my lifetime. People in other parts of the country, especially California, have lived through far more, and the ground there isn't getting any calmer — recent reporting shows stress levels along the San Andreas Fault, the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, are at their highest in nearly 1,000 years. Someone could say I survived a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. But with what's happening across the country right now, I'd argue anything is possible, anywhere. Whether you can actually prepare for an earthquake the way you prepare a go-bag for a hurricane is its own question — one I'll answer in a future post. Coming soon: Can You Actually Prepare for an Earthquake? →

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. At the time I was living in New Jersey, visiting my mother in North Carolina — what was supposed to be a short trip turned into staying through September of that year. And somehow, even with all I'd already lived through, I was still late to prepare. I watched stores go empty around me, no sanitizer, no water, no toilet paper anywhere in the county. Streets completely silent. The world standing still in a way I'd only ever read about in dystopian fiction. That was the moment I stopped letting the old lie make my decisions for me.

Three disasters, three different scales — personal, regional, global — and one truth that held steady through all of them: preparedness isn't about saving the world or being responsible for it. It's about knowing yours. Your home first, then your block, your neighborhood, your town, your county, your state — knowing the layout, the exits, the resources, the people, so that when it hits the fan you're navigating with awareness instead of wondering. That's where real readiness lives. Some people will say you can't really be prepared for everything. I'd say you're not trying to control everything — you're trying to know everything that's actually yours to know. I would always rather be prepared and not need it, than need it and not be prepared.

I decided to build something. Not for the woman with a bunker. For the woman like me — the city girl, the introvert, the night shift worker, the woman who loves dystopian fiction because some part of her always knew the world it described was closer than anyone wanted to admit.

SurvivElle is that something. Built from the ground up. Built for all of us.