The alchemy of another american school shooting

I was a freshman in high school in Southern California when the Columbine shooting happened. It was long before iPhones existed, so I am unaware of how the news trickled into the student body. I do recall walking into my French class and asking my peers what was happening. We did not have real time news, but we were shaken. We did not have a framework for the gravity of something like a mass shooting in a high school—a luxury that I ache to remember. Subsequent generations have not shared in that luxury because America is a nation hellbent on the rights of the few, at the cost of the many.

Shortly after Columbine, a student at my own high school brought a gun to school after making pointed threats. It was a terrifying paradigm shift. I was witnessing the end of the innocence of my generation and have spent the last two decades of my life wondering “what if” and “when” a shooting might occur.

This past Monday, I went to a concert in Denver. Before I went, I thought about the possibility of an active shooter. When I was there, I glanced at the exit doors in comparison to my location—something I do almost anywhere I go these days.

In Ireland, after some friends and I closed down a local pub, we walked back to my hotel and took a wrong turn into a strange alleyway. Two very intoxicated men got into a fist fight in front of us and my immediate fight or flight thought was, “What will I do if one of them pulls out a gun?” A thought I shared with my Irish friends, which was met with confused looks and concern that this is the first thought in the American mind.

Perhaps the thing that weighs heaviest on my heart is that I know if you are American and reading this, you have the same experiences. It is likely that your life has been irrevocably impacted by the endless barrage of mass shootings in our country. The pace of these events has only sickeningly become faster, and the death tolls higher. Millennials, who watched this new era of violence and terror unfold, are now raising children in a country where not even an elementary school is safe.

I took my daughter to brunch this week to celebrate the end of her school year. Where there was meant to be joy, there was me at the intersection of rage, grief, fear, and confusion. How could I sit and laugh over a latte and pancakes when I was holding the pain of those families who just had their children violently ripped from their grips?

I watched both my children play at the end-of-year party and wondered when they would begin to put the puzzle pieces together. How long will it be before the bullshit lockdown drill becomes a palpable ode to their lack of security in a place that should be the holy ground of childhood? Is it not enough that the planet they are inheriting is riddled with the carnage of capitalism? At the absolute minimum, we should be able to keep our children alive at school as they learn how to become the future—our future.

I choked back my tears as I hugged their teachers, wishing that I could tell them just how deeply sorry I am that we are failing them, too. Already underpaid and underappreciated, we send our teachers into battle with our tiny defenseless humans. All of them deemed a sacrifice so that we can bear arms. I want our teachers to know that they are seen and that I will fight for them. I want them to know that I will share this burden with them, because to face it alone must feel like the dark night of the soul.

I suppose this is the bit where I am meant to dig deep into my well and find a cohesive message of hope and guidance. Is there a well of hope in a country where our silence allows children to be gunned down in school? I search for hope like gold, but even I find it to be aggravatingly elusive in these moments.

My partner tends to be the less emotionally variable one in our relationship, and tonight he asked me (in all genuineness) if it helps me to allow myself to get this angry or sad about things. I suppose there are probably ways my big feelings can be daunting, and do exhaust me. But I know that change has never been born from apathy. These feelings are fuel for my own inner fire.

Yesterday morning I had to go for a walk and listen to music. Movement and music are places that I go when the emotional waves are crashing too quickly. When I feel like I cannot get air, I go to music and go on long wandering walks. I imagine my neighbors have occasionally heard me singing and walking my way through the gamut of my psyche. The music connects me to the feelings that can seem ineffable. The feelings that I need to wade through before I sit down and weave them into my writing.

There are times when I write, when I know I am writing myself back to hope. I used to (and occasionally still do) doubt that my writing mattered—to me or anyone. What can poems or words do to heal this broken world? The day of the shooting, before there were the posts about statistics, and action (also essential), there were Amanda Gorman’s poetic words. Posted and reposted, they became an early roadmap of this loss. Her words that gave shape to the feelings burning in our tearful eyes and clenches fists.

Poems, and arguably any art, breathe emotional life into places where we have gotten lost in the numb shock. I write as an act of resistance and defiance, in a world that would prefer to keep the status quo of silence and modest compliance. I write to remind myself that hope is worth the weight of suffering that we must endure before we find the light again.

There is an alchemical process of turning the inert suffering of tragedy into change—something my voice can speak. Music and writing will forever be the backbones of that alchemy for me. They do not lift the darkness completely. I still find myself at that same intersection of rage, grief, fear, and confusion. The shooting in Uvalde has etched itself in my bones in the way that Columbine first did. As it should. We will always live with these losses as a part of ourselves.

Where will you turn to help you transmute your own intersection into change? These feelings you are carrying remind you that you are human. Will you go numb? Will you climb into bed with apathy because hope is too distant a lover?

Tonight I am wondering how I will respond to my children when they ask me, “Mom, what did you do to protect us?” And they will ask. These little souls always find their way to big questions. Sure I bought them nice car seats, and gave them good, healthy snacks. But what did I do with all that rage and pain I felt when children just like them were killed at school? It serves no one if I let the river run cold into a shapeless sea. The fire and flood you feel tonight is calling you. Do not let this moment for change pass. Our babies—literal and collective—need us.

Per aspera, ad astra.

Julie