It felt like a bit of a stabbing pain.
After the shooting at the elementary school in Texas last week, people began to post a list of the all the schools where there had been shootings in the past nearly thirty years. I scrolled down the list and saw the school where Greg teaches– Cleveland High School.
It was not a pleasant reminder of that day, of the kid who brought a gun to school and shot it a floor below Greg’s classroom, of everything else that transpired that day and has since then. And then on the same day as the shooting in Texas, likely before that shooting, a kid brought a gun to school at Cleveland. Another kid spotted the gun in the kid’s backpack, asked to be excused to the bathroom, and went and found help. The kid and the gun were dealt with quickly and quietly.
The following morning, I tried to post on Facebook and wrote at least five posts, but none of them felt right, deleting them all. Nothing felt right. In my head, the words felt meaningful, but looking at them as a post, they felt meaningless. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t stop thinking about and everything that irritates me and makes me angry, things I am usually able to at least keep at a distance so I can forge forward. Things I mostly only share with Greg and my sister and a few others in my life, things I do not post because I don’t think it’s worth it. If one of my posts makes me feel bad, why am I a sharing it? What’s the point of that? If I need to feel better, then many others probably need inspiration, too.
We can all be negative but I’m not giving in. I’m that person hitting negativity with one of those big inflatable bats, letting it know its not welcome in my world, that I refuse to let it overcome me.
It finally occurred to me that I was grieving. Another loss. Another loss of so many things. Another loss that makes me feel less secure in this world, that makes me worry more about Greg at school than driving the interstate to school.
Yet we can’t stop living and I finally pushed my way back into my work that day, feeling a little better by day’s end. But I didn’t really feel better until I had a party yesterday– bringing people to gather for food and conversation, to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine (and ignore the wind).
It’s hard when it keeps coming at us, when we feel helpless, when we are in those moments where we don’t feel like we can make meaningful change. And yet there is hope somewhere in it– it’s inside us. It’s hard to find it outside us because we must start inside.
If only we all could find it.