Dealing with the School Shooting in Nashville

Personal

Apr 28

Nashville city skyline during an orange sunset

These are my thoughts and my feelings from a journal entry immediately after being impacted by the school shooting in Nashville as a community member.

I sit here writing this two days after the Nashville school shooting in Green Hills — at The Covenant Christian School — and I’m enraged. Rage is not an emotion that I typically feel. It’s interesting to experience it knowing it is intertwined with grief and it’s here very early in the process. But the Covenant school is about 30 minutes away from where my family lives, works, and goes to school.

If the sheer number of mass shootings wasn’t scary before, you better believe it’s terrifying now.

Don’t get me wrong — my family and I are fortunate. We’re not the victims here. But we could be. You could be. Your kids could be. And that should light a fire in you like nothing else has before.

At this moment, my family and I are part of the community impacted by gun violence.

On the day it happened, I was 30 minutes away at a local coffee shop eating brunch with my husband. March 27, 2023 was a death anniversary of one of my childhood best friends. He’s been gone 12 years. I had spent some time in the morning remembering him fondly. I took my baby to school. I was in constant contact with my husband who had just had surgery — I was trying to figure out if I needed to go to Nashville to pick him up from the hospital. It was a procedure requiring only local anesthetic and it went so well and smoothly the doctors were finished before I could make it to him. He said he was fine to drive, so he came home. He felt okay, so we went to eat and spend a bit of quality time together before he needed to rest.

I hadn’t opened my phone much to pay attention to what was going on in the world, to say the least.

As we were eating, at 11:43 am, a friend from NC messaged me on FB saying, “Hey! How are y’all? Everybody safe? Heard there was a school shooting.” Just an everyday message here in the States.

I didn’t get the message until we were finishing up, about 15 minutes later.

My heart sank. Before responding, I immediately Googled, “school shooting Nashville, TN,” and saw the name of the school. Within seconds, I was breathing a sigh of relief. It wasn’t one of our kids’ schools. The gravity of the situation hadn’t fully sunk in yet. I told my husband what had happened. We walked out in silence, not sure what to think or do.

We went on with our normal plans. With more time off work than anticipated because the surgery had gone so smoothly, we putzed around the grocery store (actually did some grocery shopping), and carefully curating items for Easter baskets and a family Easter egg hunt.

All the while, knowing parents just like us weren’t going about their normal plans. They were reuniting with their traumatized children, and a few, were bellowing sobs of grief. Their Easter won’t be like ours.

As the day went on, I fought the urge to pick up our kids from school. I stayed close to my phone to find out if there were victims and who they were.

Yesterday, the day after, I cried, comforted my child, planned ways to comfort my other child when he gets here from his mom’s house, and brainstormed actions we can take together to make a difference in this American tragedy that’s gained momentum for 30 years.

Firearms are now the biggest killer of children in the United States, surpassing car accidents.

Mass shootings are preventable. We don’t have to accept them as reality.

As a brilliant friend said on LinkedIn: “Law makers work for us. We can tell them what we want them to do.”

So, let’s do that.

If they don’t want to listen? Let’s get louder.

This is about empowering yourself to DO something.

The big question hanging over all our heads right now is, “what can we even do?” It’s clear that this is a question that keeps haunting us over and over, as evidenced by where we are today in this mass shooting mess.

We feel stuck as a nation.

Here are my ideas for what we can do and actions that I’m taking from now on:

Find motivation by building empathy (a.k.a. if you don’t already knows what it feels like to go through a mass shooting, imagine it)
Think of taking action as a rescue effort for ourselves and loved ones (there’s a psychological importance to adopting this mindset)
Take care of yourself (so you can contribute effectively)
Contact your lawmakers, loud and clear
Support your kids and educators in the best way you can

We’re failing our educators. Instead of being able to simply teach our children, they’re expected to be body guards but aren’t even allowed to pick which books are best for our children’s education — certainly here in Tenn. How is that healthy? How is that a way to live and work?

We’re failing our kids. Not only are we failing our innocent children that we send to school everyday, but we’re seeing the ramifications of failing our children who have now grown up to become school shooters. The failure comes in the form of a complex web of multi-layered systems in America that we must untangle, one knot at a time.

The knots we must untangle, that we’ve all heard beaten like a dead horse, are gun safety and mental health.

Now, where it gets tricky is agreeing on a solution.

Come together, we must.

Live like this, we must not.

Update on April 28, 2023, a month after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville:

Even though it’s been a month and life has inevitably moved on, I have kept good on my word from above. I attended the peaceful rally that the TN GOP are saying wasn’t peaceful (more about that on the blog to come). I watched as the TN GOP tried to oust the Tennessee three. I educated my children and talked to them and let them talk and share. I joined two different groups that will allow me to take action in the future and have donated money. I’ve prayed for the victims of this senseless violence. And I’ve also had to take stock of my self care routine to soothe my own nervous system.

The grief was palpable in the community last month, and even though life has gone on and there are great joys in life, the heaviness of knowing we must protect our children and educators is weighing on me.

With the lawmakers in this state not being on the side of humanity, it feels like an uphill battle. But, I do have hope. And, I do believe the systems that don’t work must be exposed for what they are before they can be changed, and that’s exactly what’s happened in TN.

I’m training for the marathon this will be, one step at a time.

Change will come. Change IS coming.

We will be okay.

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I’m Brandi Fleck, TICC. I’m a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. All genders, sexualities, and races are welcome here. I primarily serve clients via one-on-one coaching and self-paced trauma education.

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