Echoes in the Columbine Archive

Comparison between Eric’s 1995 name poem assignment, where he writes about dreaming of being the only person on earth, and his 1998 conversation with a girl, in which he describes a dream where everyone is dead and he’s the only one left. It’s interesting to see this idea resurface years later, in a completely different context.

1995 is also the year Eric started at Columbine High school.

Now getting into the culture at Columbine will be another post…

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My take

When I read Eric Harris’s journals or listen to the way he projected himself as cold, superior, even godlike. It’s easy to take it at face value as “his true self.” But it may have been more like a mask: an identity he built to fight off the reality of feeling humiliated, small, and powerless.

How I believe it ties to his dream:

Withdrawal fantasies (loneliness → erasure of others)
A bullied, insecure teen might imagine being the only person on Earth not because they genuinely hate everyone, but because they feel like they can’t belong. Being alone becomes the only way to stop the pain of rejection. It’s more about disappearing the world than dominating it.

Aggressive fantasies (anger → destruction of others)
At the same time, that pain can twist into rage: “If I can’t be accepted, then I’ll flip it and make myself the one with power.” This is where the godlike, violent language enters, almost like he’s trying to overwrite “I’m a loser and nobody likes me” with “I’m above everyone and I’ll destroy them.”

The mask of aggression often hides the softer wound. A lot of people who feel weak or ashamed push out an exaggerated, violent persona because it feels safer than admitting, “I’m lonely, I’m hurt, I’m scared.” Harris’s journals sometimes read less like a window into a stable identity and more like a performance. What he wished others could see, a sort of “don’t mess with me” armor.

If we zoom out, alienation can lead to two opposite fantasies:

Total withdrawal → “I wish the world would go away so I could finally have peace.”

Total destruction → “I’ll make the world go away because it rejected me.”

Both come from the same root: feeling fundamentally cut off from belonging.

I’m not undermining Eric’s anger issues or violent ideation either, those things are very much there. However I think two things can be true at once.