Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele Taraba
Ep. 112 – He Almost Became a School Shooter then Someone Saw Him. The Power of Being Seen.
TRANSCRIPT Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. And if you’d like to support the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Gissele: Today, we’re talking about compassion and mental health, and our guest today is Aaron Stark, who once came dangerously close to committing an act of violence as a teenager, but his life took a traumatic turn. in his viral open letter, I Was Almost a School Shooter, and the subsequent Gissele: TED Talk that brought national attention to his message of compassion and mental wellness. He’s been featured across media outlets and now speaking nationwide, including to schools, law enforcement, survivor groups, the FBI. Aaron works to help people reach those in deep crisis to remind them that they matter. Gissele: His mission, prevent future tragedies by sharing the power of connection and [00:01:00] hope. Please join me in welcoming Aaron. Hi, Aaron. Aaron: Hey, thank you for having me Gissele: Oh, thank you so much for being on the show. I would really love to hear a little bit about how you got to the point where you were so close to committing an act of violence. Gissele: I was wondering if you could share that with the audience. Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. I first off, thanks for having me on. And anybody listening, I know this gets pretty intense really fast, but I promise it ends in a very happy spot. I was raised in a very violent, aggressive, and criminal household. My first five years of life was kinda like a Stephen King movie. Aaron: My, My, birth father was the most vicious and violent person ever. Chased us across the country, and he was we basically were hunted for the first five years by one of the most abusive people you can imagine. And then after my mom left him, got with my stepdad, and it went from a Stephen King movie to more like Scarface. So it was crack cocaine and crime and stealing and robberies. We lived a very nomadic life, so I moved usually between Oregon and Colorado, bouncing between the states. And I went [00:02:00] between, to between 30 and 40 different schools. I was at a different school every couple of months, and I never attended a school from beginning to end of a school year, ever in my whole life. And along the way, my criminal family was extremely unstable. I have an older brother who’s two years older than I am, and he became the de facto man of the house. So he had to be… Like, when we’re seven and nine years old, and my parents are– we’re getting evicted because they’re drugged out and doing all their crime. And they’re at a bar, they’re not even there while we’re getting evicted. The, the sheriff’s are at our house throwing everything into the yard. My brother’s the one that has to, at nine years old, scramble to find us some place to be, and I am one of the things that he has to find some place to put. I am, I’m not useful . Aaron: He was a very gearhead kinda kid put stuff together, fix stuff. I had a lot of intellectual loves, so I loved books and music and studying science and history. I loved all that, but that wasn’t useful to the [00:03:00] crackheads when we’re getting evicted and things are breaking. My brother was more utilitarian. And so growing up, we adopted that identity. I became the burden. I became the thing that needed to be solved. I became the problem. And I was fat. I was dirty ’cause I didn’t have any clothes. I was smelly. And I really, early on, I’m talking three, 10, I wa- I Really internalized that something is wrong with me, that I’m the broken one, that I’m the thing that’s wrong. And I started, because I was always going to a new school, I would always have a different group of bullies at the different schools. And I developed this tactic that you’ve seen movies where the guy in j- goes to prison in the movie, and he goes up to the big tough guy, and you fight the big tough guy in prison so you can establish your Aaron: pecking order. I would do the reverse of that, only I would go to the most popular kid in school and insult myself to him to put, I kn- I know I’m at the bottom. You don’t have to beat me down to get me there. I know I belong at the bottom. And it… I just really internalized that [00:04:00] something was wrong with me, and this is all before even the age of 10. And by the time I’m 12, 13 years old, my parents, they are heavily in the grips of a crack binge, and I’ve started self-harming. I’ve started cutting myself really bad, and it started as a way to regulate the emotions. My life at that time, I describe like it’s like living in a mosh pit. If you’ve seen a big heavy metal concert, you see the big swirling mass of people slamming into each other. That’s what my life was like at the time. I didn’t really have any control over the damage and what I was doing. I just went along with the violence. And I knew that I was the broken one, so I started to insult myself more than anybody else could, which made me then also start being a bully to everybody else. Aaron: I w- I became really toxic, like ins- inward and outward. I just I was… My– Everything I was saying was reflecting the inward hatred that I had. I was becoming just a toxic little mean, angry, vicious kind of kid. And the [00:05:00] self-harm kind of would calm and regulate that at the beginning but it quickly spiraled into more serious self-harm. Aaron: I’m cutting myself deeper, more and more blood. And I became homeless around th- thirteen, fourteen years old. I couldn’t take living at home with the crackheads anymore. So I would bounce from friend’s house to friend’s house and kinda burn out relationships. And at first I’d be able to stay at a house for a week, and then I’d be able to stay there for a couple days. Aaron: But by the time I’m fourteen, fifteen years old, I can’t stay at my friend’s house for more than an hour or so ’cause if I stand up off the couch, his mom has to clean the residue of the stain that I’m leaving ’cause I’m so filthy and I’m so dirty. And I gathered a group along the way, around fifteen years old, of a group of kids that I called Disaster Groupies. They were a group of about fifteen or so kids that kinda lived vicariously through my darkness. My friend at the time, I was at, partying with this one buddy who his dad paid the rent at the house, and his dad bought all the food at the house, [00:06:00] but Dad didn’t live at the house. Dad was living with Dad’s girlfriend. So the house became like a teenage flophouse. And so this house became a bunch of depressed kids navigating depression without adult supervision, and it was like how far can they push us off the edge to see how far they would go. And I was kinda like a, a evil unicorn in a way. Like a piñata of pain. Aaron: Smack me and see what kind of stories can come out. Because I was, at this time, from about fourteen to sixteen, I’m living basically three lives at once, where for a– I’m 90% homeless because I’m living at this house, but m- all my stuff is still back at my mom’s house, but I can’t be there for any length of time because it turns into violence and anger and beatings and… So I’m only at that house like maybe an hour a day. So I go there, get my stuff, grab some stuff and recharge. And I had to get out because of the– I– Immediately there’d be violence. But in that hour, I’m reminded of how absolutely worthless I am and how nothing I am and how at the bottom of everything [00:07:00] I am and how I don’t belong anywhere. And then I go to this Disaster Groupie house, and I would kinda use that pain as a party favor. The more outlandish that my stories of abuse were, the more I could entertain these kids and where I could get some weird kind of social status that way And then for just a couple hours a day at the end, I’d go to what is the only good kid in this story this kid that I met when I was 12 and he was 10. Aaron: His name’s Mike. Remember, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about him now ’cause it’s a good point to bring him in. Mike, he lived at the opposite end of one of the blocks that we moved to one day. My parents had a habit of moving to the same neighborhoods multiple times. So we would go live on like a 10-block radius in Colorado, and then like another, like two town radius in Oregon, but like 30 places in each place, and so we, I was living like a block away from, or a couple blocks away from him, and we met at a comic book shop playing the original Mortal Kombat 1 video game in the arcade. See exactly when this is happening. And so we met, we bonded over deep [00:08:00] conversation and comic books. I had a love for superheroes, and I loved science, and so did he, and we just immediately bonded. Aaron: I went to his house, pretty much never left for a week. And so like I, whenever I was in Denver, his house was like my home base. I knew I had some place to be. I memorized his phone number. He lived the total polar opposite life that I had. He had a very well-off family, very well-to-do, very peaceful, lived in this big four-story house. They he would write a Christmas list and get the things on his Christmas list, which blew my mind. I didn’t even know you could do that. I, that was an amazing thing. And so he became like the good spot. So by the time I’m 14, 15 years old, I’m filling up my reservoir of hatred at my parents’ house, then using that, that pain to entertain everybody at this, this groupie house. Then for a little bit of time, I get to be a normal kid over at Mike’s house. But his mom was the one that had to clean the stain when I stood up off the couch, ’cause I was starting to leave residue. Couldn’t stay there anymore. And that’s kind of the stasis for about a year. Okay? That kind of stays my life for about a year. [00:09:00] And then that ends in a big explosion where the, the party house, we’re having this big, it’s one of the kids there having a birthday, so of course someone in this group has a band. And so there’s a band, a few high school kids playing on one side. I had a day job working at a pizza place, and my manager of the pizza place was an LSD dealer. So I got a whole bunch of LSD, had a whole bunch of kids tripping acid in the house. So there’s like 15 kids tripping acid on one side. Another other side, all these kids partying. Knock on the door, parents are there, party’s over, everybody has to go home. They all have homes to go to. Everybody else gets to go home. I don’t have a home to go to. My parents at this time are in the midst of the worst kind of grips of the crack epidemic. And so they are digging through the carpet looking for crack rock at this stage. And so I didn’t have anywhere to go to. And so my last resorts, when I didn’t have anywhere else to be at 15, 16 years old, I could either stay i- if the weather was good, I would go to this [00:10:00] field behind this restaurant named Casa Bonita. Aaron: Which if you ever seen the TV show South Park, they actually did a whole episode on Casa Bonita. The guys from South Park bought the restaurant. It’s this big pink Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and the guy in the gorilla suit. It’s a crazy thing. It’s really what the restaurant’s like. But behind that, there was a field. And in this field, there was a little dip in the field. And if I laid in it, you couldn’t see me when you were driving down the street, so it didn’t look like there was a body there. So if the weather was good, I could like urban camp and go sleep in the field. But if the weather was bad, I would go to Mike’s tool shed, because his I couldn’t stay in his house. Aaron: His parents were storing a big recliner chair, like a La-Z-Boy style chair in his tool shed, and I would go there and stay. And so At, after this party ex- ends and everybody has to go home, I end up in Mike’s tool shed ’cause it’s raining. And it’s late at night, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the morning, and I’m cutting myself so bad that there’s a big pool of blood on the ground underneath me. And I think to myself, “I gotta get some help or I’m gonna die. If I don’t do something, I’m gonna die.” [00:11:00] And so I thought over the years, one of the reasons why we had to move many times was Social Services. They tried to investigate a couple times, so I figure I’ll call Social Services on myself. May- that they, I’ll call the state, that maybe they can help me.” And so when Dawn came, I knocked on Mike’s back door and borrowed a phone book and some bus fare from her, from Mike’s mom, and I called Social Services on myself. I set the appointment for that afternoon. And it was Dawn when I called. It was like 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon when the meeting happened. And by the time I got to the meeting, they had contacted my mom, and she was there too. And so we sit at this table, this big round table. On one side there’s counselors, on the other side there’s me and my mom. And they say, “What are we here for? What’s the reason for this?” And I pull out a bloody ra- a razor blade, a box cutter style razor blade with fresh blood on it. Aaron: I throw it on the table. I lift up my arm with fresh cuts on it. I say, “That’s what I’m here for. I feel like I’m nothing. I feel like I’m worthless. I feel like there’s nothing left of me at all.” My mom, who [00:12:00] was the most practiced liar I ever knew in my life she tells them, “Oh, it’s nothing. He does this all the time. Aaron: He just does it to get a rise out of people. He just does it to get attention. It’s no real problem. We can take care of it.” Which these days I find really ironic because, yes, I was doing it to get attention. Somebody please see me screaming out in pain. But that wasn’t what she meant, and so they sent me home with her And we get a couple blocks away from the place, and she turns to me with this really evil look on her face and says, “Next you, next time you should’ve done a better job, and next time I’ll buy you the razor blades.” Aaron: I’m like, “O- okay. You think I should’ve done a better job killing myself, and you’ll help me next time? All right.” So up until that point, I was I was a shy, sweet kid, and I used this darkness as like a costume. If I wrap the darkness around me like a blanket, it was sharp and spiky and it’d keep everybody away, but it would keep a couple people that agree with me close, but it was a costume I was putting on. I was into musicals and comic books and s- and history, and I would read. Like when that party group, we were partying with that, those kids, we would trip [00:13:00] acid and I’d break out the complete works of Shakespeare. We’d all pick a character from a Shakespeare play and we’d act out Shakespeare all night long tripping acid. Aaron: I was that kind of kid. And, but sitting in that car with my mom telling me I should’ve done a better job killing myself, I just go straight into that dark. You think I’m a monster? Okay, I’ll show you what a monster is now. And that set me off on a nine-month process of what I call scorched earth, where I went on a conscious effort to destroy any positive outlook of myself. Aaron: Anybody that had a positive opinion of me, I was going to break it. And I was saying the most disgusting, sexist, racist, vile things, not because I was racist or sexist, just because it offended the person I was talking to. If it offended you, I was going to go there, and I didn’t have a limit. I was going to cross yours. So I didn’t, it didn’t really matter what I was saying, I just wanted to offend. And in that process, I would steal and lie and break every friendship I possibly could. I [00:14:00] went into every family member I could and gathered all the pictures of me that I possibly could from their photo albums, put them in a big pile and burned them. I was trying to annihilate my past. And I even t- went to Mike’s house and took two of his long boxes of comic books and went and sold them at a comic shop, stole them from him. Aaron: I was trying to break that relationship too. And so at the end of that After nine months of solid social destruction, I am alone, and I’m in that field behind Casa Bonita, and I’d been staying in that field for about a month. I had been avoiding the police during school hours because if they– I didn’t want them to arrest me for truancy, and I was surviving by stealing free samples from the grocery store and dumpster diving from the store at the top of the hill. And I woke up one morning in the snow, and I hadn’t– I was wearing wet clothes. I hadn’t changed my clothes in weeks. I hadn’t taken my shoes off in weeks. My feet were just rotting off my body. I was in horrible shape and woke up in about two inches of snow. And it was so cold [00:15:00] that the walk, the two, three block walk to get up to the store at the top of the hill, I could barely even sh– I couldn’t even move. Aaron: I could barely breathe. My arms wouldn’t work. My legs wouldn’t work. I get up there, and I’m washing my face off in the bathroom trying to get, start my day, and I couldn’t even recognize myself, and I think, “I gotta do something or I’m gonna die.” And last time when I warned them I was coming, they brought my mom in, so I’m not doing that again. But across the street from the school that I’m nominally at, quote-unquote at, was a building that said mental health. And I didn’t know what it was for, but I knew the sign said mental health. And I, I– Last time I warned them I was coming, they brought my mom in. I’m not doing that. I’m just gonna go in there cold. So I went in there, and they had me meet with this young woman. She was in her twenties, I think. And I don’t really remember much about that conversation. It was a counseling office, but I don’t remember what, much of what she said because all I remember is the very end where she said, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do. Aaron: I can’t help you And as I stood on that porch, that’s right there is where my brain snapped like a [00:16:00] mirror. I really felt like shards of glass snapped in my head. And a couple things happened right in quick succession immediately it was like, like crash bang. Couple things fell in my head. And the first thing was I found out what happens when you go to the very bottom of that mosh pit. All the violence goes away, and it gets really quiet, and it gets really still, and all the emotions fade because there’s nothing left to lose. What are you gonna do? You gonna shoot me? Okay, I’m gonna die. Aaron: Or are you gonna put me in jail? Okay, they’re gonna feed me. I don’t have any more down to fall to. And right then the, my plans crystallized in my head. When I was hanging out with that disaster groupie house, when we would sit and hang out and talk about things, we didn’t talk about nor
