What had happened was too unfathomable for me to not think that I could help change the narrative. Every look angered me, because none erased the tragedy. My response was met with looks of pity, shock or indifference, the latter an incomprehensible signal to me that they ascribed no significance to the name of my hometown. Those around me were naïve to the weight I carried every day, asking the seemingly innocuous question that you ask of strangers: “Where are you from?” I dreaded it. Prior to the shooting, I had already scheduled a 3-month internship in Boston with a pediatric neurosurgeon, so, instead of returning to my college community, I entered an unfamiliar city of strangers. In the weeks after, I felt confused, angry, and empty, but I left home to try and find my purpose. I see these words each morning and evening, bookends to my day, writes Ayesha Dholakia.
In the 10 years since, the unthinkable has happened again, and again, begging the question: when did the murder of innocent children no longer qualify as unthinkable? Sandy Hook’s motto is written on a small sign in my bedroom. We woke up to 26 families still broken, families we knew, the unthinkable not a nightmare. My sister came home, and we slept in our parents’ room that night, knowing that in the morning we would have to face a world in which our sense of safety was irreversibly stolen. I stared at the news for hours, my mom and I not speaking, as our home started “trending” on Twitter, and we frantically texted everyone we knew at the school. I clung to the thought that these headlines couldn’t be real - it was just a mistake, a drill gone horribly awry - repeating it even as the numbers went from two dead to five to 10, 20, 26. The shooter’s house sat behind mine. That day, we sat as yellow tape surrounded our neighborhood, declaring it a crime scene. The one in which we grew up, learned to read and to multiply, sang about dinosaurs and the 50 nifty United States. The shooter was initially rumored to be inside our high school, where my sister was, but he went to the elementary school instead. on TV, as I waited for my sister to come home.
There were nine words etched on the door of my elementary school, a school motto that I read every morning: “Think you can, work hard, get smart, be kind.” I recalled that message a decade ago, when I was 19 years old and watching that same school - Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. The author on her first day of school at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
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