Omnidroid

It was October of 2008 in sunny Torrance California, a suburb of Los Angeles. I was in 4th grade and was bored after school and at home with my sister Lauren. After looking in the fridge for the 1000th time and unfortunately discovering the same collection of boring adult foods and vegetables, I started rifling through my kitchen drawers and discovered a blue edible marker for pastries. With this new found tool, I decided to go over to Lauren who was in first grade at the time and to my surprise, after lying and saying it would come off with water because it’s edible, successfully convinced her to let me draw a mustache on her face. The reasoning behind this was that I wanted to do this to myself because I thought it would be funny, but I wasn’t completely sure it would come off but thought it most likely would because it was edible. As I was carrying out this experiment on my sister she kept asking if it would come off and I insisted it would, but to be safe and ensure the experiment would continue I didn’t try to prove it to her for fear it would not come off. By the end I drew a mustache on my sister with massive curled tips on her cheeks that would put any hipster to shame. I then proceeded to let her draw one on me. However as she got to the middle of my face I panicked and stopped her because I realized I didn’t see if I could get it off my sister’s face. Immediately after this I heard a car door close in our driveway and my heart sank. My mom was home. I sprint with my sister to the bathroom to attempt to rub off the mustache with water and shockingly, it didn’t. I can’t remember how I tried to hide that my sister and I had apparently just gone through smurf puberty in the ten or so hours since she had last seen us. What I do remember is that when she did find out and I explained my theory about the marker being edible to her she said something along the lines of “Oh no you read it wrong, what you need to do is redraw over the place where you drew and then it will come off here let me show you, lay down so I can be sure to draw over it accurately” I foolishly believed her the same way my sister had believed me. As she was redrawing hard over my half stash I felt the marker cross the prime meridian of my face and I saw her face shift from one of an endearing caring mom to one I had see too many times before of a vindictive prison warden- I immediately knew what she was doing. I attempted to move away but couldn’t because she had pinned me to the ground. When I got up and looked at my sister and looked in the mirror, despite our three year age gap my sister and I had become twins. The idea being that regardless of if it came off soon or not that I would have to feel the pain and humiliation my sister would. However, after our lesson in retributive justice my mom looks through the stuff we brought home from school that day she sees a note reminding parents picture day is tomorrow. My mom never bought the photos so she didn’t care much but she did laugh as she reminded us picture day was tomorrow. I proceed to freak out thinking that I’m going to be made fun of and now felt some level of what my sister did. So I went into research and development mode and tried to rub every soap, lotion, cream and anything I could find on our mustaches but nothing worked. Now we had red lips and cheeks with a blue mustache. In a final last ditch effort I used aquafresh toothpaste and with enough scrubbing it came off. What I learned was that while I really shouldn’t try to mess with my sister if I do mess up or something happens there is always something I can do to fix it. Which would be needed with the various times I would buzz her with a RC helicopter until it got stuck in her hair one day and I had to cut it out, the times I got bubble gum stuck in her hair because I wanted to pop a bubble right next to her ear and so on. No matter what happened there was something I could always do to fix it.

Fast forward 10 years to 2018 and my family had moved to South Florida in the middle of my freshman year of highschool because my father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and we needed somewhere cheaper for him to live in medical retirement. In high school I was interested in becoming a broadcast journalist so I took TV production and speech and debate. In hindsight, my interest in these two subject stemmed from the fact that I wanted to prove to my classmates that despite being a horrible writer and poor performing student due to my dyslexia and A.D.D.- I wasn’t an idiot and second TV production was the perfect mix of my passion for public speaking and obsession with photography/cinematography. Having moved in the middle of freshman year, it was hard making friends at my new school so my camera became my best friend. It was my way of telling other people’s stories even if I did not know my own, it was my excuse to be anywhere even if I didn’t have a friend because I could just say I was at school events like football games for TV production. So whenever I didn’t know what to do with myself I always turned to my camera. All of these interests started to come together in senior year of high school at which point my sister had just started as a freshman and decided to try out TV production due partly to my very strong insistence she try it. By February, I had finished several months of work creating a documentary about a weather balloon with cameras and science instruments that our Astronomy class sends to the edge of space every year. The documentary wasn’t anything Ken Burns would endorse- but it was my first film and I was proud. Despite knowing its quality, I still thought I would submit it to a film association for the fun of it. By this point it was Valentine’s day and I was putting the final touches on the film with my trusty team of unpaid editors. The weekend before I finished my Eagle Scout project building an aquaponics system in our school garden and some new garden beds. However I never got to submit the documentary or finish my last few merit badges to become an Eagle Scout.

That day at the end of school on Valentine’s day, I was in my A.P. Environmental Science class and we were learning about trash and the damage it does to the environment. The door to our classroom was open because it was one of the few days of the year in Florida it was below 85F so we had the door open and we could hear stuff outside, my high school Marjorie Stoneman Douglas is an outdoor school. As my seat partner and I are working on our worksheet we hear what sounds like a gunshot outside and look at each other and say “Did you hear that? That kind of sounded like a gunshot” in agreement we look up at our teacher and she closes the door just in case it’s something like an active shooter drill. Right as she closes her door the fire alarm goes off. Naturally the students start packing up and heading out to our evacuation zone, one floor down. As we are walking toward our evacuation zone however a stampede of students are running in the opposite direction saying “Don’t come this way he’s coming this way” Instinctually we start running with the crowd. As we were running I was still thinking that this was an active shooter drill most likely but I was also thinking if it’s not should I run to my car that’s in the parking lot next to the freshman building and just get out of here? But I knew that I wouldn’t because I didn’t want to be embarrassed if this was just a drill and second there is a gate that in all likelihood was locked. Soon however it wouldn’t matter because as we were running and about to be right in front of the freshman building, a janitor or some teacher I’ve never seen sense stopped us and said “don’t come this way he’s over here”. At that moment the stampede froze, not knowing what to do. But after we did the classroom door right next to us flew open and Chef Kurth, a cooking teacher, took in what seemed like 60 students in what felt like 20 seconds into her classroom. Students around me were having panic attacks, getting sick, hyperventilating etc. At that moment I got a call from my sister freaking out saying she’s scared and clearly she was asking if this was just a drill or real or what to do. All I could think was to lean back on what my father, who was an FBI agent had taught my sister and I growing up about no matter what staying calm in situations like this. After I told my sister to stay calm and that I didn’t know what to do but to focus on her breathing (at the time I had been doing a lot of mindfulness meditation) I got off the phone. It was also around this time that either Lauren or I texted our mom and dad saying there’s a school shooting and that we loved them. By this point I started hearing my classmates talk about how they saw the shooting on social media and in combination with the teachers attitude and radio conversations knew it wasn’t a drill. Now trying to figure out how to take my own advice I turned to what I had always turned to in moments where I didnt know what to do with myself. I turned to my camera. Knowing the situation was out of my control I focused on something that was- interviewing my classmates. I asked them about their views on guns, the gun lobby, gun laws and what they thought should be done about gun violence. I asked these questions for several reasons. One they obviously felt relevant given what was happening. But two I had seen the past year of shootings in Las Vegas and Orlando and how the media just quickly moved on and little changed after. I became aware of the NRA because of having to argue on both sides of issues like universal background checks and other topics in debate. As I watched the news after these shootings I would always see the NRA say “you can’t talk about what to do about them because to do so would be politicizing tragedy”. My thought conducting the interviews at this time was to calm myself but also to be sure that if we were killed in our classroom and our bodies were left on the floor, our voices would carry on and make some kind of change. Knowing it would be impossible for the NRA to say we are politicizing tragedy when the very kids who went through this said that they wanted change. After conducting these interviews and about two hours later the SWAT team enters our classroom guns blazing yell at all of us to get down and leave our bags, then sending us out of the school.

Thankfully I made it out that day because unbeknownst to us, the shooting had happened in the freshman building next to ours and my sister made it out alive because the TV production class she was in was on the opposite side of campus from the freshman building. As we walked outside, I connected with my father and took the truck home that he had driven to school and left my dad to reconnect with my sister who would be let out several hours later. On my way home I remember just driving hearing nothing but the white noise of the road moving under the truck and then breaking the silence just screaming “Fuck” what had to be at least 100 times before I parked in our driveway. Slamming the door to the truck screaming fuck one last time so loud you could probably hear it two blocks away. As I went inside and plugged in my phone and waited for it to charge all I could think to do was lay down on the cool tile floor and just lay there. By the time my phone came back to life I was texting with the editor at my local paper who I knew from an internship I had done and told her about the footage I had and sent to her. After I sent that footage to her and it was uploaded which took a long time. By the time it was uploaded my dad called me and it was time to go pick up my sister. As I pulled up, even though I couldn’t hear her I could feel her crying and wailing from a mile away just seeing body language and my dad basically holding her up to walk because she was so distraught. As I pulled up to them I could hear her whaling. As soon as the door opened to the car it was the most painful thing I had ever heard. I heard her in between her choking on her own tears describing how they had to barricade the door in TV production and how she’d seen and heard the shooting from watching it on other students social media, recording their classrooms as their classmates were murdered by 19 year old former student with an AR-15. Lauren at the age of 14 would come to find out as the final death count came in that four of her friends had died in the shooting with a total of 17 students and educators dying that day. After we got home my mother arrived shortly afterward after coming home from her job as a teacher at another school. Upon seeing Lauren so distraught and becoming somewhat distraught herself, my mom, not knowing what to do, attempted to make my sister take a shot of whiskey to calm down but she couldn’t because she was so upset and also 14. After turning on the TV and seeing the death count get higher and higher finding out the identities of more and more of the students who died, Lauren, to my horror and deep uncomfortability became even more upset. I was so bothered by her wailing that I went outside to escape the sound only to have it slightly muffled and to have the distant sound of news helicopters over my high school replace it as the sun got lower. After sitting outside for a few minutes with both these sounds I couldn’t stand it anymore. Unlike all the other times when my sister was upset when I had drawn a mustache on her or gotten gum stuck in her hair, this was the first time I couldn’t fix it. There was no amount of toothpaste or peanut butter that would bring her friends back. I decided to do the only thing I could think to do to stay sane and not fall into the pit of despair my sister was in was to speak out for those who couldn’t like my sister instead of letting talking heads tell our story, debate the issue and continue the cycle of thoughts and prayers, debate and inaction. I wanted the students to speak for themselves. So I told my parents I was going back to school and they said absolutely not and I basically told them I am going to tell the story of what happened and I have to. After defying their orders I went back to school and went up to the first TV camera I saw, told them I was a student and asked if they wanted an interview. Telling the story of what happened that day at first as a student journalist and eventually an activist. I didn’t know it that night but the following year and a half would be the hardest, most exhausting period of my life. . You might be asking like I was as I wrote this and shared it with friends why I wasn’t more emotional and to be honest with you the only answer I could think of was that I was surrounded by so much emotion that I didn’t really think about how I felt other than just being mad that this happened. I think some of it might be a product of my leadership training in Boy Scouts where in any situation you are taught that panicking is the least productive thing to do.

In the six or so weeks following the shooting, students from my high school could be seen speaking on national news, organized bus trips up to our state capital Tallahassee to lobby for gun laws being changed, hundreds of thousands of students walked out of their schools on the one month anniversary of the shooting and we had a march in D.C. with over 500,000 people present with 800 sister marches around the country and world. This period was marked by getting very little sleep and acute levels of stress. Most days we would start with being on the news at 4 or 5 am and most days would end around 12 or 1 am. The result was far more than being exhausted. It was getting ill because our immune systems were weakened by the amount of stress we were under to the point I can remember multiple interviews where I nearly passed out from exhaustion and feeling so sick. A surprising effect was that to this day I still can’t remember much of what we were doing on a day to day basis in the time after the shooting and before the march. I believe this is mainly because we were getting so little sleep that my brain couldn’t encode many memories properly. There were also a lot of extremely early morning flights and red-eyes going cross country for various news programs. We got in a cycle of basically going and not stopping until you either collapsed from exhaustion or were so sick that we couldn’t get out of bed. Once we got any strength back we repeated the cycle. This went on for six weeks leading up to the march. You might be asking yourself where our parents were. The answer is that they were watching from the sidelines in horror and awe of what we were doing. Many of them including mine had initially tried to stop us but we were so upset by what happened that little could be done to stop us. We were on a mission to make this time different, we were driven by trauma, survivor’s guilt and righteous indignation. Nothing could stop us. Not the NRA, not our parents, not the dead animals some of us had dropped on our doorsteps, not even the hundreds if not thousands of death threats we got.

After the march we decided to do a bus tour across the country in the summer to help turnout young people to vote. Over the course of about 60 days and with a total of three legs of this tour nationally along with one based in Florida, we went from Chicago to Bismark for leg one, Dallas to Los Angeles for leg two, and Tallahassee to Newtown, CT for our third and final leg. Each day of the tour consisted of the following generic schedule. First a several hour bus ride to our next tour stop, dropping our stuff off at the hotel, a local private event with community organizers where the organizers would share stories often about their experience with gun violence- not that we had to but it just happened, then bigger community event open to the public usually with pizza for lunch, I don’t think I have ever ate so much pizza in my life, then straight to a town hall event with several hundred to a thousand in attendance, with a panel conversation with community organizers often themselves survivors of gun violence, students from other stops who joined the tour and “The Parkland Kids” as we were often referred to as. More often than not outside the event there would be armed protestors from far-right militia groups assuming the event didn’t get canceled because someone called in a threat to the venue which was not uncommon. The threats and armed counter protestors screaming that we are paid government actors and that the shooting at my high school didn’t happen, certainly did take a toll. What really burnt me out the most was hearing the stories of hundreds of people everyday about their experiences with gun violence and the exhaustion of traveling every single day with only a few days in between legs of the tour. By the third leg of the tour I was sick as a dog early on in Georgia and had to start sleeping on the bus during events because I felt so horrible as I know many others did too. I would spend the rest of the final leg attempting to sleep if I got the chance, which was difficult because we were so used to working ourselves to the point of exhaustion we would just fall asleep immediately. When I did try to catch up on sleep I couldn’t sleep because there was so much my mind would run through the same thoughts and stories I had heard from people about gun violence or things I experienced. I was so sick that by the time we got to Newtown I could barely speak or do much at all. All along the way I would have person after person ask me how I was and tell me to take care of myself. The truth was I didn’t know how I was but it clearly wasn’t good and I didnt know how to take care of myself and I thought even if I did how could I? Don’t people see that kids are dying everyday? How could I rest? How could anyone rest knowing that is happening? It’s not like it would matter anyway if I did because I had completely stopped doing anything I liked that was not directly related to the movement and had effectively cut off all my friends who were not in the movement. The movement was my universe. If I was a fish it was my water. For all that I cared that’s all there was. The problem was that I was underwater and thought I was a fish but wasn’t. I was dawning but couldn’t feel the water entering my lungs because all I could think about was November 2nd- election day. After our summer tour there was one last tour before election day. The vote for our lives tour. The point of this was to go to college campuses and help turnout young people to vote. The thing was that this time it was not a bus tour we were flying everywhere. For two weeks before the election it was like all the negative aspects of our summer tour but on steroids with way more jet lag and red eyes. Most days were like the summer tour but instead of waking up and going an hour or two to our event on the bus it was us waking up at 3AM or 4AM every single day, flying several states and timezones, hosting the events until 11 pm or 12 AM going to bed for a few hours, attempting to sleep and then repeating the process. With the final 72 hours involving me sleeping not in a bed but on a plane or bus going from Miami to LA then after 5 hour so hours at a rally in Orange County, flying back to Florida on a red eye to Charlotte, NC, transferring planes to go to Tallahassee, FL (Florida State University is there) then to Gainesville for an event at the University of Florida, then taking a party bus overnight the whole eight hour drive to Parkland for election day.

The year after the election I decided to take a gap year, in this year I traveled the country working with March For Our Lives and spoke at various colleges and conferences about the work the organization does. Much of this time was spent away from my home on the road. In this time I became even more involved in the work and study of gun violence. I read every book and study I could find on what makes movements succeed and fail and tons of books on gun violence. Everyday all I would do was eat breath and sleep. Even my dreams were about the work we were doing. It was inescapable. I lost track of what day it was because everyday was some different version of either waking up and getting on a plane to go somewhere, studying and talking for hours on end about gun violence and repeating the cycle the next day. With a couple days back home every week or two. This travel, along with many of my friends going off to college resulted in me almost completely losing touch with anyone I knew before the shooting who was not directly involved in activism after the shooting. By the end of this year all I knew was activism and work. While I was in therapy for a short time after the shooting, by the summer of 2019 I had been so unable to attend in person therapy that I stopped going. I also thought that I didn’t need it because I wasn’t nearly as impacted by the shooting as many of my classmates. But the real challenge would come when I started college that fall.

When I started college it was my first time since the shooting really being in the same place for more than a week or so. Starting college after traveling that much and doing little other than activism and sleeping was like flying into a brick wall. When I started college I got a buzz cut in a futile attempt to change my appearance so I would be able to blend in more and so that I would be able to be more “efficient” by not having to spend as much time brushing my hair. By October of college my first symptoms of PTSD started to settle in. I went from being able to sleep normally to being extremely paranoid and got into a vicious cycle of having the same nightmares over and over again of the shooting or being in mass shootings but also surprisingly, dreams of being back on the road, being so exhausted and emotionally raw from not processing what I had gone through and also meeting so many other people who had also gone through different instances of gun violence. It got especially bad with the presidential primaries that were happening later in fall where I would have nightmares. I was on a perpetual campaign talking about the worst day of my life over and over again. I also would have nightmares about the times people attempted to run me off the road and about the death threats my family got. At this point I was still traveling almost every weekend to a different state for various related movement events. But once my sleep got bad enough that I was only getting four or less hours of sleep at night and was perpetually sick because of my lack of sleep, I had to learn to say no. So I canceled nearly all the commitments I had and finally decided to be a college student. I would spend the rest of the semester focused on trying to just do normal college stuff like studying, hanging out with friends and more. But it didn’t work. I just felt numb. I didn’t feel sad or happy or anything. I felt completely numb. In hindsight the reason I felt this way was because I had to become numb to continue doing the work. I had developed an emotional callus that I had gotten so used to I didn’t even realize it was there. The PTSD continued and all I would talk about still was the movement.

By the time the next semester had arrived I was focused on getting my mental health in check. So I started journaling everyday and writing out what I did that day and how I felt on a scale of 1–5. The idea behind this was that by writing down what happened daily I would be able to see what broke through the numbness and made my PTSD less severe. I also restarted therapy.

Reflecting on the past two plus years since I started journaling and going to therapy what I have realized is that the shooting was the day my childhood ended. From that day on my classmates and I behaved the way we expected adults to. Simply to just do the work, organize and do nothing else. What we didn’t realize, or at least I know that I didn’t, was how critical it would be for us to learn how to be kids again, to do fun things again and not feel guilty, to do things not related to the work and have friends outside the movement. Through journaling and therapy I have learned the most important thing to this work isn’t how many hours we can put in or how many voters can we register, it’s to remember some of the things that feel least important, rest, art, doing things we enjoy, are arguably the most important to sustain the work. While we can never bring back those we lost that day we can work to bring parts of us that we lost that day. For me that meant learning to have fun, be a college student and friend again.

No matter if it’s the movement for gun safety or another movement entirely, don’t lose yourself and what it means to be human when you have already lost so much. The danger long term for this movement, like many others, is not that people won’t be motivated doing the work. It is that the motivation we feel is so great we put far too much pressure on ourselves and lose the ability to persist. Activists who lose what it means to be human, who refuse to see joy as resistance, who can’t accept that they have limits, will not last and neither will the movement.

It is remembering that same childish fun my sister and I had when we drew mustaches on each other. That fun and connection siblings have, that our friends as chosen family have, that will sustain the movement so that maybe one day all we will have to worry about is how to get a blue mustache off our sister and not how to care for them after they have four friends murdered.

The name of this essay was based on the robot in the incredibles that is so powerful only it can destroy itself. I saw the power of the omnidroid as a good symbol of trauma in movements.