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On Wednesday, Feb 17, 2021, eight people were injured in a mass shooting that took place in broad daylight at the mass transportation hub in my neighborhood. It happened at the station where my family and I would normally take the subway to go downtown. Fortunately, my loved ones and I were not there at the time, but we could easily have been.
This particular shooting has had an especially rattling effect on me because I have lived through too many similar events. In August 2019, five people were gunned down in broad daylight during a drive-by shooting two blocks from my home. In June 2019, I was in a subway when a gunfight broke out in the next train car. In September 2018, I was at home one evening when a three-way gun battle took place right outside my house. When the police arrived, they sealed us inside our home and I watched from a window as they counted over 40 bullets. In addition, along the paths I walk to the subway and supermarket are various memorials for neighbors who have been gunned down at those spots over the years. In many of these cases, I was at home to bear witness to the thunderous gunshots fired and the sirens of police cars and ambulances as first responders rushed to those scenes.
Each of those experiences was terrifying. In aggregate, they are overwhelming to process. One thing I’ve noticed is that after each of these incidents, we are left to cope with the shellshock and trauma on our own. No mental health services such as trauma counseling are offered to the witnesses or residents in the community. Media coverage is minimal. No additional attention or support is provided by government agencies.
After each incident, my parents and neighbors seem to carry on with their day-to-day lives and responsibilities without missing a beat. Following their example, I also do my best to push through fear and terror to function as best I can. I tell myself: These are isolated rare incidents and for the most part, I can walk around my neighborhood and take the subway without there being any gunfire. I try not to let the fear win. However, inside, the toxic stress wears me down and it must wear them down too.
Now that I am living through it once again, I am once again forced to grapple with the lack of support programs. I desperately wish for solutions on healing community violence but my search for one has so far been in vain. Yet as someone who studies neuroscience and mindfulness, perhaps there is something that can be learned from using this experience to build an autobiographical case study on the burden of community violence.
As a child growing up in northern Philadelphia, I assumed this type of violence was part of ordinary life. However, that assumption changed when I had the privilege of going to an Ivy League university. From there on, I was insulated from such violence as I built a career as a white-collared professional living in middle-class communities in Boston and Manhattan, and then worked abroad as an expatriate in several countries in Asia living among the educated elites in those countries. Therefore, when I returned to this neighborhood to help take care of my parents eight years ago, I also had to get reacquainted with this form of community violence.
It makes me very sad when I talk about these incidents with people outside my community, how so many of them quickly suggest the solution of moving out of our neighborhood where my parents have lived for almost three decades. They don’t understand how tied my parents are to our neighbors, how invested they are in the community, and how much pride my father takes in serving on the ward committee here. They don’t understand how painful it would be to give up on our home and be part of the brain drain instead of the solution.
One week later, I am still processing the aftermath of this latest mass shooting and the toll it has had on me physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Despite practicing self-care through meditation, exercising, and eating well, I continue to feel drained and lower energy than usual. It’s still harder to focus on work and topics not related to my neighborhood and gun violence. I am hypervigilant about going outside and fearful of walking by the transportation center where the mass shooting took place, though I know one day I will have to. Right now, I can’t imagine riding the subway anytime soon, though one day, after the pandemic ends, I probably will do so again.
These observations made me realize how compared to a peer living in an affluent community without these challenges, it is now much harder for me in this current state to perform at the same level of cognitive functioning that they can. This realization has also made me see how community violence has been an extra burden I carried and compensated for my whole life as I strived to match the performance expectations set for white middle-class peers, first academically in school and then professionally in my career.
In the absence of further incidents, I know my body will eventually return to homeostasis because it’s done so before and knows how to be resilient. Yet, if there are more incidents, the return to homeostasis will take more time and the negative impact on my body, my mind, and my ability to do my best work will continue.
If this is the toll that community violence has on me, someone who has researched the neuroscience of trauma and who has a toolkit of mindfulness techniques to observe and mitigate the impact of trauma on my body and mind, then what is the toll that community violence inflicts on people without this understanding and toolkit?
My mind continues to raise more questions than answers: Why are people who experience community violence left to suffer in silence? What does it take to get more people to care about this issue? What can communities do to heal the impact of violence? What does this form of healing look like? How do we mobilize resources to design and test programs to foster this type of healing?
I hope sharing about my experiences motivates more people to help develop answers to these questions.
