This week had already been a trying one, with a major midterm election on Tuesday and lots of our local races still too close to call. I didn’t work too much on the election on Election Day, but I did go in early on Wednesday and pretty much worked on nothing else but election follow-up. I went home that day, rather exhausted but still kind of overwrought from working on the election, and went to bed at around 10:30 p.m. — late for waking up for a 4 a.m. shift, I know, but that’s what happens when you have kids.

The first middle-of-the-night calls started around 1:23 a.m. You know when was the last time I got middle-of-the-night calls and voicemails? Immediately after the Las Vegas shooting.

The overall story is already terrible. Eleven young people out for a night of country music and line dancing killed, along with a hero sheriff’s deputy. The gunman found dead, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. It’s hard enough to cover these stories; I’m human after all. But then again, I’ve had a lot of practice — this is the third mass shooting I’ve had to cover as an online news producer. First, there was the San Bernardino shooting in 2015. Then, there was the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, in which so many Southern Californians were killed. And now, Thousand Oaks. As so many have said today, it’s the last place you’d ever think to add to the list of mass shooting sites.

I graduated from Cal State Fullerton, which in 2002 (the year I graduated) was the site of the worst mass school shooting in California history. In spite of that, I don’t think any of the students in our journalism program ever anticipated covering a mass shooting themselves — especially me, much less three mass shootings.

While covering my first, San Bernardino, I remember looking back and thinking how difficult it is to tease out a coherent narrative out of breaking TV news reports in the midst of an active shooter situation. Cops are still busy trying to keep people safe and catch the shooter(s), incomplete and flat-out wrong information is flying about along with facts from officials, while a lot of coverage is focused on pictures of survivors crying and frantically looking for loved ones, running cops, speeding police cars, and other visual elements. There is so much video to listen to, and if you want to include a really good quote in your written story, you have to hear it several times to get it right.

Covering a mass shooting feels a lot like wildfire coverage (we get a lot of that too in Southern California) except in that the opposing force is another human being with a gun, not a hard-to-control element like fire. Both affect communities at large, cause people to look for shelter and comfort, and have consequences that can last for years, long after the news vans and reporters have left the scene.

I know, there are hundreds of journalists across the country who are getting used to writing mass shooting/active shooter stories. I’m most definitely not special. Most of them probably also have kids and get that twinge, maybe even sob outright, while watching an emotionally raw father tell reporters his first-born son is dead, after hours of showing pictures of him to anyone who would give him some airtime.

What sets me apart, I think, is that I grew up in Southern California and now work as a journalist here. Most journalists bounce around the country throughout their careers. Me, I’ve had to write about high school classmates who have been murdered in love triangles, and be sentenced to death for murdering their own families. I knew friends of friends who died in both the San Bernardino and Las Vegas shootings, and my family spent so much time in Thousand Oaks when we lived in Ventura County. In fact, I delivered my first son at Los Robles Hospital, the same hospital where they took all the victims of the Borderline Bar & Grill shooting.

After finishing my workday that started at 2:30 a.m., life goes on. I got to nap for an hour before having to pick up my kids from school, get dinner ready and referee as they played with Pokemon cards, watched Pokemon on Netflix and later did the first phase of cleanup in the kitchen after dinner (I always do the final phase, of course). I should feel exhausted — I really only got about three hours of sleep, supplemented by an hour nap before pickup, and dozing on the couch as the boys watched Pokemon. But really, I’m mentally exhausted, and honestly, is there any rest from mass shootings? It doesn’t really feel like it.