ELMHURST -- For a year, I've been contemplating the causes of the Columbine shooting, and I've come to some pretty odd conclusions. You see, I understand Columbine. When I examine the situation, I can relate to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris far better than I can a lot of their victims, in a "wherefore but the grace of God go I" kind of sense.

I can understand being so unhappy with your situation that you really don't even care about your own life anymore--you just wish it was over.

And I can understand desperately wanting to make those who had hurt you for your entire life pay for what they'd done to you and others like you.

And most of all I can understand the desperate need for acceptance from anyone in a world that seems only to keep you around as a scapegoat for others' feelings of inadequacy.

I've done better for myself than they have, obviously. But it's still not easy to persuade myself to go to school every day and face a lot of people who couldn't care less about me and what I'm feeling. I've worked so hard just to get to the point that I don't feel that my life is worthless because of these "harmless, innocent" kids.

I sometimes think about how much my experiences in schools have affected me. I wonder how much of my identity, who I was, I've lost in an effort to survive. My education wasn't bad. The teachers were pretty good; some were great. But no matter what I make of my life, no matter how much I may come to like myself, it will never have been worth it. I can't even imagine how much I've lost: my innocence, my trust in others, my sense of self-worth. It makes me sad, but it also makes me angry to think of all that I've sacrificed to boost the egos of ignorant little kids.

I'm not sure what elementary school is like today--I didn't have to worry about guns when I was a child--but I'm reasonably sure that the children haven't changed that much. In my experience, the kids that like to tease are only looking for a reaction. My first memory of elementary school is of being teased, and it hurt then. And from the moment that some of the other kids knew that they could make me hurt, they did. I was different, and I was an easy target, so I had to live with their harassment for years, until I learned to not react, to not care.

The worst part about it, though, was that it seemed that nobody cared. The teachers never did anything because I never asked them to do anything. I didn't know then that sometimes you need to tell people when to care.

I'm a senior in high school, and it still hasn't stopped. There are still kids who think that they can bring me down by tormenting me, but I have grown beyond them. It wasn't easy for me. A lot of people in my situation may not have the strength of will to manage it alone, but that is not their fault.

The Columbine shooting was something that struck me deeply--not because it was a shooting that took place at a school, but because of the reasons why Dylan and Eric were driven to commit such an awful crime. In discussions with other people my age, and even with a lot of adults, I've brought up many of the same points I brought up here, and the majority of them just don't get it.

And I envy them for that.

People don't understand how completely devastating teasing can be to a child. They don't understand how hard it is for some of us to recover from schooling with any sense of self worth. The thing that bothers me most about the past year is the number of parents and kids who have said, "Schools just aren't safe anymore." School has never been safe--not for people like me, not for people like Dylan and Eric. Kids shouldn't have to face school every daywondering what demeaning thing they'll be called, who will push them around, what they'll have to face throughout the day. Guns and bombs may kill bodies, but taunts and harassment can kill the soul. That is far worse.

In the end, what have we, as a society, learned from the Columbine tragedy? We've learned to further isolate potential dangers, kids like Dylan and Eric, kids who are a danger only because they've been outcasts their entire life. We've learned to attack physical violence while ignoring emotional and verbal violence. We've learned to distrust teens more than ever.

What we haven't learned, however, is that we cannot end physical violence in schools without ending harassment in school. We haven't learned that there are deeper problems behind school violence. We haven't learned that kids have been killing kids for longer than they've been using guns to do it.

We haven't learned anything.