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 w