“Then I opened up social media to see what was going on and I saw Uvalde on my feed,” Arokium said.

The Uvalde shooting that left 21 dead and 17 more wounded instantly brought Arokium back 10 years to the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, on Dec. 14, 2012. Arokium, a second grader at the time, lost 20 of her schoolmates and six educators at her school that day, including her first-grade teacher Victoria Soto.

Arokium has now become an activist — with a mission.

“I want to stop school shootings as a whole. I also want to protect kids in the future because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I had to go through,” she said.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School children who survived that fateful day are now young adults. Several have joined sports teams, such as Newtown High School’s 2019 state championship-winning football team. Others have become activists for gun reform, calling legislators and marching in Washington DC. Some are just going about their daily lives, trying to put the tragedy behind them and hoping that the shooting is not what forever defines them.

Coping with tragedy

Newtown resident Jackie Hegarty said she’ll never forget the day when police officers instructed her second-grade class to walk out of the classroom in a line, with their hands on each other’s shoulders and their eyes closed.

“Going from a dark classroom to a brightly lit … hallway, it was kind of a little bit of a transition. I remember walking out and opening my eyes … and just seeing really horrific things that no 7-year-old should have to see. And then kind of just continuing to walk out in shock, following my classmates,” said Hegarty, who is now 17 and a senior at Newtown High School.

She said she has experienced survivor’s guilt as a result of the tragedy.

“Over the past nine or 10 years, I have been wondering why I walked out of the school and other kids didn’t, and how could I have survived,” she said. “I can’t even compare to these kids who had so much potential. I feel like I’m not good enough because I feel like they could have done more. I felt like I should have not walked out because they were kids that were better than me.”

Hegarty has received various forms of treatment, but still experiences hypervigilance, causing her to oftentimes be evaluating potential threats.

“I always have to be staring at a door when I’m in my classroom,” she said. “I have to be seated so that I can find a hiding spot. Every place I go into, I have to know how to get out. I’ll never walk into a building where I don’t know at least one exit.”

Ashley Hubner, 17, said she has experienced periods of being afraid, and attributes them to her experience as a survivor of a school shooting.

“My room faces toward our driveway and the woods. When I was younger, I used to lay in bed and look out the window and I was afraid that there was gonna be someone coming up to my window,” said Hubner, who was in second grade during the shooting. “It definitely made my mom a lot more anxious.”

Now a senior in high school, she started going to therapy her sophomore year and strongly believes in its benefits — for anyone, but especially for those who experienced trauma.

While Newtown resident Maggie LaBanca knew several students who died in the Sandy Hook tragedy, one of them — Daniel Barden, was her best friend.

“He was my neighbor and my best friend. When I met him, he was 3 and we would spend almost every day together,” said LaBanca, 18, and a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

In the years following Daniel’s death, LaBanca said she avoided making new friends.

“I had just lost my best friend in the entire world and he meant absolutely everything to me,” said LaBanca, who was in third grade at the time. “To see him gone for no reason and so quickly, made me scared to make other friends because I didn’t want to lose them, too.”

She has since tried different therapies to cope with her experience.

“Eventually, it did become easier for me to make friends,” LaBanca said. “But nothing’s ever been the same for me again.”

Junior Newtown Action Alliance

As a reaction to the tragedy, LaBanca and several other Sandy Hook tragedy survivors have joined the Junior Newtown Action Alliance — the high school chapter of Newtown Action Alliance. The Junior alliance group works to raise awareness about gun violence prevention through educational activities and actions. The group, founded shortly after the tragedy, meets weekly at Newtown High School throughout the school year.

LaBanca said the group has been a source of great support for her, and in her senior year, she became co-president. It was the first year the club was led by a Sandy Hook survivor.

Now in college, LaBanca said she’s taking a “little break” from activism efforts.

However, she said recent events have brought the tragedy to the forefront for her all over again.

Aside from the Uvalde school shooting, she and others were frightened by a man later arrested on disorderly conduct charges during the March For Our Lives rally last summer. March For Our Lives is a group started in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in 2018 and it holds an annual rally in Washington D.C.

“That was the first time my friends and I were there together from Sandy Hook. And that was the first time we felt there was real evidence that we could die again,” she said. “I remembered when I was 8 years old and I was terrified because I had no idea what was going on. But this time, I was terrified because I did know what was going on … So now I’m working through it all over again.”

She added grief is a “process.”

“Trauma finds its way into every aspect of your life and sometimes, days are easier and sometimes, days are harder, but no matter what it’s always there,” she said.

She said participating in gun reform movements such as traveling to a vigil in Washington D.C. for all victims of gun violence has helped her healing.

“It’s very supportive environment,” she said. “Hearing other people’s stories really made me feel comforted.”

Over the past decade, she said she has been in therapy and is currently seeing a therapist.

“It’s always helpful to be able to talk to someone, especially coming to a new environment at college,” she said adding she thinks she’s the only student at her college who attended Sandy Hook Elementary School.

LaBanca said she hopes to not let the tragedy define her.

“It will always be part of who I am but I don’t want that to become my life,” she said. “I’m still me.”

Like LaBanca, Hegarty said she has turned to activism for gun violence prevention, such as joining, and later becoming co-chair of, the Newtown alliance group. She joined the group in seventh grade. She was its youngest member.

“That has fulfilled me,” she said.

A look to the future

Arokium said when she’s in college, she plans to study medicine to become a cardiothoracic surgeon which is a heart and lung surgeon — treating both adults and children.

“I would like to help kids to get back to their daily lives,” she said.

She said due to the tragedy, she “grew up very fast.”

“My childhood was kind of like taken away from me and I want others to experience a normal childhood,” she said.

Hegarty also plans to study a health field in college, like allied health or pharmaceutical science.

“It goes back to the survivor’s guilt. I must have survived for a reason. I have to use the gift of life that I was given,” she said. “I survived and therefore I have to do something to give back. I want to help people. I want to do great things that help give back.”

She added, “One of the most important things is just to continue speaking up about preventing these school shootings,” she said. “And we can.”

Hubner said trauma has no timeline.

“It can be 30 years from now and I could still have a panic attack thinking about something,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s invalid.”

She added she expects the effects of the tragedy to remain with her long-term.

“I did a couple of school projects two years ago about the Parkland and Columbine school survivors,” she said. “This stuff stays with you for life. It doesn’t matter if it’s gonna affect you in a big way or a little way. It’s always gonna be in the back of your mind.”