Commentary: My high school classmates were massacred in 2018. How are we still in the exact same place?

In my first journalism job, I wrote two obituaries and edited 17. They were about the classmates and teachers who died in the mass shooting at my school.

In my first journalism job, I hid from an active shooter inside the newspaper room's photo closet.

In my first journalism job, I returned to that room every single day to write about the trauma and its impact on all our lives.

I was 16, a junior in high school and editor in chief of my school newspaper. It was 2018.

I start with this not for shock value or an attempt at gaining sympathy, but simply to share the truth of my life. The truth I skirt around whenever someone asks what city I am from or how I learned I wanted to write or what my high school was named.

I have come to learn that it is not something to shy away from. I need to tell this story for anything else I say here to make sense.

I don't remember writing those obituaries as much