Trigger warning for discussion of death, grief, and school shootings in this article.
“You never really know these things happen until they happen to you.” This is what I wrote in the caption of a blank Instagram post late into the night of February 14th, 2018, hours after my school was the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S history where we lost 17 of our own, a mixture of students, teachers, and faculty. It’s been three years since then– since the formation of March for Our Lives, since the celebrities visited my quiet hometown, since we marched on Washington, and still, none of it feels real. It’s as if it happened to a different version of me rather than the one that’s writing this article. There are some things the news left out that I think you should know.
Three years of therapy, growth, and ruined relationships taught me that the effects of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) will last a lifetime. When I was first diagnosed and decided to talk to CNN about it on the one-year anniversary after the shooting, I received harsh comments telling me that my PTSD wasn’t real. I was told that if I didn’t fight in a war, I wasn’t allowed to have PTSD even though I had a professional diagnosis of the disorder and definitely felt the trauma in my everyday life. This is something that I can’t seem to fully grasp, still feeling embarrassed when I open up to a new friend that I trust about my diagnosis and how it still affects me. I have PTSD. I will have PTSD for the rest of my life. The symptoms may lessen over time; someday I will be able to hear a door slam and not be taken back to that Valentine’s Day in 2018 when I didn’t quite know what those popping sounds were. Someday I will be able to sit alone in a movie theater and not fear for my life. Someday it will get better.
Along with the PTSD, the guilt of it all never really goes away. Sometimes I think I haven’t done enough living to spite him and to do justice by them. I think about my friends who lost their lives that day; they were going to do great things, and they got taken from the world too soon. Sometimes I feel guilty for not thinking about them enough and then feel guilty for thinking about them so much it gets in the way of my day-to-day life. Anyone who has experienced death knows this feeling, but it was made worse with the presence of survivor’s guilt and thoughts of “it should have been me,” which echoed in my mind for years after and still occur today.
I don’t want to leave this article on a low note. It is a sad topic, to say the least. Some good came after the bad. The lifelong connections I will have with my high school class are as strong as ever; we always seem to check on each other when we need it the most. The country became more aware of how complicit they are in perpetuating gun violence, breaking the cycle of the general population hearing about a school shooting, mourning for a week, and then moving on until the next one hits. I was able to choose a career path after seeing the courage and bravery exemplified by teachers. I chose to go into the College of Education at USF immediately after graduating high school.
Three years and many tears shed, I finally feel myself healing. It’s been a long journey, but it can only go up from here.