The movie theater shooting happened the day Ava was born. I was too busy recovering and processing everything that happened to pay too much attention to that.
Here I am 5 months later I am coming to grips with my PTSD. I have seen the impact this has had in many aspects of my life. Now, in the brinks of another national tragedy of the Connecticut elementary school shooting all I can think of is how these poor children are going to recover from the images they saw. The nightmares. The waking terrors and panic attacks. They are too young to have to deal with that. I guarantee that there will be a lot of students and faculty that will suffer from this for the rest of their lives. How do you comfort a small child through this? I can logically think my situation through and it gets me to a point that I can handle it. There is no logic to this. At all. I pray that these children will be able to be resilient and live a life where this doesn't leave them fearful and scared.
I'm sure that this young man had some sort of mental illness. We need to stop the stigma that mental illness means weakness. We can get help. And that is ok. It is ok to have a mental illness. Embrace it and get the help you need. We aren't meant to live in this world suffering silently. There are resources, therapy, medication that can make it manageable. It isn't going to be easy. But with the right support things like this doesn't need to happen.
