You have heard by now that three people were killed at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado last week. The suspect in custody, Robert Lewis Dear, was purportedly against abortion.

I heard the news, as is most often the case when I’m learning about the all-too-frequent violence in this country, with personal anguish. You see, I lived the first 18 years of my life in Colorado Springs. It is my first home.

Colorado Springs is where I learned to ride a bike and write a sentence and fall in love. My only sense of cardinal directions was shaped by Pikes Peak to the west. The deepest roots of my moral compass were also shaped there: while writing for my high school newspaper (I penned overwrought op-eds about the immorality of the debutante ball and the sexual double standard): while reading The Bluest Eye and Native Son and a whole slew of other books that changed me forever (none of them, strangely, in class); while becoming friends with people who didn’t grow up in my sheltered little neighborhood; but probably most importantly, while in conversations with my parents, proud progressives, and with my extended family, many of them conservatives Christians.

For those of you unfamiliar with the city, Colorado Springs is known for being the home for many of the most conservative organizations of the Evangelical movement, including Focus on the Family, which once tried to shut down our high school newspaper because we published a hotline number for gay and questioning youth. To my estimation, making this crew of kids that thought themselves invisible visible was something Jesus himself would have done. Justice, not theological interpretation, won the day. The hundreds of Focus on the Family members who flooded our school board meeting calling for the end of our newspaper were reminded that even teenagers were protected by the freedom of press. These were the battles for meaning and action within which my consciousness was shaped.

I left at 18 with the kind of bravado so typical of a kid who has never had to leave. I lived in the same home my entire life, in fact. I couldn’t wait for my parents to get in the taxi and drive away so I could finally be alone in New York City, finally start my bigger, cooler future away from Colorado Springs and all its contradictions. As soon as the bright yellow disappeared down Broadway, I devolved into desperate tears.

Your first home shapes you in such profound and immeasurable ways. I know that now, having lived outside of Colorado Springs almost as long as I lived there. I have carried the beauty of the place, its tragic intolerance, its innovative pockets of creativity and courage, its people — most of all — with me. When snobby New Yorkers try to claim that anyone who doesn’t live on a coast is intellectually inferior, I call them out on their own ignorance. When feminist friends, likewise, paint anyone who has complicated feelings about abortion as in cahoots with people like Robert Lewis Dear, I try to fill the picture in with more accurate, living, breathing details. The vast majority of people against abortion condemn his actions with every fiber of their being.

Truth be told, last week’s news goes even deeper for me.

I’ve sat on the floor of that Planned Parenthood. I was 17 years old, there to support a friend. There weren’t enough seats because the waiting room was so crowded with mothers and fathers and aunties and grandmothers and toddlers and teenage girls getting birth control and pregnancy tests and information about sexually transmitted infections. I remember sitting there and being stunned by the wide variety of humanity sharing a place and time in that small, contested building. We had to cross the picket line to enter. I hoped that my friend averted her eyes from the images of mangled fetuses on the protest signs. The cruelty of the people holding those signs, their dehumanizing screams directed at those walking in, rattled me to my core.

What horror we manifest when we cloak ourselves in abstract morality. What cruelty. My home has taught me many things, but first and foremost, I think, it’s this: there is grave danger in becoming invested in a simple moral story about anything or anyone. The next step is dehumanization. And the step after that is, in fact, a full stop — violence.

Three people from my hometown died because Robert Lewis Dear thought he had the answers. I mourn them and recommit to honor my hometown’s greatest lesson: to attack all that I don’t understand by asking more questions rather than leaping to answers that may comfort me but surely endanger others.