Hey Y’all, I’m not sure how many of you I’ve talked about this with before but I graduated from Columbine High School in 2020 and am still in very close contact with my community back at home in Littleton, Colorado. In light of the tragedy we have faced I want to share what one of my former teachers shared with me in our conversation today from his perspective as a survivor of Columbine when he was a sophomore in high school.

Today we talked about what happened and I asked him “did this happen to me?” And he said well that entirely depends on what you describe as this and that is your choice. He told me that we have the choice to decide whether this will be something that shakes the foundation of our existence or if it will just be a bad thing that happened in the massive course of our lives and there is not a right or wrong answer. He said that feeling however we feel is real and right and acceptable and that we cannot compare anyone else’s experience to our own.

When we were in high school he told us about how his graduating class kind of had two starkly different outcomes for the students that made it up and he attributes a lot of this to how people reacted to what happened to them: half of his class turned to wallowing and continued to abuse themselves with different tactics like drug and alcohol abuse and many didn’t make it pass 30 in that crowd and the other half decided to use what happened to them as the first example of their resilience and their ability to overcome obstacles and adversity and those people now are in service to their communities contributed positive change to our society (almost all of them went into service oriented fields I.E teachers, doctors, nurses, etc etc)

He then told me “The one thing you’re not allowed to do is wallow. Wallowing is the acceptance of hopelessness or rather the reviling in it.” And offered me a short of homework assignment to help me work through how I am feeling: He told me to write down every emotion I feel regardless of what it is even if it’s just numbness. Explain how you feel in words— do art if you need to but really try to articulate it. Then write why you think you’re feeling them. This is assignment 1 that he wants me to email him and we’ll go from there he said.

He talked about how we cannot choose what happens to us, we cannot explain why it happened and we should not waste any time trying to do so but we can control how we react and respond and we can explain why we do it— that’s a big purpose of this assignment. “I feel xyz because of something out of my control and I am reacting this way because it effected me xyz and I am choosing to respond this way because that is what I have control over”

I hope this can offer you all (and perhaps your constituents too) a token of comfort in this inexplicably painful time we are in. The community I grew up in is a pillar of hope and has provided me with more love than I can contain so I want to be able to share that with you all. During the 20th anniversary of our tragedy, an ambassador of Japan gifted our school an ancient Japanese bowl that had survived hundreds of years in a museum and during a transport had fallen and shattered into multiple pieces. Rather than throw the bowl away— the curator decided to glue the bowl back together and fill the cracks with gold. We have the choice of whether to throw away the pieces or fill our cracks with gold. Someone for some unknown reason decided to make an irreversible choice yesterday but this persons actions do not get to control us forever. I love you all.