I didn’t have a name for all the feelings that resided in me when I thought of Janeera.

What I did know was that I refused to go to the Texan famous Whataburger restaurant because the part of me that was Californian was loyal to In-N-Out. Eventually I relented and said my first time would be with her.

What I did know is that we took goofy videos of us on the bridge behind our community college that she posted on an obscure photo sharing app.

What I did know was that we kept postponing our hiking — we called it exploring — plans beyond the bridge, because we just knew we would be tired and aching and would complain about it for the rest of the week.

What I did know was that if I went to school the day she was murdered, she would have walked me to my class’s building on the opposite side of the school.

And she would still be alive.

Friendship opportunities during community college were scarce. Sure, I was lonely, but was it really worth making friends in this new state when I could possible move again when I transferred to university? I figured I could probably last one more semester.

After the first week of spring semester, I entered my Spanish class about 2 minutes earlier than usual and noticed a small girl sitting in the seat next to mine. I sat down, settled my things, and asked her how she had fared through the homework.

We consistently became the only people that showed up to the class that early. I told her that I came early because if I even came in a minute late, everyone’s heads would swivel in my direction. And even if only for a second, their attention would be solely on me, and the idea of that made me want to vomit. I sucked in a deep breath of air after the fat text bubble I had just blurted out. She agreed with me.

And from then on, an unexpected friendship bloomed.

Janeera and I would hang out at the bridge behind the school. She called the bridge a secret; she said that nobody ever hangs around this far behind campus. So we claimed the “secret” bridge as our own and went there almost every day.

On the school’s side of the bridge was a garden — it was green with mold and just the right amount of neglect that made it feel a little sad. It had tall trees with leaves covering the sky and the occasional duck that had strayed from the small stream under the bridge. It was always cold there, but she never wore jackets––she said she didn’t feel so cold. The other side of the bridge was what we called the forest. A forest was too big of a word for what it really was; a cluster of trees with a few trails here and there to make it walkable.

One cloudy day we stood on the bridge and looked over to see the muddy waters below us slowly undulate away. She told me about how she identified with her Hispanic culture and how the political climate made her upset — not angry, she reiterated. Just sad.

“What’s your opinion on guns?” I asked. “I hate them. I would feel safer with more gun control.”

“I also believe in gun control,” she replied. “But I like the concept of gun ownership. What about you?”

“I am scared to death of guns,” I told her.

I didn’t go to school the day she died. There was no reason for my absence — I was lazy and the spring semester was winding down as summer approached. My phone started to light up around 10 a.m. — someone in my history class group chat asked if anyone else had heard the noises that sounded like shots. They all replied no. I told them I skipped classes that day. A few moments later, someone else in the group chat said that yes, the noises were real gun shots, and that they were following intruder protocols right that moment.

I scoured local new sites, incredulous that a shooting would happen in the small suburb of nowhere Irving, Texas. I pulled down the touchscreen on my phone, morbidly curious for the next update. Every refreshing of the page followed was followed by a dark curiosity accompanied with a pit of dread. Thank god I wasn’t at school, I thought.

I didn’t even text Janeera to see if she was fine.

The evening the shooting happened, I went to Panera Bread with a family friend. I had macaroni and cheese and an M&M cookie. My history class group chat lit up again with the latest update on the incident: that there was a reported one fatality.

“Thank God,” one of them texted. I clicked on the link and the first image on my phone screen was Janeera’s face with a flower crown Snapchat filter on her head. I excused myself and shuffled my way through the restaurant until I stood still in a bathroom stall. The idea that my only friend, a quickly close friend was dead — no, murdered — was unbelievably impossible for me to grasp. I didn’t know how shock felt, but I was sure it felt like it did then.

The feelings that flowed through me were foreign. How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?

How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?
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I told my mother about Janeera. She didn’t understand that I wanted to lay my head on her lap and cry. I told a friend about Janeera. She didn’t take me seriously. I suppose it has to do with the façade that I wear that everyone sees: I’m funny, I make jokes, I’m never serious, and I definitely do not have friends that are victims of gun violence. She just looked at me and asked if I was joking. Why would I be joking? I answered back.

One hot day, I walked across the bridge to the forest for the first time ever. I followed the path between the trees and not a single tear formed in my eyes. Which was strange for who I was, I normally cried at the simplest of things.

When Janeera’s brother messaged me on Twitter with information about her wake and funeral, I cried.

When my history group didn’t believe that I was Janeera’s friend and I basically had to prove to them that I actually was Janeera’s friend, I cried.

When I listened to “Blue Jeans” by Lana Del Rey — a song we used to listen to — I cried.

Why Are We Used To Violence But Caught Off Guard By Hurt?

So yes, it was quite strange that after all the talk we had about our potential exploration, I didn’t cry when I went into the woodsy area without her.

I walked for about two hours. My headscarf burned an embarrassing tan line around my face and my Converse high-tops were definitely not the right shoes for the activity.

When I went to Whataburger for the first time with a few coworkers, I remembered my promise to Janeera that my first time trying the traditional Texas staple would be with her. I didn’t cry then, too. I felt melancholy; a longing for a friend who understood me in a way that I thought rare for someone as complicated as myself.

The police say that this man was stalking her after she had turned him down multiple times. If that story was correct, I knew nothing about it. She never told me about a guy persistently asking her out on dates, or that he was following her. I wondered why. Every time I walked outside and saw a man holding an object, or walking a little too fast, or with his hands in his pockets, panic began to brew in my chest. Theoretically, I knew that every man wasn’t a potential school shooter, but there was a small part of my mind that totally believed that every man was.

I was lying down on my bed and scrolling through my phone. School had been canceled and professors sent out emails addressing Janeera’s death. Teachers were giving out accommodations on finals due to the tragedy. My Spanish teacher called me personally after she sent out a class email. I picked up the incoming call and when the professor told me who it was, tears slipped out of my eyes as I remembered the way our friendship had begun.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes.
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A girl I knew recorded a few “story time” videos about the shooting and posted them on Snapchat. Her videos were of her laughing and making inappropriate jokes about the gun and the man. I tapped on the screen to skip to other clips of her talking. She continued to laugh and joke.

“And as soon I heard those gunshots, I got up and sprinted! I didn’t wait for any professor or anything!” She laughed hysterically. “At least only one girl got shot — she should have run like I did!” More laughter.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes. And honestly, as stories go, it wasn’t even the slightest bit funny. A few days later, she approached me at school. She offered her condolences and wrapped her arm around me in a halfhearted hug. I wondered if people talked to me to become closer to tragedy. I accepted her words but eventually walked away. All I could hear were her videos and how she trivialized Janeera’s death.

Spring semester was my last time physically at school until I eventually transferred to Seattle University, the following year.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space. Someone had been shot dead at our school.

Janeera used to sit at this particular couch that was to the side of the college’s common room. We would meet there and sit for an hour or so before heading to our Spanish class. I don’t know exactly where she died, but a morbid piece of my mind imagines she was shot on that couch.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space.
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I imagine her face in shock as she realizes that she is about to die, I imagine the bullets hitting her as she bleeds through her clothes, staining the carpeted floor and couch. I know that following that trail of thought will not get me anywhere productive, but I can’t help but follow it anyway. The idea of walking into school and passing the common room everyday sickened me.

When brainstorming this piece, I sat and talked to a close friend. She has a degree in sociology, and is the perfect person to turn to when you need help with big pictures in social settings. “Why do you think that some school shootings get more attention than others?” I asked. “What happened that made us numb to these deaths?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Later that day, the news broke on the Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018. The thoughts that ran through my head when I heard of the tragedy— I knew they were not logical.

Every rational part of me knew that these thoughts were unreasonable, but the combination sadness and guilt overrode the logic. I thought: “I spoke the shooting into existence when I speculated aloud earlier. And it’s my fault.” For the rest of the day as I refreshed the news on my phone, I berated myself for causing the tragedy: If only I had chosen a different topic to write on, if only I had kept my mouth shut and not asked stupid questions, 17 kids would still be alive and I would be spared from having to revisit the death of my friend as if it was the first day.

The vigor that I see in the Stoneman Douglas high school students inspires me. They say every movement starts with one moment. And I think that we are in a moment right now — the high school students that are demanding for their safety is a moment. The national and international support, and the momentum they have is a moment. Their ability to organize events, marches, and movements in less than one month is a moment.

I can only hope that I can tap into my strength and contribute my voice to a cause that is deeply personal to me.

It took me six months to tell my therapist about Janeera. During the session I used nearly half of her tissues. She called it a “multiple Kleenex day.” After the session, she gave me a hug. She had never hugged me before.

Dr. Novinsky told me that I didn’t know for sure that if I was at school that day Janeera wouldn’t have died. In fact, she told me that if this man was stalking her, he would have known that she would be with me and I would be dead, too.

And I wonder if death would have been more peaceful than the seemingly perpetual sadness that followed me long after Janeera’s death.

When ardent defenders of gun rights don’t want to talk about what’s wrong with guns, they talk about what they think is wrong with the people who make the news for using guns the way they’re made to be used. Often there’s a quietly intense litany of curses — “crazy,” “nuts” — meaning the individuals in question do not count among the “normal.” During this part, they always spit the word “sick” as though there is nothing more wretched and strange than being mentally unwell. Being me. Being among what is actually an enormous and ordinary population.

A disdain for those deemed abnormal is animating the conversation. After the massacres in Las Vegas and Parkland, the idea of bringing back asylums has found new support, in thoughtless one-offs but also in serious proposals in trustworthy outlets. A few Parkland survivors, too, suggested targeting the mentally ill for increased surveillance by law enforcement. There is a troubling desire to deal with the disorder that is gun violence by putting people on notice for their diagnoses.

It can be hard to define disorder, both in the clinic and in talking about what we will and will not put up with as a society. It takes nuance to distinguish disorder from wellbeing on a continuum of possibilities and amid the deep inflections of culture and social context. (Are you depressed, or going through a rough patch? Are you fasting because of anorexia or a religious observance? Is an unlivable minimum wage a spur to betterment or a sign of breakdown?)

But carefully defining disorder is core to grappling with the U.S. gun problem — and envisioning a less disordered, more just world. What do we admit into the fold of normal? What do we map to the edges? And what are we seeing all upside down?

For all the people who marched and spoke out for gun control, there may remain as many with a stoic, fatalist understanding that tragedies like gun violence are to be expected. But this understanding coexists with the idea that the various kinds of hurt seen as the causes and effects of gun violence — mental illness as well as the wounds that follow the path of a rifle round — are not a part of ordinary life. We’ve gotten used to violence as background hum, yet we are unprepared to recognize and live alongside people who have been hurt. We’re caught in a chilling dynamic of hurt disseminated and then obscured.

It must be said again up front that the link from mental illness to gun violence is far from straightforward. So entwined are our ideas of mental illness and shocking violence that the question of whether a violent individual is mentally ill is often answered by the fact of their behavior. It is true that reports of mental illness are common among those who carry out some of the most devastating mass shootings. But there remain many mass shooters who do not have an established diagnosis; and among perpetrators of smaller-scale violence, who far outnumber mass shooters, rates of mental illness are unusually low. Even severe mental illness is not enough to explain the pronounced patterns of gun violence unique to the U.S., because concomitant disadvantages are part of the picture. Using the single variable of mental health as a net for identifying danger captures far too many people who were never going to violate the social contract.

The wrongful dread of mental illness as this seed of unthinkable acts makes it difficult to conceive of mental illness as an ordinary characteristic, found abundantly among friends and neighbors and maybe even in ourselves. When I was struggling to get a handle on my major depressive disorder, I understood the concept of “needing help” to mean possessing shortcomings terrible enough to require professional intervention. I shrank from crucial medical care because accepting it would have felt like admitting monstrosity. I did not realize how common my illness was. Nor did I realize that monstrous tendencies inhabit every human being, not just the ones we would make outcasts.

How We Learn To Love ‘Good’ White Men With Guns
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The unseen ordinariness of mental illness, and other illness, can explain gaps in care. Sickness is implicitly seen by too many lawmakers as what happens when you have done something wrong, not a quotidian fact of numerous lives regardless of how they have been lived. If serious illness were seen as truly ordinary, it would not be so hard to afford. Nor would disability be so often a sentence of poverty. Workers would have the right to get sick yet stay employed. Swaths of public life would not still be inaccessible to people with disabilities, and the Americans with Disabilities Act would not be at risk of getting fundamentally undercut.

The people who survive gunshot wounds are no exception to this neglect. The tens of thousands who die every year in the U.S. because of guns are staggering enough, but these dead represent only 20% of those who have gone through the trauma of being shot. Many of the survivors deal with chronic pain and posttraumatic stress combined with health-care insecurity, as detailed by sociologist Jooyoung Lee. Many are uninsured or underinsured and struggle to control their pain, and some may become desperate to find relief; one leapt into traffic in order to be admitted to a hospital for pain treatment. “In addition to feeling victimized by their shooters, gunshot victims also felt victimized by a health care system that did not continue to care for them,” Lee writes.

Even more numerous than the dead and wounded are those who care about them. Some time ago, a rare dear friend to me gained access to a gun, and left us. They were 17, I was also 17. I still dream about it. Impossible to trace the immense shape of the loss. But here is a fragment of it: Not long afterward, I sought out a doctor and asked for a new prescription for an antidepressant. I am trying to say a gunshot has a long echo.

Dear Congress: I Don’t Need An Effing Gun, I Need Health Care
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Each of these hurts is elided by inaction. Despite a richness of resources we are at least adjacent to, the threshold at which our current leaders begin to pretend to want to address the health and safety of the hurting, including those with mental illness or physical wounds, is a critical mass of tragic headlines and town hall callouts where constituents beg for access to medicine or for protections from weapons that will continue to inflict injury. The rest of the time, the everyday fact of hurt is, it seems, too atypical to acknowledge through meaningful action at high levels.

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” If only Sontag’s view were more widespread.

Next to the refusal to see illness as ordinary is the reluctance, especially among those whose foremost sympathies lie with a couple lines on a centuries-old document, to see current levels of gun violence as disordered. Gun deaths in the U.S. have been repeatedly excused as the price of our exceptional freedom. These deaths now threaten to outpace those from car crashes. Few of the records of people shooting each other are defensive or can be in any way justified; far more incidents are murders or suicides. The violence is absolutely beyond a passing side effect of patriotic or honorable necessity.

Yet the prevailing understanding has been that this violence is impenetrable and inevitable. This violence is not to be challenged, but accommodated. For all the dismay felt across the ideological spectrum after every tragedy, there remains a current of deference. There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons. School shootings are to be met with backpacks that are bulletproof or see-through, behemoth panic rooms wedged beside students’ desks, something something CPR, calls for more empathy not from potential shooters but from potential victims, and buckets of river rocks in every classroom for dispatching threats by stoning. Believing violence to be inevitable also looks like increasing the presence of police in schools, which brings further risks of violence toward and criminalization of students of color and students with disabilities.

These measures are sometimes called hardening the target. They amount to a crouch that braces against onslaughts of our own making as against the uncontrollable weather. It is imaginatively flat.

There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons.
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All these imaginative shortfalls converge in the worst way. The costs of gun violence, from physical to financial, are immense, yet numerically murky. These wounds not only are seen as inconvenient outliers but also have not been adequately quantified, thanks to the ongoing inability of federal agencies to research gun violence. This lack of clarity on consequences muffles the urgency of acting on the problem.

The rhythm of violence inflicted while its effects are obscured is often wielded by the privileged and powerful. We see this with sexual predators. We see this in the increasing permanence of war and the failure to care for veterans, or to reckon with the damage left behind. We see this as the right of the police to freely execute black people, made normal every time yet another officer responsible is released without charges.

And it’s in privilege and power that we might begin to find an explanation for the seeming inability of a nation to connect the dots from gunshot to wound. Gun laws in the U.S. have long operated in service of white supremacy. The majority of mass shooters are white men, and about half are domestic abusers; and men constitute the vast majority of shooters overall. But the group most vulnerable to gun violence is young, working-class black men.

Many noted the contrast between the widely cheered protests spurred by the well-off white neighborhood of Parkland and the less-popular movement for black lives, rooted in Ferguson. Gun violence as it most often occurs elicits so little material response because the aggressor or the injured can often be subsumed into structures of oppression. If those who remain in that imaginative crouch shifted the landscape of their sympathy, perhaps the violence we have come to know as everyday would seem more strange. The people who have been hurting the most could finally make their way from the periphery to the focus.

There’s a lot to do in a day, and there are a lot of mass shootings. This handy guide will make preparing your statement a snap!

My heart is _________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) over news that ________________ (# OF VICTIMS) Americans have been tragically killed by
a _______________ (POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) mentally disturbed family man who deserves our compassion.*

At times like these, we must commit to not _______________ (NEGATIVE ADVERB) politicizing a _______________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) tragedy.**

I will be praying extra hard in the coming days, to ensure our ____________ (POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) God prevents another mass shooting from happening in the most heavily armed __________ (PATRIOTIC ADJECTIVE) country in the world because truly, that is all any of us can do.

America remains a resilient ______________ (HYPERBOLICALLY POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) nation in the face of ________________ (BOMBASTICALLY NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) adversity.

I am, again, so very _____________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE).

With condolences,

___________________________
(GOP CONGRESSMAN NAME)

*Unless perpetrator is Muslim/brown/black, in which case please write “vicious terrorist thug.”

**Unless perpetrator is Muslim/brown, in which case please write “allowing dangerous Islamic terrorism to destroy America.”

***This Mad Lib may be used after every mass shooting in perpetuity forever.

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