**This is a guest post from a community member.

I am about to state something I have never said out loud to anyone. The Columbine case has changed my life by helping me through difficult situations and it means more to me than I would ever be able to express in words.

If you are reading this, and you’re thinking, “What a horrible person. Just another obsessed fangirl,” there used to be a part of me that was ashamed that I had anything other than bad feelings towards Eric and Dylan. I was so afraid that maybe because I felt something else besides bad feelings towards them, I was a despicable human being. But I’m not.

I am an incredibly strong and compassionate person. I hate that so many beautiful, innocent children lost their lives. I hate that their families will suffer for the rest of their lives. I am not a fan girl who obsesses over these killers. And I am not a horrible person for feeling the way I do. I’ve come to realize as long as I know that about myself, it doesn’t matter if anyone else agrees with me or not. For anyone who would like to know why I am so very drawn to the Columbine case, I have to tell you a bit about my life.

I was born an army brat in ‘81. I grew up in Kentucky, Indiana, and two different parts of Germany. In fourth grade, while in Germany, my best friend ever was also my very first crush. Every day we would explore base on our bikes and sneak off base into German neighborhoods to go on adventures. Anytime we would climb steep hills or trenches, he would throw his hand back for mine and say, “I’m from Colorado. I know what I’m doing.” The last thing he ever said to me before he left Germany was, “When you get back to the states, just look for the mountains, that’s where you’ll find me.” I never saw him again.

When we moved back to the states, we stopped in Kentucky for a week and then headed West. The plan was to settle in Colorado because my dad loved it there when he was stationed in Fort Collins. I was so excited about the possibility of seeing my friend again, but my parents got tired of driving, so we settled in Kansas City. I was almost a teenager at this time and it was the beginning of a very miserable life for me.

I started my period on the first day of a new school and everyone made fun of me. Kids would point at me and call me “Germany lady” and then laugh as they walked away. By the time I started high school, things were a lot worse. My family life had fallen apart at home, and I would escape it only to go to school to be picked on and made fun of by the “cool kids.” The only place I managed to fit in was with a group of friends who were outcasts and misfits like myself. I loved the group of friends that I had, but every single day I wanted to disappear. I was severely depressed and very suicidal.

During my senior year, a very popular football player took interest in me. I even started hanging out with his friends and going to their parties. During one of these parties, he tried to sleep with me and I wouldn’t do it. The next day at school, he wouldn’t talk to me and he told everybody that we had sex and he was throwing me away for the slut that I was. People I didn’t even know were laughing at me and teasing me and bullying me about it. All I could do was hang my head and pretend it didn’t bother me, and then cry to my outcast group of friends.

At lunch in the cafeteria, one of my friends at our table warned me that the asshole was staring at me. I looked up to see his whole table staring, pointing, and laughing, so I flipped him off. He got up and walked across the cafeteria to my table and leaned down in my face to say, “Why’d you send your loser friends after me? Can’t you handle your own business?” I didn’t send anyone after him. All I did was cry to my friends about how humiliated I was and how he was lying. I found out later that a few of my friends went up to him and told him to leave me alone.

All the anger that was built up inside of me exploded. I grabbed my drink, threw it in his face and said, “Why’d you tell everybody you fucked me when you probably can’t even get it up with your steroid infested ass?!” After that, he punched me so hard I flew out of my chair and landed on the floor. He got on top of me and started to pound me over and over. I remember it stopped for a moment and I peeked through my fingers to see him grabbing my friend by her face and shoving her so hard she flew across the floor. Then he started hitting me again.

Another one of my friends jumped on his back just to get thrown off. My friend jumped on his back again and then finally the asshole backed away. A lunch lady came running up to me, grabbed me by my arm and said “You just got the shit beat outta you. We gotta go.” She dragged me up to my feet and we started down the hallway towards the nurse’s office. My right eye was swollen shut, my lip was busted open, and I had huge knots and bruises all over my body. It took 2 weeks for my body to be mostly healed and I only had 3 months until graduation, but I refused to go back. They allowed me to finish my senior year at the high school across town. It actually wasn’t that bad, except for the fact that every day I hid in the bathroom during lunch because I was terrified of going to the cafeteria.

One day, when I was in a stall waiting for the bell to ring, I went to my next class as usual, only the teacher was not there. About 20 minutes later, the teacher slowly walked in with a very grim and somber look on his face. Even though the whole class was at this point extremely loud and all over the place, our teacher just stood there staring at us. Finally, after the class naturally quieted down due to the weirdness of the situation, our teacher finally spoke.

“There’s something horrible happening at a high school in Colorado right now.” The entire class was silent. I thought about my best friend from 4th grade and how I hoped he was okay. I thought about how I wished we would have moved there instead because maybe my life would have turned out better and I wondered what was going on.

Our teacher continued, “The principal has decided to release school early today because of what’s going on.” The whole class cheered. I remember one kid saying, “Why the fuck do we care about what’s going on in Colorado? But if it gets us out of school early, hell yeah!”

The very next day, and every single day following until graduation, our school had a bomb threat. We were forced as a school to report to the gymnasium, which I thought was dumb because what if the threats were real and the bombs were located in the gym? In those first couple of days spent in the gym, the main topic was Columbine.

The two stories I remember hearing were: 1. A group of Nazis were living under the school collecting weapons and came up one day to start asking people if they believed in God and those who said yes were shot and killed. And 2. A group of Nazis charged into a school to have a religious debate then started shooting at the cops when they arrived. Two weeks later, I graduated high school and never thought about Columbine again until years later.

Sandy Hook was on the news when I came home from buying groceries. I had to stop what I was doing and turn my undivided attention to the T.V. I ended up dropping to my knees in tears. I called my best friend sobbing about it as I drove to my daughter’s elementary school. She was in the same grade as these kids and I was absolutely horrified and devastated about the whole situation. I marched in and demanded that the principal assure me that the school was safe. He walked me around the whole school and showed me where all the cameras were and told me that all the doors to get into the school were locked except for the front doors which you had to ring the buzzer to get in. He was very nice and put me at ease a bit, but I was still so disturbed about the whole situation.

A few years later, I found myself in an extremely abusive relationship. I don’t care to go into the details of this situation, but I will tell you, I hear people say they don’t understand why someone in an abusive relationship doesn’t just leave. I wanted to, desperately. But leaving was the one thing this person told me he would kill me for.

I tried finding different ways of coping and distracting myself. One of those ways was trying to find evidence on the internet that Sandy Hook was fake. If I could just discover that it was fake, it would be such a relief for me, at least in some small part of my heart. As I was searching, I came across a photo of two boys, one who I thought was my buddy back in high school. Same long trench coat and same haircut. I saw that the title said, “Columbine.” I thought, ‘Columbine? I thought that was about a bunch of Nazis?’

So I started reading the article. Then I searched up more things and started reading. The more I read, the more I was taken back to the girl I was in high school. Reading about Eric and Dylan made it feel like it was just yesterday when I was that timid, scared, suicidal teenager. And then I realized that it was the first time since high school that I felt that way again. I didn’t want to be that girl anymore, so I took the necessary steps to get me and my kids out of a very horrible situation.

This next part will understandably lose some of you if anyone is still reading. But this is my experience in my life. After the abusive situation was over, and my kids and I were in a safe place, I started to isolate myself from society. Besides my kids and work, I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to be around people. I started playing with the pendulum. The theory goes, you ask the universe to give you a yes and it swings one way, you ask it to give you a no and it swings another. It seemed to work for me, so I became suspicious. I looked up how pendulums work and I found an article that said you unconsciously have slight muscle movements in your fingers that persuade the pendulum to swing a certain way. I was super bummed and wanted to test that theory.

I wrote out the whole alphabet and decided to ask for a message. I purposely cleared my mind of everything as best I could to make sure I wasn’t actually the one giving myself messages. I held the pendulum over each letter until it gave me a yes and then I would write the letter down. Again, I don’t expect people to believe me, and if I was the one reading this about someone else I probably wouldn’t believe it either, but it worked! Not every time, but messages started coming through. There were a few messages from a couple of my loved ones who had passed away. There were also a few that I’d like to share with you for the purpose of why I am even writing this.

I got a message that spelled out “DK BIG DADDY.” The very next message was “I LOVE THE KIDS OF MY FRIENDS.” I asked the person to please spell out their name and it spelled out “DYLAN KLEBOLD.”

A few months passed by and I was playing with the pendulum nearly every day. Sometimes getting messages, sometimes not. One day, I asked specifically Dylan, to please give me a message. The message I received was “HAVE FUN IN LIFE.” For some reason, this short and simple message hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been isolating myself from the world for so long. And at that moment, I started to crave my life again. I got a hold of my closest friends and started going out and it didn’t take long for my life to change back to something I felt like I could be thankful for again. This is around the time I started to feel guilty and ashamed for being so interested in the Columbine case.

I had read enough to know there is a huge following that a lot of people refer to as the Columbiners: Obsessed, Eric and Dylan worshiping, fanboys and fangirls. I was so afraid of being put in that category. I didn’t want to be one of those people, so I stayed quiet about my experiences and true feelings.

I’d like to share one more piece of my life with you. About a year and a half ago, my 15-year-old daughter’s dad was in the hospital dying from COVID. We weren’t allowed to go in and see him, but the day I was informed that his oxygen levels were continuing to drop and they would be turning off the ventilator to let him drift away, my daughter demanded that I drive her to the hospital. I parked my car and watched my daughter march in with no fear. She called me about 10 minutes later and told me that they were allowing her to be in the room with him to hold his hand while he passed.

A couple months later, my son’s dad, who had been MIA for a couple of years due to drug use, came over to my house. He told me how sorry he was about my daughter’s dad. He told me he wanted to be in the kids’ lives again and that he wanted to straighten out his own. He also told me that he has missed me as a friend more than I will ever know and that he considers me family, which was so nice to hear because I had secretly missed him soo much.

He had a long talk with our son, with my daughter, he told them how much he had missed them and couldn’t wait to start spending time with them. One week later, he died of a meth overdose mixed with fentanyl. I started playing with the pendulum again since all of this has happened. I’ve gotten a few messages from my son’s dad one day. The first letters were “I L…” and I thought for sure it was going to spell out ‘I love you,’ or ‘I love the kids,’ but instead, the message was, “I LEFT THE WORLD LESS OF A MAN BECAUSE OF DRUGS.”

I’ve only ever received one message from my daughter’s dad. I have a feeling, if this is real and they are in fact trying to communicate, it’s difficult for them for some reason. And yet, messages from Dylan, this boy I never met while in human form, still comes through. Sweet messages. Funny messages. And sometimes, inspirational messages.

This is how the Columbine case has changed my life and what it has taught me… Life is short and sometimes tragic. No matter what you are going through in life, you are never alone. There will always be someone out there going through exactly what you are going through. Being humiliated, being afraid for your child’s life, being afraid for your own life, or losing people that you would have given your own life to save. I’m not drawn to any other crime case or tragedy. In fact, most other cases upset me so much I have to turn away. My daughter’s elementary principal was so kind. But cameras and locked doors are not going to stop school shootings.

This is a problem in society that nobody seems to want to address. We have to change our behavior as a society in the way we see and treat people. There is no reason why any kid should go to school and be humiliated by anyone and nothing is done to stop it until it’s too late. There’s no reason that anyone should feel like they don’t belong. Every one of us is in charge of how we respond to a situation and how we deal with it. Society has to change in order for things to get better, and unfortunately, I’m not sure we can do that.

Knowing that when I was 15, 16, 17 years old and going through hell, there were two people my age going through similar things who would ultimately commit such a tragedy, in an area I so desperately wanted to move to, shakes my soul to the core. If I could go back, knowing what I know, I would ignore the people who were mean to me completely because they don’t matter at all. I would tell my group of misfit friends how much I love them and how thankful I am for them. I would jump in my car, drive to Littleton, find Eric and Dylan and tell them that they are not alone. I’m not naive enough to think that would have stopped the Columbine tragedy from happening, but doing that is something that my heart will long for for the rest of my life.

Side note: One of my friends (the very one I mistook Eric for in the photo) moved out of state after high school. He came to visit his parents a few years ago and we went out for some drinks. (I have changed the names to protect the innocent… or not so innocent) He told me that back in high school, he, Billy and Bob planned on shooting a particular group of jerks at school and then killing themselves when it was over. Bob ended up bragging to some chick that he had a gun in his locker and she narced him out, that’s why it never happened. This was before Columbine. I never knew. I had no idea. I asked him why they were planning on killing themselves and his answer was simply, “because….life sucked.”