I’m positive there’s something to explore about my experience thus far in the prison. It’s mildly unfortunate I must do so at 10:25 PM before I need to be up at 5.
I appear to be helping people.
Prison is its own kind of culture. It’s like a small town if all of the people from every small town that you were supposed to stay away from got together. It’s not that they are a hoard of violent unrepentant maniacs just waiting for you to drop your guard. It’s that it’s a lot of people who have missed out on what might be considered an entire world of information, support, encouragement, or patience.
Well, I’m almost pathologically disposed to a desire to genuinely help. Not the kind of help that adopts the catchphrases and proceeds to mindlessly follow policy or read from a script. I show up when you call, cover a meal, keep an open door, and listen indefinitely. I seek to genuinely help my thoughts and influence my behavior, and it has provoked habits of speech and reflection I think serve me fairly well.
I reminisce about the absolute pain in the ass of what it has meant to create my living arrangement over the last few years. Even if my goals struggle through merciless circumstance to come to fruition, they serve as living anchors. I know what I want, but only after repeating it a thousand times in blunt and nuanced ways. I know what kind of example I can set, should set, and how it makes me feel if I’m not doing so. I like being the guy who jumps from beater vehicle after beater to the one with a winch to pull his own ass out of the ditch.
Prison, like any small town, is filled with gossip. The word, consistently, from people I don’t even know, is that my guys like me. They think I care. They seem to connect with my form of deliberate challenges to unpack their thinking, refine their goals, and suggest ideas for peeling away the layers of trauma or ignorance that speaks to why they started using. I can dig that.
I don’t know that it’s ironic more than incredibly sad, but the precise means by which I connect with my guys and theoretically imbue this new found investment and intrigue about themselves is how I perceive myself to have been alienated by most people I’ve ever cared about. They didn’t want the challenge or obligation of the work I was offering. They struggled to even spend time hanging out. They stopped commenting, stopped talking, and went wildly in the direction of judgment and caricature to solidify my “out” status.
Several things at once could be happening here, so for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m just a really bad study of my nature and the points to which I’ve drawn meticulous contention over that pissed off a former friend. Perhaps I’m especially bad at reading the words and body language of my clients which any sane or normal person could immediately recognize as dripping with bullshit. Maybe every time I thought I was inviting a conversation, I went blind to all of the “Fuck you, idiot” comments I was making, and it really is on me to not be confused why no one wanted to be around that…
It is one of the most tear-jerking things to read some of what my guys are writing about their lives or their perspective on a class and what they’re hoping for. It’s hard not to be disgusted by the nature of the problems and piety on offer from people I’ve known. It’s hard to think about the opportunities squandered because something vague and distasteful like “discomfort” could placate an otherwise obligation or notional self-respect. How many of your children have died on you? How often were you drinking at 9? How guilty do you still feel about stealing to feed yourself at 12? Can hardly imagine? This shit is routine with my guys.
I think what makes my guys different is that they’re living within visceral consequence. There’s a familiarity, consistency, and camaraderie in prison, but I promise you, no one wants to be there. No one wants to shit in public, be strip searched, fed “passable” food, nor be tucked in a bunk with 150 strangers who may or may not be mentally unwell, violent, or at their breaking point. What that will do is compel your mind to look for anything else to think about or work on. The suffering is right up against your nose. I don’t care how proud or cool you think you are, prison will humble you.
You, though? You’re educated. You’re still cute enough or found your partner and only-quasi-miserable job. Your conversations are about options and indulgences. Whatever existential brink you may be teetering on, it’s as abstract and improbable as a considerably worse plague or asteroid impact. You don’t need to rewire your brain so that triggering moments won’t derail even the memory of stability. You don’t have more painful and regretful memories than positive ones to sort through, drunk parent or medical turmoil notwithstanding. You’re “just you,” with only so much to say. Where would I possibly get off talking to and impressing upon you my so-called ideals?
I was told before I got the job that I would see death. It took 6 weeks and I watched nurses, unsuccessfully, attempt to resuscitate a 37-year-old who died playing basketball. I don’t know how to distinguish my behavior from someone who isn’t constantly thinking about death. The death of those friendships. The death of certain ideals. The death of opportunities and every day that dies for nothing more than what might be desperately extracted from it in trying to deny death. A great many notions of yourself and standing will die after you find yourself incarcerated.
I was willing to attack the worst parts, or at least the most nagging and seemingly pathological and painful parts, of me. That began to fuel my insistence for a certain awareness of “now” and my responsibility to it. I wasn’t going to feel better pining or mourning or sitting and staring and bitching. I was going to build or I wasn’t really going to exist. I was going to invite or I couldn’t expect people to be open. I was going to parse or I wasn’t going to pretend I was so sure of where I was coming from. It’s been a lot of work, physically and mentally. I had a field, now I have a house. I had “friends” and “girlfriends,” now I have clients as primed as they’ll ever be, who are hungry to not end up like me if I’d found solace in substance use instead of writing.
The idea of profoundly influencing someone’s life because I happened to pass on the ideas and habits instilled in me feels empty. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just don’t feel like I own the ideas I’ve read or were raised on anymore than I’m responsible for an offender getting their life together or a former friend distancing themselves. I’m a conduit for what I think is worth building. I guess you can add a brick or go fuck yourself. I don’t believe most people I’ve encountered are really trying their best or wrestling with death in spite of its inevitability. I don’t sense the urgency or obligation. The entitled took their lives for granted before turning ones they envied into something to resent.
The hollow feeling comes from thinking about the people who can’t be bothered to think about how or why people become literal prisoners. You, too, are in a cage. The type of shit you’re taking is on a world stage. Because your charges amount to cultural norms and the collective secretive shame, you’re let off with an indefinite warning. The consequences get to play out in the lives of the most vulnerable. My job isn’t to “plant seeds” and fight the statistical odds for maintaining sobriety. My job is to attack you, larger, uglier, perpetual existential threat that would toss me away as soon as any other inmate. You pre-contemplative gods of ambivalence and laziness hold the heads for my wall.
This is why no “job” or “individual” will ever be enough. I want everyone to feel like they have a shot and to take it seriously. My lifelong experience has been being carried along a fascist wave of sentiments distilled into doomsday clock minutes. We’re a disgusting embarrassment, but not hopeless, and that’s the problem. You hope you’re not as bad as you are. Prison makes it nearly impossible to deny. So, who do you think is really capable of the necessary change?
I see more enthusiasm and attention from these guys every day than I’ve seen from meme-lords over years. You not proud of what you’re doing? You’re not still eager to share? Do you even believe in yourself? I certainly did.
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