I was a sophomore in high school when two 12th graders killed 13 people and injured more before shooting themselves at Columbine High School.

I remember where I was when I found out: with a friend in the lobby at school, just-returned from an away softball game, waiting to be picked up by our parents. I remember feeling stunned, but not scared. Surely something so terrible couldn’t happen twice.

When another school shooting — this one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut — became one of our nation’s deadliest, I was a second-year high school English teacher. On the first day of school that year, there was a shooting at my alma mater, Perry Hall High School. My mom, who worked in the nurse’s office at various Baltimore County schools, texted to tell me. She was at another school that day, and, mercifully, safe.

By this point, we had endured dozens more school shootings. It was only when it happened in my hometown that I finally understood: This happens everywhere.

During my interview just the year before, my principal had said, “The classroom must be sacred.” Her philosophy is one of the reasons I accepted her job offer. Sacred means special. Sanctuary. Safe. In a city where gun violence scars so many childhoods, my students, my lovelies, deserved and needed that sacred, safe space. The classroom should have been at least one place that remained free of bullets and bloodshed. But we live in a country where nowhere is sacred and no one is safe.

When I was a student, I never had reason to feel unsafe at school. The only drills we ever had were the routine evacuations in case of a fire. Children in America no longer have that luxury. Because I’m child-free, I don’t know the fear of sending my kid(s) to school every day in this country. But I know the fear I’ve felt for my lovelies and the children of loved ones, all of whom are experts at active shooter drills.

I also know the toll that school shootings take on classroom teachers, even when we’re spared from experiencing them at our own schools. I taught for over 11 years, and sometimes marvel at how many hours I spent hiding in my classroom corner, wondering if this lockdown was a drill, or if we actually did have a threat within our walls. For years, I didn’t let myself think too much about it in the moment.

I’m not sure when it was: during a lockdown, in the aftermath of another school shooting, or on any other ordinary day. Eventually, I realized something.

I didn’t want to have to sacrifice myself for my lovelies.

This discovery brought me immediate shame. I adore my lovelies. I’m made better by them. And I didn’t want to take a bullet for them.

I wonder how many people now expect that level of self-sacrifice from teachers. It’s possible, if a shooter had arrived at my classroom, I would’ve jumped in the way after all, but I just don’t know. I’m fortunate that I never had to find out and furious that I needed to consider it, time and again.

It wasn’t until my 11th year teaching that I began to feel frightened during lockdowns. Ten days before the first day of school, my brother Tyler died in a car accident. His death suddenly made my life feel like something I must protect at all costs. I could not, would not add to the heartbreaking load my parents, brother Connor and I already live with.

The next year, my 12th, a health crisis abruptly ended my teaching career. As much as I miss being in a school building, I’ve also noticed a gradual loosening of tension that I hadn’t known I’d been holding. I didn’t realize how tightly wound or how precarious things felt until I was no longer in a place where, every day, gunshots were somewhere in the back of my mind.

My time as a student and teacher in America are mild compared to what countless others have, and will, experience. I was wrong when I was 15: what happened at Columbine High School wasn’t a freak tragedy.

I was also wrong at 29, thinking, hoping, that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School would finally make us change gun laws. Instead, we’ve continued to compound our losses. Hundreds of people have died since the shooting at Columbine, some as young as 6, inside of school buildings.

At 30, 31, 32, all the way to 38, I went to school every day, waiting for things to get better even as they got worse.

I’m 40 now. Just days into this new academic year, our schools are already bloody from shootings. Today, I’m afraid that this is how it will always be.

God, I hope I’m wrong.