Sorry about taking so long with this reply – I had caught it earlier, but needed a bit of time to contemplate it. Hope that’s all right! =)
I think there was definitely another side to Eric that only sparingly made it into his journal and the rest of his writing. We know that a lot of the official researchers have opted to take all of the material written by Eric at face value, which is a glaring mistake that was unfortunately promoted even further by the likes of sensationalising journalist Dave Cullen. What I believe they have failed to comprehend in all of this is that every single scrap of the material we have from Eric was written for some kind of audience. His school assignments were designed for the teacher (as well as fellow students) and, though there are interesting parts in some of them, they are quite limited in scope because of the original assignment they were written for. His webpages weren’t set to private, either, and friends like Dylan were fully aware of the content on those. Even the Browns were made aware of it and reported it to law enforcement due to the threats Eric threw at Brooks online. Eric didn’t start his journal until a year prior to the massacre. Already in its third entry (written on 4/21/98), he references “going NBK” – which we now know was code for the massacre. He started that journal knowing fully well how it was going to end.
Every person on this planet has a multitude of faces. They’re divided up into public and private personas and often subdivided into who you’re using them for. That’s not necessarily a conscious process, either, and sometimes the differences between them are so small that you’d hardly know you’re altering them! What we see from Eric is mostly public face mixed in with smidges of private face. He had built up what I often like to call the Reb-persona: the would-be mass murderer who knows it all and doesn’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. His journal is a bit of a bulldozer act in a sense, driving all of his wild-and-not-thought-out ideas home with the endless shouts of who gets to live and who gets to die. It’s crafted as much as it is stream of consciousness. There is an awareness of shock value, an almost-exasperation at how much he has to spell out for his unwitting audience, and the underlying storm of NBK makes its way out onto the page in sharp darts and phrases.. He knows full well there will come a time when those words are going to be analysed over, and over, and over. And he can’t be weak when that happens. He can’t be insecure, though he admits to being just that almost flippantly, and he can’t be “just Eric” because “just Eric” was never quite good enough for anything.
There’s the catch, see? 😉 There’s that other side of him. And that doesn’t become clear upon the first read of that journal – at least, I was far too absorbed in all the other stuff he was yellin’ about while trying to make sense of the ideas he was displaying that first time I read it. The first time reads like a school shooter ideology neatly wrapped up with a little bow. Kinda like “ding ding ding, we have a winner, you will be taking a psychopathic little monster home with you today!”. It was what Eric had intended. It also was what most people fell for without ever realising that they were playing right into his hands. He didn’t want people to look past that, not really.. and I also suspect that he didn’t think people could want to look past it, after what he did.
But what happens when you do look past it? When you sit with Eric the way I’ve sat with him – one sentence at a time, one idea at a time, one entry at the time? When you sit with his journal propped open on one browser tab and run a comparison with other evidence like the diversion documents and certain witness statements? When you start connecting the dots – start putting things in their respective timeline, getting a feel for what was going on in his life when he wrote the things he did? The result of that is surprising, really. I initially found myself latching on to the throwaway lines I describe below, which I believe to be windows into that other side of Eric. Once I had pondered those in relation to statements about his family life (strict, authoritarian, high expectations), his childhood (moves from state to state and from school to school), his personality (shy, timid, intelligent, goofball sense of humour), and other things.. Eric became clearer and clearer.
“my doctor wants to put me on medication to stop thinking about so many things” –> Eric has described rapid thoughts, thoughts he may have even looped on incessantly, and some of them may have had an intrusive quality to them that he wasn’t 100% comfortable with.
“give the Earth back to the animals, they deserve it infinitely more than we do” –> Eric was a huge, huge animal lover. I’ve often said I could see him working to rescue dogs and the like later on in life – he seemed to be more comfortable around animals and had a natural empathy for them. His dog was everything to him.
“I have to turn off my feelings” –> Eric tells himself this in regards to the massacre: he cannot let himself get side-tracked from killing by feelings of sympathy. I think that his desire to switch off his feelings may have extended beyond this – I believe that the environment he grew up in didn’t give him the space to safely express them, so he learned to switch them off or switch them into something else that was more accepted.
“I have always hated how I looked” –> Eric uses the word ‘always’ here, which is concerning in its depth. Many of us can remember that we used to feel differently about ourselves back when we were little, before we had a proper notion of good looks or whatever. The fact that he seems to not be able to differentiate and throws in the ‘always’ instead shows a very deep-seated discomfort with his looks.
“that’s where a lot of my hate grows from: the fact that I have no self-esteem, especially concerning girls and looks and such” –> I often wish I could quote this line incessantly and hammer Dave Cullen over the head with it the way that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” appears over and over again in The Shining. It’s a no-brainer of a line: a rare admission of Eric’s feelings about himself and his awareness of his self-esteem issues being one of the root causes of his hatred.
“whatever I do, people make fun of me and sometimes directly to my face” –> One of the very few outright references to bullying we’ve seen from either one of the boys.
“I would’ve loved it if you were there (at the gun show) dad, we would’ve done some major bonding” –> Eric expresses a particular desire to bond with his dad here, which really shows how little he felt he connected in with his father. He needs something like a gun show – something to do together – to be able to really bond with his dad. I think that just sitting down together and talking was not really something that happened between father and son, though Eric might’ve craved that connection.
“I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things” –> Self-explanatory once more: Eric also mentions in the vicinity of this line that people had his phone number and everything, so it wasn’t like he didn’t make himself available. He felt left out of things that he had wanted to be a part of by people he was trying to connect with.
“don’t let the weird looking Eric KID come along, ohh fucking nooo” –> This one is always one of the most interesting lines to me. It’s the closing line of the journal, which isn’t a strong note to end it on by any means when you’ve just been trying very hard to look badass. But what strikes me about it every single time is the venom that is in this one line – not just toward people who didn’t let him come along, but also toward himself. There is such self-loathing hiding in this one closing note that I wonder how anyone really missed it..
I could basically go through his journal line-by-line and dissect it this way at this point in time, but the above is a sampling of what happens when you stop taking the entries at face value and start digging. I think that Eric.. just Eric.. I think that he was really fragile emotionally, that a lot of his anger was a defense mechanism to prevent people from getting closer to him and seeing him as the insecure child he was. I believe there was a part of Eric that never really grew up due to the uprootment he suffered as a child and the lack of space he had to express himself safely. I think that he wanted to do right by everybody and wanted to belong to people, but that he forgot about himself and his own needs in the process until the bucket was full and he started spouting toxic lava to make a point and re-assert himself. I think that he weirded people out with his quiet intensity and that he had a razorsharp drive to get things done once he set his mind to them. I believe he was intelligent and witty and that he enjoyed learning new things: this was the kind of guy who’d voluntarily sit down and watch documentaries on history and wildlife in a marathon run of joy. I think that he was damaging and a little loose cannon once he’d grown fed up with life and people. I believe he was black-and-white in opinions and that he’d pick a fight with the sky if it was the wrong shade of blue. I think he could be exasperating and stubborn to a fault. I have the sense that he could be jealous, possessive, and suffer a bit of a mean streak. I also have the sense that he could be warm, caring, and prone to handing out these big bearhugs if anyone he liked needed them. I think he was a conundrum even to himself. I think he had as many light moments as he did dark, no matter how much of a monster-hiding-under-the-bed he made himself out to be. I think he didn’t always know what to do with himself. I think he didn’t know who would love and accept someone like him just for being Eric. I believe that he had learned that love was always a terms & conditions thing rather than an unconditional expression. I believe that he didn’t know where to go, so he went nowhere.
Columbine 