The Conversations We Must Have

Is it okay that I am utterly heartbroken? It is okay that I cried and cried and cried last night? Today, I am trying to go on with life-as-normal and failing and failing but trying. Is that okay? That is what we are supposed to do, right? Get on with life-as-normal, especially when life-as-normal is still life-as-normal. I am so far away, yet I am so close. We all are, right? We all feel that Newtown, CT is, or could be, our home town?

I am from Connecticut. My mom grew up in the town next to Newtown; my dad grew up a few towns over. I have family in the area and my mom still drives through Newtown almost every single day. Is this how I justify how heartbroken I am? Because I know the town, because I am first-and-foremost-and-always-will-be from Connecticut? Because my classmate from high school is the one anchoring the news and reporting on this unbelievable and indescribable tragedy? She has to find the words, she has to comfort my grieving state, and I am having trouble just putting words to paper for a blog post. Is this why it feels so close to my heart? It's close to all of our hearts, right? You feel this too, right?

The pain the families must feel is incomprehensible to me. It's an ache and a shortness of breath when I think of them. My heart shatters when I think of the kids and the teachers in that building. A thousand tiny, irreparable pieces shattered. Is it because I have spent the majority of my life working with kids? Not as an advocate as I have the past few years, but as a lap with a sleeping, drooling five-year-old sprawled across it during a field trip. As a high-five to celebrate a 93 on a quiz, with a squealing and lit-up nine-year-old who comes bounding into the room after school. As a pair of arms that has held a child and just let her cry, "it's okay to be sad, sweetie, let it out, it's okay." As a person who has had some of her very best moments in life gifted to her by a child. We have all had this, right? And that is why all of our hearts are shattered? Yours is shattered too, right? 

How do we tell our children, they are all our children, that they are safe and cared for and do not need to worry? I do not know. But I do know that we have to try.

I am not a parent. But was once a child, I have spent years working with kids, and my friends have children. There is no source I trust more than Mister Rogers and Sesame Street. If you have a child or children in your life, perhaps those are places to start? Do you have any other suggestions? 

My parents talk of the assassination of President Kennedy as their where-were-you-when question to which everyone has an answer. It marked their childhood. I thought Columbine would always be the where-were-you-when question that marked my childhood. Perhaps it was. I can tell you where I was when I found out and how I watched my high school transform in the coming days. The doors that lead to lunch outside on the field were locked and hallway doors that lead to the science wing were closed with new locks installed. A security guard appeared within days. The only way into the building was through one set of front doors. The desks in the front office were rearranged to look outside the glass windows. These changes appear and we re-adjusted. We knew without talking about it why the school days would never be the same. We didn't talk about it. We we had counselors available if we wanted to talk, but I don't know anyone who chose to talk. I wanted to talk about it. I didn't understand why nobody else wanted to talk about it. I felt scared at school, for the first time in my life. I didn't know why other people didn't feel scared. Did locked doors and a new security guard mean that we were safe or in danger? Even as a sophomore in high school, I didn't fully grasp my level of safety or how upset I should be over the events. 

It turns out that I was not alone. About six weeks later, a rumor spiraled about a "hit list" and a gun and then more than one gun and then a bomb threat evacuated the whole building. All rumors started by the student body. And then it happened again. And again. We left the building for bomb threats on a regular basis and a student who was entirely and whole-heartedly innocent of the hate he was accused of was targeted and bullied as dangerous. We talked about it then. The school and the teachers and the students talked about Columbine then. Weeks and weeks after it happened, we finally talked about it. We had assemblies and a "healing wall" and discussions about how scared we all were. I found out I wasn't alone in those first few weeks as a scared student trying to cope silently as I continued on with my school work. It's a hard conversation, I know. But it's important to recognize that this shakes us all to our core.

Unfortunately, Columbine would not end up being my generation's where-were-you-when conversation. It would be September 11th, 2001, two years after Columbine. I was in college at that time. Everything shut down and we grieved as a campus. Cried in the dorm room lounges together and held-hands in a peace circle on the quad. Had memorial services all over campus. We let our hearts break in a safe space. When classes resumed, we didn't pretend we weren't all extremely sad and quite scared. In my "thinking and creating" class we went to the campus gym and silently created. We colored, danced, built, wrote, and sculpted. It was healing for all of us. It wasn't a verbal conversation, but it was our professor's way of telling us it was okay to feel what we felt. And it grew into all of us telling each other that it was okay to feel what we felt. 

And that is what Sesame Street and Mister Rogers say so much more eloquently that I can: tell your children it is okay to feel scared. It is okay to feel sad. And that is what I want to say today also. I am so, so, so sad. I think it's okay. And if you are terribly upset by this event, it is okay to feel sad. 

That this event could occur is incomprehensible to me. Yet, dismissing it as incomprehensible leads us nowhere. These incomprehensible events are occurring again and again and again in the country. In order to stop them, we must understand them. We must understand what causes a twenty-year-old man to walk into a school and kill classrooms full of young children in order to stop it in the future.

I do not mean that we need to determine the motive of the man in this shooting. I mean that we need to have a difficult and thorny conversation as a country about both guns and mental health. There are many, many people who believe that talking about policy during tragedy is wrong. I understand. I so heavy-heartedly understand. I respect that opinion, but in my opinion, it is time to start talking.

More specifically, it is time to start talking with both our heads and our hearts. Gun control in this country is a complicated conversation. It is at the crux of maintaing the security of citizens with the liberty of citizens. This balance has racked our nation since before it was a country. It involves the rights of the federal government and the rights of the states. It involves the very basic, fundamental aspects of what make the United States uniquely the United States. Moreover, it involves a plethora of recent legislation and recent Supreme Court decisions that impact a right that appeared settled for a very long time. It involves special interests that impact legislation and perception of risk versus actual risk. Policy creation on any issue is complex, muddy, and difficult. Policy creation on an issue that represents almost every foundational belief of our entire country is extremely complex, extremely muddy, and extremely difficult. The conversation needs to acknowledge and accept these difficult aspects or we are not going to get anywhere.

I do not believe that we can have a conversation about guns and the United States without a conversation on mental health care. More specifically, the lack of mental health care and the stigma associated with mental health in this country. The connection between mental health and guns is, in my opinion, the place to begin the conversation. I think it is a place where the conversation can begin to make sense of these "incomprehensible" events and find the middle ground between liberty and security. I think it is the place where the people can form a voice louder than the voice of wealthy special interests. We have to do something. We have to start to pull apart these complicated issues and take some type of action to stop these tragic events from occurring. Labeling these events as incomprehensible and dismissing them does not solve the problem.

If we think these conversations are too difficult to have, if we think the stances on these issues are too extreme and too far away from one another to talk with one another, if we think these conversations have no place in the aftermath of horrific events, then we will continue to have conversations with our children about why it is okay to feel sad and try to find the words to assure them that adults are doing everything we can to keep them safe.

My final question is: are we?

It's Nothing Like This Anymore

I'm approaching the finish line on this (what ended-up being a crazy) semester and hoping to be back here soon-ish. Until then, it's papers and presentations and one exam. Nothing like law school. Which means I'm relatively sane, just busy. I won't say I miss law school finals (I don't, not at all), but this time of year does make me miss the people that meant the absolute most to me during those utterly insane (the-psych-ward-or-the-hospital-isn't-far-off insane) weeks of early December. In the memory and honor of those days, I thought I would re-post this, originally written sometime in 2010 when I had finally recovered...
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Saturday night dates held hands under chandeliers.  The white lights bounced off the restaurant windows, competing with the holiday lights hung by the city.  We had missed the tree lighting ceremony in the haze of all the days after Thanksgiving.  Long days that passed too quickly but merged into one another, never ending.  We spent countless afternoons that turned into nights under the buzz of the florescent lights in the school's basement lounge.  We each had our place on the ratty couches next to the water fountain that reminded us of its existence with a loud roar every thirty-five minutes.  Or whenever somebody stepped over us to use it.  We tried not to glare, but the nights got long and we got punchy - our filters disintegrated.  We laughed when I ran upstairs to get us play-dough, but we pulled the colored mounds apart piece by piece when the statutes tangled themselves together and refused comprehension.  We ran on anxiety, adrenaline, and caffeine.

When we stopped counting the days after Thanksgiving and started counting the days before exams, we moved into her tiny apartment and brewed pots of coffee to calm our nerves.  Hours measured by days of class notes and pages in our outline.  Taking turns explaining what the others didn’t understand; shifting places - from the couch to the chair to the floor and back to the couch; cursing at google docs for reformatting, pinwheeling, rejecting edits.  We would negotiate end times, but two against one usually meant one a.m.  Sleep, shower, and a Mister Bagel pick-up before a 7:30 a.m. arrival.  Some nights, when the class included only two of us, we worked until 2:30 a.m.  I slept on her couch and woke to the alarm at 6:30 a.m.  A coaxing boyfriend helped pry us out of deep sleep.  On nights when I returned home, I would crash into bed without seeing the pillow.  The nights I didn’t, I watched the walls close in on me.

Winter came early that year, and the weather guaranteed us a snowy day.  So we hauled our text books and our code books and our laptops and our sweatpants to her tiny apartment intent on feeling cozy and enjoying the snowfall.  Days into reading “week” and days from its end, we could fill the day with comforts and ignore some of the anxiety.  We laughed that day.  Drunk on late nights and early mornings, coffee light and sweet, hours of tax statutes, days of sweatpants, and the sight of falling snowflakes, we belted out in hysterics.  When the sun set and she made coffee for the hour, we crowded into her kitchen, opened her backdoor, and took turns grabbing fists full of the snow piled on her porch railing.  When it became hard to reach, she held me by the waist, and I reached out farther than gravity allowed to grab handfuls for the three of us.  She would pull me in and we would collapse in hysterics.  I remember holding my sides on her kitchen floor.

I don’t remember the number of places we called hoping to print our outlines in color.  Open note exams meant extreme organization, labeling, and detailed notes.  Colored copies of our fifty some odd pages became an urgent requirement.  Dinner became a secondary priority as we tried to find places still open.  We settled on a place downtown and piled into the car of the only one willing to drive in the light snow.  It never occurred to us to change out of our sweatpants or brush our hair.  I’m not sure if we had even showered that day. 

We had a hard time finding parking.  The holiday lights strung above the streets reminded us of the festivities that we were missing again this year.  The snow smeared on the windshield made it hard to see.  We climbed out of the car with heavy feet.  December wind ripped through our sweatpants.  We trudged by a restaurant window filled with cheery faces and couples holding hands under pretty white-light chandeliers.  I realized it was Saturday night and begrudged them their free time and dinners and love.  My reflection in the window fell over their cheer.  My eyes vacant, my mouth taught, messy hair, sweatpants too big tucked into heavy snow boots.  I put my head down and kept walking.  I didn’t need to see any of that.

When we got to the store, it was closed.  Lights off, door locked.  Of course!  It was Saturday night!  We had lost our days weeks ago, forgotten that the world still ordered itself around times for work and times for rest.  We stood there and looked at one another in silence.  She checked her phone for the time - we could get to the next place if we hurried.  “Run!” someone shouted, it could have been any of us.  We ran.

A jog at first, but the we picked up the pace together until we reached a sprint.  I don’t know who let out the first screech, but I felt its release.  We turned our faces up to the snow and squealed and screeched and clamoured down the sidewalk.  Belly laughs erupted and the peaks and valleys of our squeals turned into sustained screaming with bursts of laughter.  We ran by the restaurant window and the diners turned to watch.  This time I saw our reflections in a flash: my smile and our eyes lit up in the street lights and the falling snowflakes.   Sheer joy.  For this moment, I knew the better deal was on our side of the window.

Slip knot. Slip not.

Which thread unravels the knot?

In an instant, we came undone. Word over word, breath over breath, hastily, as if the sand would run out of the hourglass all together.

Perhaps it did. The shock of electricity, melted glass. I shook afterwards, held my face up towards the rain. Waited to put one foot in front of the other. Watched the sun break over the horizon, golden yellow under the dark clouds, all the days to come lit up at once. Golden yellow and sky blue. Sky blue and then golden yellow. 

And so it was. An undoing. 

One foot in front of the other, we're clumsy, both of us, I know this too soon. One foot in front of the other. His step, my step. Forward, forward, backward, side, forward, backward, side, side, turnabout, backward, forward, turnabout, side, side. Connected and tangled. Knotted. The words splayed out around us, wedged between us, pieces of a puzzle. The sand next to the hourglass. I can't find the beginning or the end. I am quiet, with so much more to say. Not until the knots unravel. Not until we're standing face to face. Connected, without the tangle.

A gentle tug, these knots will fall away. Slip knot. Slip not. 

Which thread unravels?

Always, words. All this, words. 

Which undo, unravel.