In my neck of the woods, a teen shooter is in jail for killing his own father and then driving through his former school, guns blazing.
These incidents happen seldom, thankfully, but they underline by exaggeration what is happening in many teen-- and adult-- lives.
From what has been reported so far, it seems as if this young man, Alvaro Castillo, clearly considered himself to be a character in a drama.
He explicitly linked himself with the Columbine, Colorado shootings of 1999-- sending an email to the principal of the high school stricken at that time:
Dear Principal, In a few hours you will probably hear about a school shooting in North Carolina. I am responsible for it. I remember Columbine. It is time the world remembered it. I am sorry. Goodbye.
The note makes no logical sense. Why does the world need to remember Columbine? Why is violence needed to restore people's memories? Who says we have forgotten Columbine?
In fact, the note is about the shooter himself. Like an ancient hero, he wants to be remembered. He wants to be noticed. He wants to have some significance. Therefore he dresses up in his costume (black trench coat, sunglasses), and plays out the drama (a sequel to Columbine) in which he considers himself to be, in front of as wide an audience as possible.
Few of us are so mentally wounded as to go as far as this young man did, and I do not excuse his actions.
But all of us who live on the margins of life, mentally, physically, or psychically, are drawn towards screaming our stories, so that perhaps someone will hear us, notice, and save us.
According to police, when they asked the shooter why he was obsessed with Columbine and other school shooting incidents, he said he didn't know. That's a typical teen answer to the adult attempting to get inside a teen's head, but it makes sense.
Every one of us who seeks boundaries and a way back into normal community will seek them and seek them, going farther and farther out into more outlandish territory, until we find them. Once that journey or process of seeking limits has begun, we spend more and more energy exploring the wide world that the lack of limits has opened up to us.
If we go far enough out, the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the situations and circumstances we encounter will master us, and we will forget why we originally began the journey. Like a hero in a story, we no longer consider ourselves masters of our fate, but controlled by some unseen and unrecognized author.
It's often said that those who have suffered in life-- from dysfunctional families, difficult life circumstances, depression, and many other things-- also show up among the best of our storytellers. How I wish that shooter had chosen only to write his story but not act it out.
Comments