This is what it feels like.

And other things I tell myself in America.

I used to collect movie ticket stubs. By the time I graduated high school, I had accumulated hundreds of them. I never meant to keep them all, but I did, and I can still remember the floral, beaded jewelry box where they lived. I can still recall all those tiny pieces of paper that mapped out the schedule of a 14-year-old’s life. I can also still remember waking up on a Saturday afternoon and learning about the Aurora, Colorado mass shooting, can vividly recall sitting up in my childhood bed and reading a text about what had happened. I can remember my mom vacuuming in the hallway outside my bedroom as I realized the shooting happened at the midnight premiere of a movie, one I was planning on seeing that summer, too.

I was 19 then, probably home for summer break after my first year of college. Maybe this particular moment stuck with me because I had been considering going to the Friday, midnight premiere the night before, too. Maybe I had been out at a different movie that night. I probably was. Going to movies at midnight was exciting then. It was thrilling to be out that late, to be experiencing something for the first time with a room full of people who are excited about the same thing as you are. I’ve been to the movies many time since then, but never once has it been without a mild sense of dread. Never without an accounting for the people who had entered the theater alone. The people with backpacks. A person who seemed nervous. I never again sat through the opening trailers, something that used to be my favorite part of going to the movies, without a tiny question in the back of my brain that asked, “If you die here, was it really worth it?”

I go to the movies less often now than ever before, for a lot of reasons, but every time I do enter a theater and spiral about a detail in the room feels slightly off, a person that seems odd, an unaccounted for bag, every time I try to talk myself down, I remember one thing: This is what it feels like. I realize that this particular brand of panic, of fear, is exactly what it feels like for all those people, those children, who have died in movie theaters, at schools, at concerts, at grocery stores. They, too, tell themselves the backpack is just a backpack. Or those sounds are just firecrackers. Or that this isn’t actually happening at all, just like I have every single time I sit in a movie theater. They calm themselves down and wait for the fear to pass. But it doesn’t.

When I hear about mass shootings like the one in Nashville this week, it’s this specific thought that haunts me, this idea that you can feel that kind of dread sink into your core, your lungs, can feel yourself drown under the weight of it, and not have it eventually fade, but to instead have it be confirmed, amplified into infinity. That feeling seems unsurvivable to me. But I imagine that I’m not the only one who has had this thought, this fear, this panic in crowded spaces. I’m sure most of us have entered theaters or churches or schools and casually thought about which chair would hide us from a shooter more easily, which table could offer better protection. I don’t have children, but I imagine most parents have had those conversations with their kids, too, trying to carefully figure out which fear is worth giving them and which isn’t. Which fears, exactly, just might save them.

Sometimes, when I’m in public place and having these fears, I soothe myself by saying they’re not rational. And then I wonder if the teachers at Covenant Christian told themselves that, too. I wonder if the elderly person shopping for groceries in Buffalo calmed themself down that way, too. I wonder if the 9-year-olds who died yesterday took a moment to tell themselves in their small voices that this is just a drill, or a joke, or a prank, or anything else other than what it actually was, what it always seems to be, again and again and again.

Maybe all of them told themselves what I’ve told myself when I walk into a room and wonder who might have a gun, or force myself to note each and every exit. Maybe they do that without even thinking about it now. Maybe they said, well, odds are that it won’t happen. Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely. Like it’s a shark attack, a bolt of lighting, a completely natural occurrence that no one could have seen coming, that no one should realistically fear. Except we’d all be wrong to tell ourselves that, of course. We’d all be so very wrong. Rationally, in this country, feeling the fear, at this point, is rational. It is practical. In a country where firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens and the rate of gun-related homicide is 26 times the rate of high-income countries, fear is, statistically-speaking, the smart move.

Except, if you’re anything like me, maybe you’ve found that feeling much of anything about gun violence is difficult lately. I scrolled through my Instagram feed yesterday and saw a hundred people post the same sentiments, the same grid posts, the same quotes and statistics and action items. I thought about sharing them, too, not because I thought it would be impactful, but because I needed to signal my rage to the world, too. And, yes, I’m angry, too, and, yes, there are always more things I could personally be doing to enact change. I will continue to seek out those things, to vote, to use what little platform I have to promote change, too. But mostly I’m finding is that with every tragedy and all that comes after, I feel less. I cry less. I post less. I watch the inevitable chain of events tumble out before me, the cries for action and the lack thereof, the Facebook posts promoting the 2nd amendment, the people who tell me they care and then vote for NRA-backed politicians again and again, the thoughts and prayers of it all, and I just feel tired. Aren’t we all tired? Aren’t we exhausted from feeling the fear, from giving it to our children and hoping it saves them? Of the thought of them one day doing the same exact thing with their children, too. That is, if they’re lucky enough to not go to a school like Marjory Stoneman Douglas or Sandy Hook or Covenant Christian or they don’t go to a movie theater like the one in Aurora, Colorado or a grocery store in Buffalo. Because at this point, that’s what it is. For all of us. Luck. And even if we’re lucky, the fear remains.

I know I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said a thousand times, that hasn’t been screamed into the void by so many people for years. I don’t even think I have a neat way to wrap this up. I don’t have a single idea to land on that I think will enact change amongst the people and corporations who cling to their guns like they mean something about who they are. I don’t have a solution. I don’t have anything to land on that feels solid at all. I don’t have any indication that things will change. And maybe that’s part of the fear, too. Maybe that’s what I would ask, if it’s ever me, or my one-day child. Maybe I would feel that same familiar panic, the kind that I’ve known since I was a teenager, in a theater or a concert or a grocery store and the realization would sink in that I was right, that I was always right. That the thing I’d known was a possibility for most of my life, the thing I’d seen on the news a thousand times and no one had ever done anything about, was happening. I wonder if I’d know then, too. If I’d have time to imagine the way this probably wouldn’t change anything, either. If that thought would cut its way through the fear, even then.

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If this week’s essay resonated you, please consider joining me in donating to Everytown For Gun Safety. Here are some more resources, if helpful:

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