I learned what fear felt like before I fully grasped it.
I was in my kindergarten class fifteen minutes away from Sandy Hook in 2012. I don’t remember all the details, but I will never forget the stillness, the locked doors, and utter confusion in my peers. Children too young to name what was happening, but old enough to sense that something was wrong. Waiting. Listening. Thinking.
Years later, I’ve faced bomb threats and lockdowns at my highschool- and the same feeling returned, not as panic, but as recognition. Now, I was older, and more competent to understand my surroundings. Time had stretched in a way that felt familiar. I waited, I listened, and I thought.
What stayed with me in these moments wasn’t terror so much as repetition. These moments were echoed and patterned. Over time, they’ve shaped how I think not only about safety– not as an abstract policy debate, but as a shared human right. I’ve begun to notice how conversations often fracture and focus on blame rather than prevention. Having lived in the aftermath, this divide sits close to my heart.
I don’t believe solutions come from choosing one side over another. As humans, we always need something or someone to blame. My experiences have pushed me to ask different questions: How can we protect communities while addressing the mental health cries that often go unseen? How can we respond before harm occurs? Trauma, anxiety, impulse, resilience aren’t all failures, but complex interactions between the environment and biology. When we reduce these emotions to minimal points of conversation, we lose the chance to intervene. We need to learn to wait, to listen, and to think.
These experiences haven’t made me fearful, but rather made me attentive. Attentive enough to care about both the safety of myself and others. Just as I have seen fear in the classroom, I see it in close communities living under the constant presence of ICE, where fear is not momentary, but sustained. Many families are forced to wait, listen, and think… before continuing their everyday lives in society.
If we are serious about public safety, we much recognize how often our systems fail to protect all of us. Ending fear cannot mean relocating it. It means building a society where nobody is taught to live on standby. No child, mother, or father, should have to wait, listen, or think, in fear.
