The Blanket Fort at the End of the World: On Fear, Loss of Control, and Learning to Stay in the Body During a Massive Winter Storm

Two days. That is the countdown the glowing screens are giving us on the day I write this.

A massive snowstorm is barreling toward the Mid-Atlantic, a heavy, swirling beast of snow, sleet and ice. This would have been an occasion to celebrate when I lived in the city. Neighbors by the hundreds would run outdoors, their boots crunching toward Clark Park. They carried trash can lids, stolen cafeteria trays, and large plastic filing bins to sit and sled down hills covered in powder and ice. Afterwards, we had the heat of each other’s bodies as we squished five people side-by-side onto vintage sofas, the smell of cheap coffee in crowded apartments, and the shared, rowdy laughter that turns a blizzard into a block party.

But I don’t live in the city anymore. I moved to the exurbs because I love the hills and the nature trails, and I needed a slower pace.

When storms hit out here, though, things get tricky. Last year, I twice lost power for nearly a week each time. The wind gusted at 55 miles per hour, taking down trees and lines and leaving me in a house that felt more like a meat locker than a home. I remember the sharp, violent crack of my pipes bursting in the dark. I was never so cold. My cats and I huddled under a mountain of blankets, trying to keep each other warm. My backup power brick flickered and died. My fingers were too frozen to turn the pages of a book by candlelight. So I stared at the walls until I finally gave up and rented a hotel.

Now, the media is telling us to expect the same, if not worse. Sleet. Power outages. Days of freezing temps. “Prepare for casualties and possibly weeks or even a month without electricity,” one fear-mongering meteorologist spat while staring straight into the camera. He could’ve offered solutions but chose to leave us shivering instead.

I live alone. I have prepped as much as I possibly can. I have gallons of water, nonperishable food, and battery-operated lanterns. I have identified the one interior room—my bathroom—where I plan to build a blanket fort on top of sofa cushions if the mercury drops. I created a makeshift heating range with candles, a baking pan, and a metal rack to heat food in a saucepan.

I’m not afraid of freezing to death or starving. I’m afraid of losing control.

This is one of the greatest lessons I came into this life to learn: how to release my grip. How to regulate a nervous system that has been wired for survival since birth. I’m facing “electricity” that looks more like quivering in my limbs that tells me my body is bracing for impact.

In the old spiritual communities I belonged to, they would tell me that my fear is manifesting a power outage. They’d say my anxiety is a low-frequency signal inviting the pipes to burst. They would tell me to choose joy, to speak affirmations, and to visualize everything going well until I’ve bypassed the reality of my own shaking hands.

I call that a bunch of ungrounded woo. And it has never worked for me.

With all due respect to anyone who believes in them: to heck with affirmations. All they have ever done for me is make the inner voices that believe the opposite grow louder and more insistent. To pretend I am not afraid when my body is literally vibrating with ancient survival instincts isn’t spiritual. It’s gaslighting.

Back in the early 2000s, I grappled with debilitating bouts of major depression and anxiety. I was a regular on the Philadelphia SEPTA bus, riding the fifteen blocks to and from work with my nose buried in a book a friend recommended to help heal my mood. It was by Wayne Dyer, and its premise was that I could improve the way I felt if I changed my thoughts to positive ones. The bus smelled of damp coats and exhaust, but I was breathing in the fresh air of possibility that I could think my way out of feeling.

I had tried also tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) years prior. My therapist wanted evidence that my thoughts were either facts or fiction. Somehow it was supposed to make me feel better if I recognized that my thoughts lacked validity when in fact it was a polite way of being told my feelings were irrational. But my body didn’t care about evidence. My body was the storehouse of a thousand years of ancestral trauma.

But for some reason, I gave more credence to Dyer’s claims, because he was a spiritually minded self-help guru. Mustn’t he hold ancient wisdom or a secret key to releasing the human from suffering? I mean, his book was a best-seller, after all, and he’d appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, The Tonight Show, and The Phil Donahue Show.

Then again, CBT was also considered the “gold standard” of therapy, yet I find very few people who can admit that it healed them from anything. Eventually most clients give up, get medicated, or seek therapists who offer very different modalities. I know this, because as a somatic psychotherapist years later, most of my own clientele consisted of CBT dropouts desperate for a safe place to feel their feelings and to root out the despair where it lives in the subconscious. And our body and our emotions are the gateway to that murky underworld where all that we’ve repressed or distanced ourselves from in order to survive past pain and trauma lives and waits to be loved back into wholeness.

So once again this approach of glorifying the power of the mind to change our reality failed—for me, at least. Unfortunately, I labeled myself the failure, and my inner torment reigned once more.

By this time, though, I’d been seeing a new therapist for a few years. She was trained in what I’d later adopt as my own approach to body-mind healing after I finished my master’s degree in social work: The Hakomi Method of Mindful, Somatic Psychotherapy. Her name was Martha. I’ll never forget her warm Virginia accent with vowels stretched just enough to feel comforting. When I told her about the self-help thought leader and the thought-stopping techniques, she laughed and asserted, “Oh, Allison, that’s bullshit.”

I guffawed. I loved her unpolished realness. My relief was instant. She didn’t want me to change my thoughts; she wanted me to meet my body. She taught me that when I was afraid, I didn’t need a mantra. I needed to shake. She sat with me while my body involuntarily rocked like I was sitting on the epicenter of an earthquake. And she taught me to love all parts of myself rather than repressing them.

She taught me that fear is the body’s loud prayer for life. Spirit created us with these instincts; why would we demonize them? We are wired to hold onto what is familiar, even when it no longer serves us. We are living through an era where world systems are dismantling, and that ancient fear is naturally going to arise.

But I’ve learned there is a trick to moving through it. While I honor the feeling in my body, I’ve learned not to indulge the fearful thoughts that follow. When we’re scared, the mind wants to chase worst-case scenarios all the way to the end. I’ve learned to notice the thought, but then bring my awareness back to the physical feeling. I can reframe the thought by saying, “This could be a great opportunity to find out how resilient and adaptable I really am.” This isn’t meant to shut down the emotion or pretend it isn’t there; it’s simply a way to stop myself from making the feeling worse with a story that hasn’t happened yet.

Years later, in 2005, I was reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, upon Martha’s recommendation. I was enthralled by the peace of the present moment. But then, a relationship ended. The man I’d broken up with dropped a box of my things he’d borrowed on my doorstep. It was a final, wordless “we are done” that provoked my unhealed abandonment wounds. My heart hammered as I paced my apartment. I called my therapist, sobbing that I was failing at being present.

“You’re not doing it wrong,” she said. “What’s causing the anxiety is your resistance to what you do feel in this now-moment. What would happen if you just allowed yourself to feel heartbroken?”

I lost it. I bawled. I shook. And after ten minutes of allowing the storm to move through me instead of bracing against it, my entire system grew quiet. I wasn’t happy, but I was at peace. I asked her if the sorrow would return and how long it would last, and she shared how grief moved in waves when she lost her husband to suicide. She said if you fight the wave, you drown. If you pull yourself into a fetal position and let the riptide move you, you eventually find yourself on a new shore.

The physical body is not a sin or a distraction. It houses our DNA—our spiritual blueprint. We didn’t come here to be light workers floating six inches off the ground. We came here to be masters of the material. We came to hear the birdsong, to watch snowflakes race each other to the ground, and to feel the entire buffet of human emotions.

So, as this weather event approaches, I’m not doing affirmations. I’m focusing on my courage.

I’m allowing my body to feel the electricity and the quivering. I’m reminding myself that I have another opportunity to face challenges without identifying with the fear.

As I type this, peace has has settled into my nervous system. The fear hasn’t dissipated completely, but I’ve voiced it. I’ve given it space. I have compassion for the girl who is scared of the dark and the cold.

Now I’m actually looking forward to the snow. I’m going to cook a hearty meal. And if the power goes out, I am going to do what my little girl self would have delighted in: I’m going to live in a blanket fort lit by battery-powered fairy lights. I’m going to eat cupcakes in the dark with my cats. I’m going to draw and write and put puzzles together until the world turns back on.

I didn’t come here to be an airy-fairy spiritual type. I came here to root. I came here to feel. And if the process of learning is messy—so messy that I shake and cry—then let it be messy. I’ll be in my fort, waiting for the sunrise.

If these reflections offered you some companionship, validation, or a way to understand your own experience more clearly, you’re welcome to join us at Medicine Stones. You can find my writing and full archive on Substack at medicinestones.substack.com, or visit AllisonBrunner.com. Until we meet again, may you be a source of comfort and self-compassion as you traverse times of uncertainty.