Dear World,

We hear everyday of some terrible incident occurring, whether it be on purpose or by accident. We hear about tragedy, we hear about things that we could never imagine occurring to us, but as a resident of Connecticut, and more specifically a resident of a town 15 minutes from Newtown, the home of the Sandy Hook massacre, we know tragedy. We know what it feels like for these unimaginable stories and news reports to happen because it happened to us.

On December 14, 2012 everyones' lives were changed. I remember being a junior in high school and sitting in my fifth period biology class when my principal began speaking over the loudspeaker saying, “We have been notified by the Redding police that we are entering lockdown. This is not a drill.” You could feel the wave of panic that just swept through our eerily silent classroom. This was only 15 minutes from when everything happened.

I don’t want to talk about the bad though. I don’t want to talk about what you saw on the 5 o’clock news. I want to talk about what you didn’t see. I want to talk about the love, the strength, the perseverance, and support that came out of this. I want to talk about how every resident of Connecticut, and every resident of the United States came together to show how much the power of love can do.

In the midst of the most horrible thing imaginable, there was constant support pouring in from our neighbors to even the President of the United States. What mattered the most is that we knew we had love, we knew we had each other. Our lives changed forever, but now we all hug each other a little tighter, we say “I love you” when we hang up phone calls, and we text our friends saying that we’re home when we’re out late at night. We learned how to love, we learned how to support.

So yes, we are sad. We will always be sad, but we are no longer devastated. We know that although we gained 26 beautiful angels that day, we also gained the lifelong lesson to love one another. So don’t be sad for us. Pray for us, but don’t be sad for us. We aren’t here to dwell on the past. We’re here to look to the future, to look at life as a gift, and that’s what we’re going to do.

We are Sandy Hook and we choose love, we choose change.

Sincerely,

Connecticut