*I started writing this a couple of years ago as a coping device I think it’s finally time to post it.
In the fall of 1983, when I was 11 years old, a young friend of mine went turkey hunting with his father in the woods of Northeast Arkansas. There was some kind of commotion, and the man stashed his young son in a bush while he went to check things out. Meantime, another hunter came along, saw something moving in the bush, and shot it. The boy died instantly. At the time of the incident he was wearing an orange vest, and general hunting protocols suggest that you don’t shoot unless you actually see what it is you are aiming for. But my parents had to deliver this news to me, nonetheless. A wire in my brain disconnected.
In early October of 1992, I was in college at TCU in Ft Worth, Texas. My best friend left a guttural, unintelligible message on my answering machine. The comical part of this story is that my roommate at the time was also named Jen, and her best friend from home was also named Laura, and the message was so discombobulated that we couldn’t figure out which of our dear friends had left it. She got a hold of her friend first, who confirmed she had not called and everything was fine on her end, thus the message must have been meant for me. I couldn’t reach my friend after several attempts, so I finally called her parents at home. In what must have been one of the most dreaded conversations of his life, her father shared with me the news; one of our friends was dead, and it appeared to be suicide; a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A wire in my brain disconnected.
I grieved. It was a deep, visceral grief that fell out of my bones like ash from the tip of a cigarette. I screamed and cried in between gulps of air as my roommate held me. I bought a plane ticket home, and went to the memorial service. I watched his mother shake hands and give hugs and smile warmly as people filed out of the church, offering their condolences. It was an unfair thing to ask of her, but it was what society expected. I watched the recent ex-girlfriend collapse at her feet, until the girl’s father scooped her up from the floor like a baby and carried her, soggy and screaming, to the car. Another wire in my brain disconnected. I flew back to Ft. Worth Sunday evening.
The next morning, I learned of another friend there at college who had killed himself over the weekend, also with a gun. I had traveled to bear witness to the life cut short of one friend, only to miss another. A wire in my brain disconnected.
In April 1995 I was working in a corporate high rise in Dallas when Timothy McVeigh parked a yellow Ryder rental truck in front of the Edward F. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and blew the face off the entire structure. These details and names are embedded in my memory like my childhood address and phone number. By 10am that morning the local news was reporting that there had been a bomb in Oklahoma City, and that the bombers were in a car driving for Dallas to do more damage (incorrect, but it was reported this way early on.) My coworkers and I huddled around a TV trying to comprehend the details. We were scared, but we didn’t have enough information to be truly terrified. Then the power to the building went out. Someone screamed. We scattered like roaches. A wire in my brain disconnected.
The power had gone out because there was a construction crew installing a new street light in the intersection next to us, and they had accidentally cut a line under the street. But we didn’t know that until several days later. It was coincidental. What I knew at that moment was that I was leaving, regardless of my job expectations. I grabbed my purse and went to my car and drove home to my apartment. It was the first time that I can remember allowing my flight response to overrule my rational brain.
Back at the apartment, my fiance was working from home, and we watched TV for the next 20 hours straight. It was then I first saw the image that many of us associate with that event: the firefighter carrying the tiny, lifeless body of an infant girl, her little legs and arms cradled so gently but also hanging loose. Another wire in my brain disconnected.
Four years later to the day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned and carried out their revenge saga at Columbine High School. I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina then. It seemed so much further away, and yet I understood it. I was bullied so much as a child, and suddenly those memories resurfaced in the days that followed, as news anchors interviewed locals and experts alike, desperate for answers to why or how this could happen. But I didn’t wonder. Bullying, bullying, bullies, more bullying, the news anchors cried out. In the back of my mind I understood how a kid could get to that place. “That place” was a black hole beneath a cobwebbed, dusty trap door in an old abandoned mineshaft in my brain. I couldn’t open that trap door myself, but I knew about the place, and the door. I knew it existed. I couldn’t reconcile this fact with the horror of what they had done, and it bothered me greatly. A wire in my brain disconnected.
Then 9/11 happened.
I was a mother by then, living in Kansas City. My little boy was not quite 14 months old. I had Good Morning America on the TV in the kitchen, just playing in the background of our morning routine. We were heading out the door when I realized something major was happening (I left the TV on for the dog most days.) I stopped and stood in the kitchen watching with my baby on my hip as the second plane hit the building and Diane Sawyer sucked in her breath. I heard her words as she tried to make sense of what was happening and maintain her composure on National Television.
At that point, it occurred to me that my parents had taken the first international vacation of their lives the day prior, and were in London, England. Several wires disconnected in my brain. I took the baby to his babysitter. All morning long, I sat at work, in my office alone, watching television, trying to make sense of what was happening. Finally after lunch I went and picked up the baby and went back home. I sat with him in my lap and watched CNN, as wires kept disconnecting. I finally heard from my parents, when they were able to find an Internet cafe and send me an email.
The mass shootings kept happening, of course. Schools and movie theaters, on and on. A wire in my brain disconnected, every single time.
Over time as these events kept happening, the wires in my brain stopped simply disconnecting, and began disintegrating, like spent sparklers on the 4th of July. Nothing to reconnect someday in the future.
When Sandy Hook happened, I had changed careers back to teaching. My youngest son was in the fourth grade classroom across the hall from mine. I stood alone in the middle of my classroom in a daze, spinning around and staring hard into every corner, trying to imagine, where would I hide their little bodies? How quickly could I truly get the lights off and keep them quiet as someone walks down the hall with an automatic weapon? If I used myself as a distraction, would they actually run when I told them to? And let's be real. When all this might be going down, would I leave them and run for my son anyway? Isn’t that what a mother is supposed to do? Would it be a Sophie's choice scenario?
And with that thought, the switchboard went dark.
I had a full blown panic attack.
See, the wires in the brain work like an old fashioned telephone switchboard of memories and experiences connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting to meanings and feelings of safety or fear.
Like when I was 12 and I burned my arm on the 375° oven removing a cookie sheet, a wire in my brain that connected baking cookies to a feeling that was soft and safe and smelled wonderful, disconnected. It reconnected to a different memory. A new memory. This one held the slightly acrid smell of sizzling skin, pain, and a tidal wave of fear. But that is an acceptable trade off, you say. These are lessons we learn the hard way, and the next time you were probably more careful. Except, there was no next time. I never made cookies in that particular oven again, because we moved house shortly thereafter. It was disconnected. The new memory was sealed.
This doesn't mean that I never baked cookies again. What it means is that I didn't allow my own children near a hot stove. I didn't let them help me bake or cook. Instead I put them in front of the TV, so they'd be safely entertained far away from the oven. They didn't learn safe cooking skills until they were much older, because of my fear memory. It never occurred to me to bring them into the kitchen with me when cooking to connect food prep to healthy habits. And this connection never occurred to me until I started writing this paper.
After I melted down in my classroom trying to decide if I would choose my students over my son if there was an active shooter in the building, it was not just a single wire that disconnected. The switchboard fell completely silent. It lost power. And something broke in another part of my body. Because the switchboard was down, there was nothing to stop the fight or flight response, the adrenaline just kept going. It was like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing you can do except watch it surge out into the ocean and wait for it to stop burning off.
I operated in full fight or flight mode, quivering and looking over my shoulder at every single odd noise, for almost two full weeks. The switchboard finally came back online, but many, many wires remained disconnected, permanently. My body began to break down from the stress of trying to function with so many disconnected wires. I started having fits of vertigo, migraines, chronic pain, and other miscellaneous health issues that were unexplainable by my doctors. I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases which may or may not have been influenced by that stress.
Less than two years later, a neo-Nazi former KKK leader shot and killed three people at the Jewish Community Center in the city where I live, and was apprehended by police in the parking lot of the elementary school where I was teaching at the time. I don’t remember his name. I remember the names of the people he murdered, but not him. This happened practically in my backyard, my school was involved, though it was on a weekend not a school day. But it was no longer something that happened to other people in other cities, under other circumstances. Once again, as it did when I was a child, this had happened to people I knew. A new wire in my fragile, constantly overloaded brain disconnected.
I started a new job in a different school in fall of 2016, on the campus of that particular shooting event. Once during a staff meeting, we were run through a series of active shooter training exercises. One of the teachers walked around with a nerf gun, slow and expressionless, and shot nerf bullets at the principals as they demonstrated ways to use furniture to hide behind. Many people laughed nervously at the absurdity as the principals tried to keep from being hit by nerf bullets. I did not laugh, because I was trying to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest.
Poof.
The switchboard went down again, right there in that meeting, and I bolted before I broke down in front of an audience of my peers. By this time in my life, the switchboard was having regular outages, sometimes triggered and sometimes random, and the physical toll it was taking on my body overall was becoming harder and harder to hide. I was seeing rheumatologists, neurologists, and going to regular physical therapy to try to figure out and fix what was wrong with me.
During a summer school session around this time, when I work with special education elementary students, we went into a real lockdown because of a shooting at another school nearby. Two construction workers had gotten into an argument and one pulled a gun on the other. Do you have any idea what lockdown does to Sped kids? How changing their expected schedule throws them into absolute chaos? How terrified their parents were to get a text? Many left work and came to pick up their kids instead of letting them ride the bus home. I focused on pretending to be calm for the kid’s sake, but my heart didn’t stop pounding for hours afterward.
Parkland. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida happened late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day. It was on the news all evening, and the next morning.
This one was different. Rather than go into the building shooting, the shooter pulled the fire alarm, and then began picking off students like a carnival game as they exited the building. So now we are supposed to teach our kids to ignore the fire alarms we’ve been warning them about their entire lives, override their natural instincts, and not go outside, because it could be a trap? A wire in my brain disconnected. In fact, several wires just sparked out.
The morning after the shooting, I drove myself to school against every fiber in my being telling me not to do so. I turned up the radio, smacked my hands against the steering wheel and screamed inside my car to try and ride through the adrenaline rush that I could not stop from coming. That was just driving to work. Upon arrival in my classroom, I shut the door and cried at my desk. It took days for the adrenaline to die down. I had finally found a doctor who understood my pain, and was giving me methods to wrangle these adrenaline surges that controlled my life and wreaked havoc on my body. Together we were reconnecting wires where we could. But, I still didn't understand my trigger.
Then in the fall of 2018, the school held an entire day of active intruder training for teachers. My disconnected wires and barely managed adrenaline could not keep a lid on things, and the switchboard went out again. Apparently, my panicked behavior was unacceptable to others. I was later called into my principal's office and told that I needed to work on not being so easily triggered. I was admonished for being rude to others. I had very little memory of the things I was accused of. But it was clear that it never occurred to anyone around me that I was in need of assistance, despite the attendance of several people with trauma training.
Trauma. All my disconnected wires, switchboard overloads, physical manifestations and systems- these are all signs of trauma in the brain. As teachers we are trained to spot trauma in our students, but apparently not in each other.
Also that fall, a parent of children at my school committed suicide. My linked triggers collided, and I fell into a vast, deep space of depression. I was in fight or flight mode 24/7, my switchboard stayed down for weeks at a time, and I became completely unable to cope with my day to day life. I zombie walked through my days, I came down with Shingles for the third time in my life, I fell asleep crying and spinning in an abyss of vertigo almost every night. With my husband traveling most of the weekdays for work, my teenage youngest son raised himself for about six months.
Just reliving these experiences as I write them here has caused my heart rate to explode. My adrenaline still rises and overflows just thinking of it, remembering. Later, the pain and stiffness will come.
These days, I have medications and calming, self-regulating tools that help me manage what is now a diagnosed Panic Disorder, along with Anxiety, Migraines, Fibromyalgia, and an autoimmune condition. All of which came along because of my brain's inability to handle the trauma of gun and terrorism incidents over the course of my life. And I am not even someone with a direct relationship to gun violence. Everything I've sorted out through therapy that is tied to my panic and anxiety is secondhand relational, at best. Imagine the trauma of someone directly affected by losing a family member, or surviving a school shooting, or even having to evacuate a building.
Now ask yourself if you really don’t understand why teachers are leaving the field. Why we need common sense gun control measures at the federal level. Why we need better mental healthcare, because as a reminder, therapy is often not covered by major insurance. Try to understand the trauma of these situations, and you know in your heart, as we all do, that a good guy with a gun cannot stop that trauma from forming. Fewer dead children in any active intruder scenario will not stop the trauma of everyone in that building. Trauma is trauma, and we will all suffer it if we don’t change something.
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