What I found in Dylan’s writing was a revelation. I had not known he had expressed his thoughts and feelings in writing at all, as I did, and it made me feel close to him. The entries themselves broke my heart. I know how deceptive self-recording can be. I often spill pages and pages when I am sad or scared or angry, whereas better times rate only a breezy line or two. I also know that people can say things in their diaries they don’t have any real plans to act on: I swear, I’m going to kill Joe if he doesn’t return my weed whacker. Even with that caveat, Dylan’s anguish—his depression, perceived isolation, longing, and desperation—jumps off the page.
He talks about cutting himself, a sign of severe distress. He writes about suicide in the very earliest pages: “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE—me—my soul (existence)” and often afterward: “oooh god I want to die sooo bad…such a sad desolate lonely unsalvageable I feel I am…not fair, NOT FAIR!!! Let’s sum up my life…the most miserable existence in the history of time.” He talks about dying by suicide for the first time a full two years before Columbine, and many more times after that.
There is despair and anger but little violence, especially in the pages before January 1999. Besides sadness, the most common emotion expressed throughout Dylan’s journals—and by far the most prevalent word—is “love.” There are pages covered in huge, hand-drawn hearts. He writes, heartbreakingly and sometimes eloquently, about his unfulfilled, excruciating desire for romantic love and understanding. “A dark time, infinite sadness,” he wrote. “I want to find love.” He fills pages with details of a passionate, painful infatuation with a girl who does not even know he exists.
The two psychological states Joiner points to as components in the desire to die—thwarted belongingness (“I am alone”) and perceived burdensomeness (“I am a burden”)—are painfully apparent, although he kept both his hurt and his infatuation closely guarded. I pushed back for years against the public perception of Dylan as an outcast, because he had close friends (not only in Eric, but also in Zack and Nate), and because he participated in a wider circle of boys and girls. But—and it is vital for every survivor of suicide loss to understand this about the person who has died—the journals revealed a vast chasm between our perception of his reality and Dylan’s own perception of it.
He had friends, but he did not feel as if he belonged. In one journal entry he lists his “nice family” among the good things in his life, but the hugeness of our love for him could not penetrate the fog of his desolation. He understood himself as a burden, although we never once felt he was. (Tom and I did worry aloud about how we would pay for his college tuition, which haunts me to this day.) He expresses anger at a world where he does not fit, is not understood. At the beginning, the anger is directed mostly at himself. Gradually, it turns outward.
? ? ?
I thought it might be helpful to have a distillation of a few points.
1. Nothing you did or didn’t do caused Dylan to do what he did.
2. You didn’t “fail to see” what Dylan was going through—he was profoundly secretive and deliberately hid his internal world not only from you, but from everyone else in his life.
3. By the end of his life, Dylan’s psychological functioning had deteriorated to the point that he was not in his right mind.
4. Despite his deterioration, his former self survived enough to spare at least four people during the attack.
—E-mail from Dr. Peter Langman, February 9, 2015
That Dylan was seriously depressed is not up for debate. A posthumous diagnosis is, of course, impossible, yet some experts believe the problem may have been more serious.
His journals are difficult to understand, and not simply because Dylan’s handwriting was so poor. Toward the end of his life, he wrote things like “When I’m in my human form, knowing that I’m going to die, everything has a touch of triviality to it.” A statement like this implies that, at least part of the time, he did not feel human. It was as if being human was out of his reach: “made a human, without the possibility of BEING human.”
Dylan was intelligent and educated, and a better-than-average writing student. Yet in the journals he often made strange word choices. Sometimes the words he used weren’t real words at all, but neologisms—words he’d made up, like “depressioners,” and “perceivations.” The way he constructs his sentences is unusual, too—as in the passage I’ve already quoted: “such a sad desolate lonely unsalvageable I feel I am.” This isn’t the shorthand of a journaler; there’s almost a singsong quality to many of the iterations that recalls Dr. Seuss.
This was one of the first things Dr. Peter Langman noticed. Dr. Langman, a psychologist, is an expert on school shooters and the author of a number of books, including Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. Our conversations in the course of writing this book have been difficult for me; they have also brought me insight and some measure of relief. With his permission, I have relied heavily on his interpretations to make sense of Dylan’s writing.
Dr. Langman told me he had originally intended to leave Dylan out of Why Kids Kill because he was unsure about Dylan’s motives. There were too many contradictions: How did this kid, widely reported to be shy and gentle, turn into a vicious killer? Then, in 2006, the sheriff’s department released some of Dylan’s writings to the public, offering a window into the disparity between how Dylan presented himself to the world, how he behaved when he was with Eric, and how he seemed to himself.
Dr. Langman believes that the early descriptions of Dylan as shy, extremely self-conscious, and self-critical may mean he suffered from a mild form of avoidant personality disorder. People with APD are shy past what we consider to be normal introversion. As Dylan entered adolescence, the stressors in his life became unmanageable for him, and he progressed to schizotypal personality disorder.
Schizotypals often seem “odd” to other people. (Dylan was often described as goofy by people who did not know him well.) They may be paranoid, or especially sensitive to slights, as Dylan was. They often use strange, rambling syntax and unusual words, as Dylan did in his writings. They withdraw into a world where reality and fantasy are not always distinguishable. These are not full-on delusions, but a fuzziness in the boundary between what is real and what is not. This fuzziness is increasingly evident in the journals: in reality Dylan felt profoundly inferior, and so, according to Dr. Langman, he created a fantasy where he was a godlike being. Toward the end of his life, that fantasy predominates.
I do not myself know what to make of Dr. Langman’s diagnosis. I’m not sure what’s worse—knowing Dylan was suffering from a serious impairment, or knowing I did not recognize such a serious impairment while he was living under my roof. There is little succor in either.
With the help of Dr. Kent Kiehl, who studies the brain structures of criminals at the University of New Mexico, I had Dylan’s journals analyzed independently. The reviewer found no evidence of a formal thought disorder, but points to
persistent and unrelenting themes of depression, suicidality, and alienation….and increasing dissociation from his sense of himself prior to the onset of his depression. As his inner pain and sense of alienation worsen so too does his dehumanization of others….This grandiose identification, dehumanization of others, loss of emotive capacity other than the experience of pain, and the promise of a release from pain, form the context of a delusional inner world that lead to the suicidal and homicidal plans discussed in the journal.
The reviewer also points to “prominent borderline themes” throughout the journal.
The report ends,
With only the journal to go on it is not possible to make a definitive diagnosis but major depression with transient psychotic episodes and/or borderline personality disorder with transient psychotic episodes are the most compelling diagnoses based on this journal.