Conclusion or a moment of honest clarity

I know I don't often seem to take anything seriously with the Ham Sandwich, and for the most part, I don't. This is just a repository for my goofy thoughts. A place for me to feel like I am trying to put some sort of creative spunk in the eye of this dark, humorless world. The truth is I am writing these in hopes to reclaim some of the relationships with myself that I have lost. Venture back to a time and place where I had real hopes and dreams, and not the dread I feel every day. 

I know you are wondering what this has to do with today's article on mass shootings. How does this relate? The truth is I often relate to these killers. I sometimes feel like I can see through their eyes and understand their underlying motives. I hate people. In my darkest moments, I hate that I have ever helped someone or made someone feel good. I hope that some of my actions have pushed someone to kill themselves. I have a simple motto, if you're not my close friend or close family then you are my enemy and I hope that I can influence a world that will take your life. I pray every day for the end of humanity. I cannot think of a single thing that makes people good. 

This ability to disassociate my feelings for people's lives and make myself believe that they are not real. These thoughts can only exist in my head for when I see people in real life and look someone in the eyes, I know I could never hurt a soul, but still, anger and depression and hopelessness exist within me. 

I feel estranged from society often. Every day is a day that I struggle with my anger and sadness. I can't remember a day that I didn't think of murder or suicide. There are often just a few things that keep me hanging on. The blessing that I have of a loving family and healthy children. Parents and brothers who care. But these people are not the people I can let see the dark side for it would be too much for them to understand and I don't want to burden them with these thoughts. I cannot turn to psychiatrists anymore as they seem to shuffle me from medication to medication and talking to them is like screaming into a void, and makes me feel no better, but sometimes worse. As the medication doesn't always seem to help and nothing makes you feel more depressed than to know that the only person who is willing to pretend to relate to you is a paid actor with a fancy degree. It feels like a dark tunnel and no matter how far you go in either direction you never see the light.

When I was in high school I started having these feelings of anger and depression. After the Columbine massacre, I wrote stories of how I would kill my fellow students and I openly told them that I wished a tragedy like Columbine would happen at our school because I would feel better knowing they were dead. These dark thoughts emanated inside me. Who could I turn to? Who could I talk to about such things? My parents would just try more therapy or have me institutionalized if they knew. My brothers couldn't understand. So who did I talk to? The only people who would listen without overreacting. The people that would let me know that though those feelings were pretty crazy, they didn't make me a monster to them. Those people were my friends. I thought of them as a chosen family. People who I miss dearly and feel like I've lost. 

I estranged myself from those I once felt so close to, but those people were invaluable to me and I couldn't let them know it because I was afraid of losing them, in not doing anything, I lost them anyway.  

I use to say I would never need therapy as long as I had friends, and for a while, it worked out. Then we grew apart. We got older and some of us fell away. 

It seems an underlying theme that many of these mass shootings we perpetrated by people who felt estranged and alienated from friends and family or society in general. Often you will read a report about a shooter and when they speak to the shooter's friends we often hear them say they hadn't spoken to the shooter in years. I am not saying that these people cause or had anything to do with the shootings, but every time we let a friend, or a family member, every time we show someone we don't care anymore, we build the blocks for these tragedies to occur. I know it is just as easy for anyone of us to reach out to the other, but the truth is we often don't. We don't talk to each other anymore. We don't share out time. It is also so hard for someone feeling these feelings to reach out to their friends they have lost and tell them they miss them and they feel these horrible feelings. They don't want to burden these happy people because they see their lives on social media and they don't want to break that perfect picture. 

So it seems like we, the psychotic would-be killers, have turned away from you, the well-adjusted public, and in doing this, you then turn away from us. It seems that we all have turned away from each other. Every time we turn away from someone we know who is in pain and tell ourselves that they just need to deal with their problems and we have to deal with ours we turn away from a person who might just need someone to show them they care. That they matter. We need to let each other know that they matter to us, because if we don't let them know that they matter, then they will show us that nobody does, and as they kill people who we may or may not know, eventually all of us will know someone who has been involved in these tragedies someday, (either victims or perpetrators) then we will truly know who matters, and we will have to make a choice. Let us all know that we matter or let us all know that we don't.

~The Terrible Writer, the poor editor, and the Honest Ham Sandwich