Tackabery Chronicle

Columbine by Dave Cullen

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in a discussion on Goodreads with Dave Cullen, the writer of Columbine. Dave wrote about the Columbine incident for Salon.com and his book was very, very powerful. My husband didn’t understand why I exposed myself to the story, but I felt I needed to understand why this thing happened. I found out that Eric Harris was a psychopath and that Dylan Klebold was a depressive who had gotten so far down into his depression that he struck out at those he blamed for it. I learned a lot about how depression can turn into violence, especially in men, although this can happen in women too. You can learn more about the link between depression and violence in adolescents in this excellent article by Dr. Allan Cooperstein.

I was saddened to hear that Dave struggled with PTSD after the Columbine incident and also during the writing of the book. In a revealing article he wrote for Borders, Dave talks about his experiences with PTSD:

School shootings hit me a lot harder since I got to know all those kids at Columbine. This time, it was a 60 Minutes segment called “Bumfights”: teenagers beating up street people for the fun of it. Kids smacked a helpless sleeping drunk with a stick. They returned with bigger sticks. They bashed a guy in the head with a two-by-four, with an exposed nail. They beat him to death.

The writing stopped. I drifted from overwhelming sadness to anxiety attacks. A Hemingway quote from A Farewell To Arms kept running through my head: The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone…

I looked the quote up later. The word crush does not appear. Hemingway said “breaks.” Breaking everyone is bad enough, but I didn’t feel a snap coming, I felt a ferocious weight bearing down. I dreamed of each vertebrae ground to cinder, one by one.

Since reading the book, I’ve thought often about Harris and Klebold’s strange attraction for each other, and the terrible vortex they created between themselves that led to so much death. There was a lot of discussion after the killings about the music they listened to; Harris and Klebold listened to a lot of the music I listen to, so I took that personally at the time, as I don’t recall ever building pipe bombs in my parents’ basement and planning on blowing up my school. I still don’t believe music or video games makes anyone do anything, but they can contribute to atmosphere, and the more you indulge in an atmosphere, the more twisted your perspective can become. The music still won’t make you do murder. But you can get to the point where the darkness is all you can see.

Willingly drawing down that darkness is what must be avoided at all costs. That will must be applied toward reaching towards the light. I don’t believe the darkness is stronger. But the atmosphere … the atmosphere can be very, very tempting. It’s like a whirling dervish dance; it feels like ecstasy, but it’s the wrong drug entirely.

I’ve been avoiding my blog.

Avoidance is a common coping mechanism for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); you want to stay away from the things you know will upset you. But like just about everything else I can think of, avoidance has a dark side. Avoidance can be the crutch that keeps you away from people, just as it has kept me away from this blog.

After my post-surgical recovery ended and I went back to work, I struggled with depression. Our cat Ripley was ill and we didn’t know what was wrong; she rapidly lost weight and I avoided thinking about her impending death. She had lived almost sixteen years, a long, happy, life, but I couldn’t face that goodbye. Eventually we had to let her go. I was also struggling with a stack of letters from my father that I have avoided dealing with since he died that have been sitting in a brown paper bag in a closet. I had told myself I would deal with them during my time off, but I managed not to touch the bag the entire time I was home. Every weekend I would think about that bag, which represented the book I have to write about my father and myself. I can’t explain why I have to write it, I just do. Not for fame, money, or relief; I just have to do it. And I’ve avoided doing it for almost eight years.

Then bopping around on Facebook one day, I found the Aunt who had helped me get in touch with my father. Memories came back, but not in a flood. I didn’t fall down on the floor gasping for breath. I just knew it was time to stop … avoiding. So I contacted my Aunt. I don’t know what she is going to think about the book when it is done. I don’t think my book is going to help anyone. But it will be the truth, and the truth doesn’t have to make anyone happy.

So I’m writing it, but it takes me away from the blog. And it’s going slow, because avoidance is not something you just stop doing overnight. I think I should call this book The Procrastinator’s Tale, at the pace it’s going. But it’s going.

Yet, I’m going to try to come back here and write a bit more. I don’t know what I’m going to write about; I suppose I’ll keep writing about Complex PTSD and the struggle that goes on, and on, and on.