Terrified (and doing it anyway)

It was partly because since 9/11 I\’ve been more skittish in big crowds. It was partly because it was a politically charged event.  It was partly because I\’m claustrophobic and I anticipated (accurately) that I would be smashed in with hundreds of thousands of people.  It was partly because it was a GUN CONTROL rally, and I couldn\’t see how anyone could stop someone from showing up with an AR-15, and things going very south in the span of a second.

I mean, that\’s WHY we were marching.

I am guessing that I am not the only one of however many hundreds of thousands of people who had one (or more) of those things pop up as thoughts.  And I was going, despite those fears.

I also had a very personal, very long-standing reason: I was terrified because, when I was four years old, I had a handgun pointed at my face.

I was at my grandmother\’s apartment. It was summer. She was babysitting for me. She had a small galley kitchen in her apartment, with a window at the end. She was on the first floor, and out that window you could see the main road in suburban Cleveland where she lived. It was also my neighborhood; our house was less than ten blocks away.

Under that window, she had one of those benches that you put a thin cushion on, one that tied around the spindles of the bench at the ends. She would set up a TV tray table for me, and that was my little, 4-year-old eating place.  I felt special when I ate my meals there.

She was setting up my dinner when the buzzer sounded; she went to the intercom. Someone said they had a package for her, and she buzzed them in. It was 1970. There were no cameras. Just an intercom. She couldn\’t see them.  We went to the door of her apartment, opened it, and looked down the hall. She was at the end of the hall; the front door was in the middle. We saw two men running down the hall. I\’m not sure I understood why they were running, but I remember my grandmother getting really upset and trying to shut the door. But they beat her to it, and kicked it open.

The rest of what I remember took place in the tiny, five-by-seven galley kitchen. The summer evening light was still coming through the window.

There were two men. They had a gun. My grandmother reached for her rotary phone on the counter–to me, now, as a middle-aged adult, a not only stupid but silly move; did she seriously think that they were going to wait while she DIALED 911?–and they pulled the phone jack out of the wall.  Back then, we didn\’t have jacks that clicked in sideways. It was a round piece with four metal prongs that plugged into the outlet. They pulled so hard the whole thing-jack AND outlet- came out of the wall.
Like, that phone wasn\’t being plugged back in.
And they were not messing around.

I don\’t remember every moment of my life. However, I have a photographic memory for the things I do remember, and I can picture this whole thing unfolding. I can picture the kitchen, the rest of her apartment, and the four of us in this tiny room.  There are two things of which I have no memory, that my mother has told me (as reported by my grandmother at the time): one, that my grandmother told me to put my head down.

Two: that at some point, I sat up, and looked, doe-eyed at the guy with the gun and said, \”Please don\’t kill my granny.\”

I have no idea how much I actually understood about what was happening. I have a movie that can play in my head, images of the events, but I have no emotional memory connected to it.

And for many years, and even sometimes still, I discount this as anything traumatic. I wasn\’t shot. My grandmother wasn\’t shot.  In fact, the ultimate irony: she screamed so insanely, would not stop screaming her head off, that they actually left without taking anything. The gun was never fired.

Scratch that-they did take something. They took my sense of safety.  I am pretty sure I had one until I was four, but I was so young, I don\’t ever remember feeling safe.

Feeling unsafe is normal to me.

It\’s on a continuum, for sure. I feel less safe in some situations, more safe in others, and all-out triggered (no pun intended) in some situations.  On one hand, I cannot IMAGINE what these kids in Parkland, these people at Pulse, at a concert, a movie theater, at church–I cannot imagine what they go through in these mass shootings.
On the other hand, in a low-grade, chronic sort of way, I think I feel that way all the time.

I\’ve learned to manage it.  For the first twenty years, that meant pretending I did feel safe. Pretending, even to myself. When something happened in my young adulthood that triggered this and it came rushing to the surface, in a way that made no sense to me, I felt like a tidal wave of fear and terror had been unleashed, and I\’d never feel safe again.  Turned out that was the biggest gift ever.  Perhaps more on that, at a later date.

And despite that terror, I went to the march.

Because for the most part, I manage the fear. I am able to function and be in situations where there are very real safety risks at play.
But I still never, ever feel totally safe.

I am, and have always been, a pacifist.  I\’ve always believed in common-sense gun control. And I\’ve certainly upped my activism one hundred-fold this past year (plus a few months). This issue, though-this issue is personal for me. Deeply personal.

Because guns can steal our sense of safety. Even if a bullet never leaves them.