Editors’ note: Because of the sensitive nature of this column, we encourage you to read it in its entirety, along with the accompanying column. Names in this piece have been changed to protect individuals’ identities.

After the Northern Illinois shootings this February, a lot of people started speculating about the shooter’s motivation, but I think I’ve actually been in his shoes. As recently as two years ago, I regularly fantasized about raping and killing the people around me, and those fantasies were the only effective tools I had to deal with my own emotions.

Because of my experience, I couldn’t help being offended when I read a column by Quincy Miller (Feb. 19’s “Stop defining shooters as Others”) in the Daily less than a week after the shooting. Quincy’s message was essentially harmless: The media shouldn’t try to dismiss the shooter’s problems by saying he had stopped taking his medication – instead, we as a society should search our souls to find the real reasons behind the tragedy.

However, it was obvious to me that Quincy hadn’t searched his own soul before writing the column, and the media’s parody of a maniac enslaved by his emotions seemed closer to my own experience than anything Quincy had written about Same, Other and society.

I took it upon myself to do what Quincy couldn’t and to search my own soul for answers.

The first thing you should know about me is that I’m smarter than you. I was in fourth grade when I realized I was smarter than my teacher, who censored my letter to a pen pal because she couldn’t risk letting a fourth-grader tell another fourth-grader an assignment was boring. Apparently, boredom was a subversive idea that needed to be suppressed.

I didn’t have much patience for that kind of stupidity, so I became a loner. From fourth grade through 10th grade, I had a combined total of one friend I saw outside of school, and that’s the way I wanted it.

But, as you can guess, being a loner eventually came back to bite me.

When I was 22 years old, I got depressed. I won’t go into why I was depressed, because it doesn’t really matter. Lots of people get depressed for lots of different reasons, and they usually get through it with the help of family and friends. What sets me apart from the crowd is how poorly I dealt with my depression.

The few times I found someone I could talk to, I felt a lot better. For example, I told Mary about a project I was worried about, and she basically said, “Don’t worry. You’re really smart.” That may not sound like much, but she said it with such blind optimism she made me believe, at least for a few minutes, that I had nothing to worry about.

Most of the time, though, I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone. When I couldn’t take my emotional cues from people like Mary, I had to focus inward, and all my inner emotions were negative. It wasn’t long before I figured out that morbid fantasies, directed at any scapegoat I could find, were the best I could do.

One of my first scapegoats was Christina. When I first met Christina, she said a friend of hers from high school “was pregnant as a teenager, but she was raped,” implying that it’s OK to be pregnant as long as you’re not a slut.

Since Christina was so casual about rape, I thought, “Hey, why don’t I rape Christina?” For the rest of the summer, I spent whole days thinking about the logistics of it. Would she keep quiet? If she struggled, how hard would it be to undress her?

Obviously, I didn’t hate Christina because she wasn’t outraged enough by what happened to her friend. I dreamt of hurting Christina because violent thoughts were comforting and she happened to be a convenient target.

As my depression got worse, I thought more and more about suicide, and when I did, I always thought about whom I would take down with me. Luckily, I didn’t have a job and I spent the last of my money on alcohol instead of guns.

When I had no money left and nowhere to live, I tried to kill myself with a box of 48 over-the-counter sleeping pills – Tylenol PM without the headache medicine – and two bottles of wine. I was surprised to wake up seven hours later with enough medication in my system to make me hallucinate, but apparently not enough to give me eight hours of sleep.

I spent the next day facing the most terrifying fear a suicidal man can face: What if I’m invincible?

It was that fear that finally set me on the right path. On a rational level, I already knew I should try to be happy, but the fear of undeath got through to me on an emotional level. Once I could feel the problem, I was suddenly able to feel the solution.

Part of the solution was learning to reach a neutral emotional state by focusing on something outside of me – a sunny day, a cool breeze, a thunderstorm – but the most important thing was learning to talk to people. I talked to Dave, and he gave me a tent I could stay in until I could afford an apartment. I told people I was living in the woods and they consistently told me I was “hardcore” or “badass,” which boosted my ego in a weird way.

When I talked to people, I was happier, but I still struggled with shyness. My life became a lot easier when a guy I knew from Board Game Club found out about my suicide attempt and reached out to help. He started by telling his minister, Roger Bear, who convinced me to move out of my tent and into the local Baptist Collegiate Ministry house.

Everyone at the BCM house was friendly, and even though they knew I was an atheist, they all accepted me and treated me well. They really grew on me and I kept spending more and more time at the BCM house. For spring break, I even went with a BCM group to New Orleans to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.

It was an incredible transformation. Instead of spending my days thinking of new ways to hurt people, I actually spent my spring break helping people, and I owed it all to Roger’s kindness.

I think there’s a lesson we can learn from all this. It would be ludicrous to blame my problems on “society,” but the people around me can have a big impact.

If I could spend every day with a happy, optimistic woman, I’d be set for life. (Unfortunately, as Ryan Frederick pointed out last semester, nice guys like me never get the girl.)

We’ll never prevent an ISU shooting by tightening gun control, loosening gun control or blaming society for past shootings, but we can help by becoming better people. We can try to be happier, friendlier and easier to talk to. If we do, we might build a campus where we all deal with depression in a healthy way.

– Bill Waite is a graduate student in computer science from Terre Haute, Ind.