You Are Not Alone: A Conversation with Aaron Stark

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The following is a piece written by Unsinkable’s Jody Carrow following her interview with Aaron Stark

One of the challenges a writer faces is the word count. Though I’m barely into the introduction, I know it’s going to be damn hard to share everything I learned from this heart-led, honest, and brave father of four in 2000 words.

But here I go. Aaron Stark describes his childhood like this: “My first few years of life were extremely chaotic and violent because my birth father was… well, living with him was like living in a Stephen King movie [he was even born in a place named Salem in Oregon for goodness sake]. It was as violent and terrible as you can imagine. It was watching my mom get raped in front of me, having him kidnap me and my brother and run us across state lines, calling my mom and telling her we were both dead. It was terrible, horrible violence for the first five years of my life.”

Then the genre changed from horror to crime drama. “Finally, when I was about 5 years old, my mom left him and we got with my stepdad and… it was like living in Scarface with crack cocaine everywhere and… they would steal entire delivery trucks headed to toy stores and take the stuff to the flea market to sell it. I mean, it was lots and lots of drunken fighting, rockin’ up crack cocaine in front of me, that was basically the next 10 years of my life.”

“So, yeah, it was bad… Whenever anybody would get too close, or we’d get evicted, or someone would get caught with something, we’d just vanish and end up in another state.”

Aaron’s lost count of how many schools he attended, but estimates it’s somewhere around 30. He was a shy and sensitive kid who was into comic books and poetry which, combined with always being the new kid in dirty clothes, made him a target at every school he went to. Aaron endured “every variety of bullying that you can experience.”

And then he stopped enduring. “[O]nce I started hitting puberty – I started fighting back. I started getting more aggressive. I started internalizing what everyone had been saying to me: that I was worthless, that I was a piece of shit. I finally was like, Okay, if you’re going to call me that, then I’m going to be that… About 12 or 13 years old I started to get into the darker aspects of life. I really started to get into Nine Inch Nails music; I got into trying to be as outwardly offensive as possible. I would say the most offensive disgusting things; I would make my living situation as filthy as possible… I was trying to get everyone to stay the fuck away from me. And the abuse just never stopped.”

Aaron was homeless from age 14-16, choosing that over staying in a home environment where he was regularly attacked by his mother for something beyond his control – that he looked like his birth father – or witness to the brutal violence his stepdad inflicted on his mom. “I couldn’t take that insanity anymore… Either I would stay at friends’ houses – and they weren’t friends, they were what I call ‘disaster groupies’ (people who just wanted to watch the car crash, to watch me flame out). When I got to be about 15/16 I started cutting myself… I didn’t have any agency over anything, not even my emotions.”

“People talk about being in that fight or flight response – I felt like I lived in that state all the time… The cutting gave me something that was mine. It gave me the part of my emotion that I could control. It was negative, but it made me feel like I owned it. It was like positive reinforcement from a negative thing.”

But Aaron had one real, true positive come into his life when he was about 12 years old: a boy at the end of the block named Mike. A boy growing up in the polar opposite environment to Aaron’s, an environment that ought to be every child’s human right. A boy who, like Aaron, also loved comic books.

“[Mike] had a stable family who still lives in the same house to this day… So he was always the home base for me.”

Mike would sneak dinners out to the tool shed in his backyard where Aaron was now sleeping. Aaron would dumpster dive for food during the day and take LSD to make it through the night. “After a couple months of that… I finally hit my low, low point – and I describe this in my talk – and I’m sitting there cutting myself and it’s so bad that I’m pooling blood beneath me and the rain is coming through this ramshackle roof… it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, it’s winter and pouring down rain, and I’m cutting myself so badly and I think…

I have to do something. I’m going to kill myself if I don’t do something. I need to find some help.”

(Sidebar: that ‘talk’ Aaron is referring to? That would be his TED Talk, which in just over a year has accumulated 8.1 million views.)

Aaron reached out to the local social services office and got an appointment. When he arrived, he was horrified to find his mom there. She had been called to the meeting and managed to convince the social worker that, despite his bloodied arms and obvious desperation, Aaron was just lying to get attention. Aaron was sent home. In parting, Aaron’s mom “said the worst thing that anyone has ever said to me which was that I should have done a better job and next time she’ll buy the razor blades.”

Aaron made a decision. “That whole kind of living in darkness and wearing it like a shield, I just ran straight into after she said that… and I decided to burn everything to the ground. I spent the next 2-3 months trying to destroy every relationship I had. I even stole a bunch of Mike’s stuff and broke it. It was like scorched earth, I was burning it all down.”

There’s a field behind the Casa Bonita restaurant in Denver, where Aaron started sleeping. He tried one last time to get help by seeing a counselor at the high school he’d long stopped attending. He was told there was no help available to him.

“And I walked out of that office and that was the minute I felt my brain completely shatter. I couldn’t even get help… I finally was at that point where I just decided to scream out, like everybody’s going to hear me now. I’m going to make everybody listen to me. I decided right then that I was going to attack my school. I was living in this giant tsunami of pain and shit.

“[T]he people who were ostensibly my friends… we would actually talk about killing people and the way we would do it. That would be the fiction of the group – that we would plan out mass murder. No one ever really thought it was real, it was like the equivalent of a fantasy football thing. Again, it was that positive reinforcement from a negative thing. It’s what made us happy to talk about.”

“Under that tsunami, way beneath the pain, it turns really quiet, really calm, and really still. Because you don’t have anything left to lose, and you have nothing left to care about. When I was in that spot, all those fantasy plans just crystallized in that one moment. I already had the plan set up because I’d talked about it with my buddies; I knew what to do.”

Aaron discovered it was far easier to get a gun than it was to get help. It took a stroll over to the parking lot at his high school, three days, and a swap for some weed. While he was waiting for it, Aaron started giving away the few possessions he had. “[L]ooking back now I can see I was saying goodbye. Because I went to Mike’s house. And I hadn’t talked to him for like a month and a half before that, but it didn’t really matter to him. He brought me in.”

“Everyone else in my world treated me like I was a monster… Mike just treated me like I was a person – he literally just treated me like it was a Tuesday.”

“And I really think that being treated like a person when I didn’t even feel like I was a human – it changed my whole world… I ended up staying at his house for a week. He’s still my best friend to this day.”

Mike’s kindness permanently derailed Aaron’s plans to shoot up his school. He unwittingly saved a lot of lives when he invited Aaron to come in that day. Aaron never went back for the gun. It’s not like everything that was going on for him magically disappeared after that – Aaron struggled for several more years with severe depression and suicidal ideation – but his unconditional friendship with Mike proved to the one thing he could always count on.

Eventually Aaron was able to finally break free. He moved to Kansas with Mike and “went on a purposeful psychological recovery mission…the biggest process being acknowledgment. I went to the people that hurt me and told them what happened. NOT to be accusatory, but to say, ‘This is what happened. I know the situation, our relationship has fundamentally changed from here on out and here is the reality we’re going to be living now.’ Getting that off of my chest was extremely cathartic and helped me get over so many of those demons that made me feel like a monster. I got so much out of confronting the people that actually were the monsters.”

Aaron didn’t stop there. After the school shooting in Parkland, FL in 2018, he applied to share his story, I Was Almost a School Shooter, on one of the most visible platforms in the world: TED Talks. And the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “The coolest part about me coming out with my story isn’t any attention it’s given me – it’s the response that I get from people all over the world. Literally all over the planet from people not just saying, ‘Hey, this is a cool story,’ but ‘Hey this is a cool story and here’s everything that ever happened to me. And here’s all my pain and all the abuse that I went through.’ There’s all these diaries that I got handed, thousands and thousands of people’s diaries.”

“And so out of that I made a Facebook group called You Are Not Alone… And it’s based on support and love and care for people who need it; it’s a place where you can express your feelings without judgment or people coming back at you. This group has legitimately stopped 3 attacks, 6 suicides, and helped 2 people get out of white nationalism. Because it’s treating people like Mike does just on a larger scale.”

“One of the first things I did with the group was I filled it up with professionals. So there are legitimate trauma therapist providers, there are police officers, caregivers, teachers…every area that would hit this kind of expertise. So if someone is getting that help with someone in the group and it’s a bit over their level, there is someone they can refer to. It’s kind of like this self-perpetuating positivity machine. The best part of this whole experience.”

The group gives every member a chance to be a ‘Mike’ to someone who needs it. “Sometimes there’s nothing more validating than realizing that even when you’re broken, you can still help somebody else. I still have issues, I still fight with depression, I still fight with self-worth issues, I still fight with self-image issues, but being able to help others help other people is so powerful and cathartic.” With over 1500 members from 71 different countries, clearly lots of other people agree.

There have been a few challenges with going public, the main one being Aaron’s employability. “People Google you right away when you apply for a job and I spent my life in food service – I have an enviable collection of nametags and hairnets – and because of Google I can’t walk into a Wendy’s or McDonald’s looking for a management job and get one like I had always been able to do in the past. Now, same jobs, I get Googled and they see that I was almost a school shooter, and I don’t get a callback.”

Does he regret it? Not even remotely. “What I’m doing now is way bigger and way more important than anything I have ever done before. To me, if I’m going back to working in a kitchen, I’m doing something wrong.”

Aaron’s speaking career is now building, which is exciting for him. No doubt he will be sought after well into the future because of his honesty, willingness to be vulnerable, his connection with his audiences through long Q+As, and his two main messages:

Give love to people you think deserve it the least because they need it the most, and treating someone like a person when they don’t feel like a human can change their whole world.

Aaron is the living proof.

Unsinkable Storytelling Author: Aaron Stark