I used to wake up and feel like crap every morning wondering what the point is to even get out of bed. I didn’t mind the cops yelling at me to get up make my bed, to put my khaki’s on after 7:00 am, to go to my call outs, because I sure wasn’t going to do it on my own volition. I hated having to look myself in the mirror and see a volition felon, someone who let their whole family down when they needed me. I hated walking down the hallway rubbing shoulders with people whose crimes I despised and despised myself because I felt I belonged with those same people as if I were not any better and had no right to look down on them without looking down on myself.
it took a long time to put away that hatred for myself. I try not to despise the people around me and learned not to find out what the next man is locked up for so I don’t have fuel for hatred. I want to judge a person for the way he carries himself because of the way I carry myself. because I learned to view myself in a different light I chose to give the next man a chance to prove themselves that they are a better person than what the courts have assigned to them. I choose to see the man behind the number who possesses the potential to be a better human being than the one who committed the crime that put them behind bars as I found the potential in me to begin my rise out of degradation. the only thing we have to be degraded about is the fact that many of us accept the stigma that is put onto us when we are sentenced to do time.
it is up to us to shrug off the social stigma of being an inmate of any type. to rise above the ashes of our own demise as citizen who was burned at the stake. rise fully formed and reborn as a phoenix new and beautiful ready to race the world once more with all the grace and want of a new beginning.
i wake up each morning now with a smile because I know not everyone is so lucky as me to make it through the night healthy and whole. I know today is one such that I will be given the opportunity to better myself and improve what I am growing into what I may become. today I may have the chance to help someone even if it is to just be seen becoming a better person in front of them. to prove to myself, so them, to the world, that it is possible to become something great no matter what the environment. that is my motivation for life.
