“Do you have any guns in your home?”

I can’t remember the last time I was sat down and accused point-blank of being a possible school shooter, largely because that’s never happened before. But on Friday, January 18, I was pulled out of my second-period Latin class, unceremoniously marched to the school psychologist, plopped down on a chair, and informed that the faculty was seriously concerned that I might be a threat to myself and others.

Two days prior, in Advisory, seniors had filled out an anonymous survey. Well, an “anonymous” survey, with tritely employed quotation marks indicating that the survey was not, in fact, anonymous. The questions seemed as rife with basic grammatical errors as they were innocuous: “What are you most looking forward in the next six months?” “What are your plans for next year?” “What is you most concerned with about next year?”

When filling something like this out, there are a couple of options. The one that most people choose is the most acceptable, the most normal, and clearly the least sincere. I’ll try to keep this from fully devolving into a cynical tirade, but I do think society runs on everyone pretending that they’re happy, healthy, that any slight emotional problems they have can be cured through hard work and “virtue” and “character.” Everyone hurts, but that makes people uncomfortable, so we hide it and smile and say we aren’t worried.

But I’ve always had an unhealthily stony sense of personal integrity. I don’t like to lie, I don’t like to compromise my beliefs. I don’t like to respond to “How’s life?” with a “Pretty good” or a “Fine” or even an “Okay” when in actuality sleep is the only part of life I really enjoy. So I told the truth. Which isn’t exactly McMurphy, I know, but it was apparently enough of a bump in the system to warrant a red flag.

After my advisory teacher assured the class that the survey was anonymous, I set about answering, in limp semi-comic fashion (don’t get me wrong, while what I said was honest, it was also written as a sort of joke): what am I most looking forward to? “Getting out of this hellhole.” What is I most concerned with? “Being too overwhelmed by the sheer joy of escaping this vacuous purgatory.” How can I best address those concerns? “Making peace with the unending pain of existence.” Okay, so it’s a little dark, but anyone who’s spent even a few minutes talking to me knows I have a pitch-black sense of humor (I should also clarify that I don’t hate WS in particular, I just hate public school, and high school, and having to take Calculus when I’ve known for five years that I’m going to write movies for a living.)

I finished up, took a picture with my phone, and sent it to a few of my WS friends, who responded with an assortment of amused texts, ranging from “Haha” to “That’s funny” to “Classic Ben.” I put my phone away, turned the survey in, and didn’t think of it again.

Not until two days later, when the school psychologist told me my advisory teacher had been “alarmed” by my answers and analyzed my handwriting to determine the author. The psychologist told me that multiple counselors read it and found it frightening, and Mr. Greenfelder himself would have talked to me about it if his schedule wasn’t so busy. She asked me a series of escalating, subtly accusatory questions: “Are you angry?” “Do you ever want to harm yourself or others?” and the one that made me finally realize that this wasn’t a simple “Your writing is a little dark” intervention, but a serious analysis of what they considered a possible threat in light of recent events: “Do you have any guns in your home?”

To be fair, I have struggled with clinically diagnosed depression, sometimes rather severe, since seventh grade, and a simile exercise I completed in tenth grade also resulted in a brief conference with faculty. I understand and appreciate that the school is trying to be extra-vigilant in the wake of recent tragedies. But WS has lost my trust, and I can’t say I recommend future honesty for anyone else with unconventional responses to the school’s cutesy character lessons. A jokey, non-threatening, supposedly anonymous survey results in my interrogation? And they wonder why I’m so anxious to leave.