The following testimonial was delivered during the Oak Park Village Board meeting, June 9, before the board approved a proclamation recognizing national Gun Violence Awareness Day:
I am a wounded survivor of gun violence, after being shot at point-blank range while on a run here in Oak Park. I want to speak to the experience of existing as a survivor in 2026, to give tangibility to something that, even to the most empathetic, can only exist with immeasurably great distance from their reality.
Gun violence is complicated. And those of us forced into this narrative are incredibly aware of that. It exists at the intersectionality of all that America is, and all that we ourselves are.
My own reality is that I would not be who I am without gun violence. My voice would be different. I would not have the same career path. I would not be in law school, a future attorney. In many ways it was gun violence that was the catalyst for the opportunities I have today, and it was gun violence that has given me purpose to showcase my strengths. That doesn’t mean that gun violence did not steal a massive piece of myself from the person I was before April 21, 2020.
Whenever I share my story, it’s always met with a reply about how strong and inspirational I am. Because I made it look easy. Because I had to make it look easy.
But very few have seen the bad days. The day I woke up paralyzed from the waist down. When getting out of a chair, or bed, or off a toilet wasn’t possible. When I finally got my legs to move, but then couldn’t figure out how to stop them. When the pizza dough was too warm to use because I couldn’t get up quickly enough to put it in the fridge, and I threw the whole pan across the kitchen in complete frustration, breaking almost everything in its path. I couldn’t even drive to the store to get more. When the man following me in his Lexus caused me to sprint to Ridgeland Commons so I could have my panic attack in public … for safety.
When the sky is just the right color, or just the right part of that song plays before I manage to hit the skip button and I instantly smell my burnt flesh and gunpowder. I feel the scrapes on my palms as I set myself down on the concrete and my leg starts buzzing again. I see the pool of my blood growing beneath me, the smell of iron growing stronger as I quickly fashion that kind stranger’s belt into my tourniquet once more in my mind.
Then there are the days when a news reporter interviews a newly inducted member into this godforsaken club and I spend two days lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, raging with the fire of a thousand suns because I hear their screams. I hear my own mother’s scream. There are the days when that light switch doesn’t switch off.
For survivors, all we were left with was to fight in whichever way we could. Some of us punched. Some of us screamed. Some of us learned to walk again, others learned to walk alone, carrying a memory the rest of the world will never know the weight of. All of us wake up knowing that, just by waking up, we are fighting. Those of us blessed with the ability and privilege to do more, do more. We fight for small bits of progress without letting perfect be the enemy of good. We learn and we educate. We listen and we speak. We show up. We persist.
Every one of us has quietly picked up the pieces that were left and put ourselves back together again, the best way we knew how. And although we find pieces less frequently the more time that passes, we spend the rest of our lives picking something up here or there because grief is never linear.
We do it for ourselves. We do it for each other. We do it for our friends and for our loved ones. We do it for the ones we won’t encounter in this lifetime again except when the breeze moves through the trees just so. We do it for the version of ourselves who never saw it coming.
Sometimes I do still feel like the girl I was before I was shot. I even sometimes feel like the same 16-year-old girl, driving with the windows down, blasting “Fall Out Boy.” I wonder what she’d think if she knew … that she’d have to fight off an assailant, fight for her life, and then spend her life fighting the national institutions — justices, executives, and legislatures — who not only condone this by sitting on their hands, but in many ways justify our lives as some sort of necessary sacrifice for a delusion of freedom while offering hollow platitudes to patch over the unsightly bullet holes in our bodies — to make themselves feel better, not us. But one day, at the tipping point, we know we will overcome because we’ve already overcome so much, together.
Alison Gerard is an Oak Park resident. She is a member of both Moms Demand Action (OP/Austin chapter) and Everytown Survivor Network.