Wednesday, July 28, 2010:
Every once in a while, I have to be reminded of the crimes I committed. After ten years, it’s easy for me to forget exactly why I’m in prison.
I robbed three banks. I brandished a gun in one of the robberies which earned me an additional seven years. I’ve robbed more than one pharmacy, strictly for the drugs. When the police attempted to arrest me, I fled, and led them on a high-speed chase.
I put many lives at risk. I traumatized many people, but none more so than my family and my wife at the time. And ten days later, in my final act of madness as a free citizen, I put a gun to my own head when I was surrounded by police officers. I was shot at fifteen times and hit four times.
Maybe I was trying to take myself hostage. Maybe I was trying to commit suicide by cop. I really don’t know because my drug-influenced mental state at the time did not foster rational cognition.
I’m lucky to still be alive and I’m lucky I only received a fourteen and a half year sentence.
All this because I only wanted to feel good. It was all for a feeling.
I continued drinking and getting high four years into my sentence, when suddenly, my desire to use was removed like a torrential thunderstorm finally blowing over.
Now the fog’s been removed from my head and I find myself with almost six years of real clean time. But I’m stuck. I’m stuck in what sometimes seems like purgatory.
I want to move on but I can’t. I’m frozen in time. I feel like a rocket sitting on the launch pad, anticipating the final countdown that will be a long time in coming. They won’t let me grow up. They won’t let me have my dignity back. Do this, do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that.
Time keeps marching forward, and I feel like I’m living in some convoluted, alternate reality. I don’t know what life is like out there anymore.
I know I deserve to be punished, but at some point, the punishment “took,” it had taken effect, achieved it’s purpose, but I still have superfluous years left to go.
I think I’ve made myself a better person, but I had to reach down and dig and do it on my own.
The mission statement of all prisons should be to make a person fit for society again, but our prisons do the opposite of this. Our prisons are breeding monsters, returning more sophisticated predators back on the streets after their prolonged business convention.
It’s difficult to stay focused and positive because it’s going against the grain. It’s trying to swim upstream when the river’s headed for a thousand foot waterfall. The pervading mentality is: I want what I want when I want it and I don’t care whose rights I have to trample to get it.
I struggle to keep a grasp on reality. I’m exposed to so many false beliefs and so much maladaptive and self-defeating behavior that I have a hard time discerning right from wrong, black from white, up from down.
It’s a daily struggle to keep the ship righted. This is why I have to be reminded.
Read my book Running Away From Me.
{ 0 comments }
