Explore your prison cell
"The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear." – Aung San Suu Kyi
I have written before about one of my most memorable high school teachers, a man who is now in prison for the rest of his life.
My correspondence with Mr Snow over the past few years has been a journey of wonder and pain and confusion and shock and shame, mine and his. What happens to a life? Who are we, really? What is the gap between who I tell you I am, and who I really am?
In an odd way, prisons have become a part of my life—first, I decided to write Mr Snow in prison to learn the trajectory of his life, the awful horrible miserable fateful path that took him there, from a pedestal to a small flat bed and public showers and lock-downs and shackles.
And then people started writing to say that every week they were printing my 37days essays out and mailing them to friends and loved ones in prison.
Then those prisoners started writing to say how much they looked forward to 37days, and how the copy they received would make the rounds among the prisoners in their cell block, coming back to them dog-eared. Then I started a mailing list to accommodate all the requests I was getting to mail 37days directly to prisoners. So each week, I print them out and mail them to prisons across the country: You’re welcomed to add to that list–if there is someone in prison who might appreciate getting 37days each week, let me know and I’ll add their name to my prison mailing list, a list that contains some very high 
profile prisoners we all know of, and others without names–much like life outside, the celebrities and the nameless, many victims of a circumstance that is generational in its turning and turning in a widening gyre, father meeting son in prison: we are all living on an arc that started long, long before we did, some bright shining and some not so.
Their letters from prison enlighten and sadden me, scare and rebuke me, show me a world I could not otherwise know, and that I still–really–cannot imagine. The politeness and respect and gentility and urge toward humanity of murderers reminds me that we are all part light and part shadow, aren’t we?
I serve on the board of a local nonprofit that recently uncovered a sophisticated embezzlement scheme by one of its employees, over $160,000 in all. I sat for months across from her in board meetings, not knowing. We all did. She presented one facade to the world–prim, proper, organized to a fault, conscientious–while she created elaborate computer programs to hide money, transfer it from 
department to department so she could take it undetected.
After her arrest, a former employer of hers came forward–she had stolen $250,000 from them, a theft undetected because they chose not to prosecute for fear it would hurt their standing in the community, a decision that made it possible for her to move here and take a job as an accounting director, a spiral of not-saying, not-stopping, not-holding accountable, just as the community did when Mr Snow started his fall, young boys instead of cash his fragile, human, vulnerable collateral.
All of this connection to prison has led me to believe this: none of us is who we say we are, not really, not fully. We put a good face on what it is to be human—we wear moisturizer and create finer eyebrows with stiff brushes and taupe Mac powder and use deodorant to deny the very thought that we are sweating, grunting animals, and we navigate four-way stops with aplomb, that social contract intact as the cars on the right move, then the next on the right move, then the next on the right move in some elaborate wheeled dance of civility. We swear off red meat, sneak white refined sugar, and pretend we don’t fart. We say "yes, sir" when we mean "are you insane?" and we say sure to things we hate doing, but down below that genteel surface, arranged and neatened like a house is staged for sale, sometimes we are really not that neat, responsible, moral person, but someone else. And that scares us, I believe. We are vulnerable to our animal selves, aren’t we?
We know, deep down, that we are someone who has the capacity for avarice and greed, someone who forgets to send birthday cards and picks their nose when no one is looking, someone who knows what it means to lust and hate and eavesdrop and worse, someone who has felt such anger and hate that shaking or smiting is too near the surface, someone who feels small and insignificant and lonely and sad and unloved sometimes. We sit in management meetings feeling like imposters–if they only knew that I’m making all this up, we think–not knowing that they are all thinking the same thing, and that we are all making it all up. We dust our living rooms every other year knowing that if anything ever happened to us, our house would need to spontaneously combust so the survivors wouldn’t see the junk room upstairs or the toilets that need cleaning.
We are, it seems, imprisoned by our own denial of that part of us we don’t want others to see, or know, or reveal.
And when someone sees those things about us–when we sit for hours and tell, unable to hold it in any longer—or when they find out or glimpse it in us–it is too much, we must distance ourselves, and them. We must pay people to listen to such secrets, the shame is so great. Such is the life of the prisoner in us all, all semblance of privacy gone, shorn and shown to be who we really are. We can’t stand that bright light, and so we dim it.
Sometimes when I get a letter from prison, I wonder if we aren’t all shadow humans, these men and women just having gotten caught at things we are all capable of in some way, down at the root of ourselves.
As I first wrote about Mr Snow, playwright Eve Ensler first visited the Bedford Hills Correctional Institute for Women in 1998, volunteering to teach writing there, working with women inmates, most convicted of murder. In a 2004 speech, Ensler spoke about the women being “murderers and abusers and thieves” when she started. As she grew to know them through their writing – in which they confront the lives they have ruined, explain the scars on their bodies, describe their crimes – they became “women and sisters” to her.
As she listened further, she came to know “that these women weren’t just the crimes they committed: they were mothers, daughters, sisters, Jews, Christians, Muslims, high-school dropouts, PhD candidates, barely 21, pushing 60, barely conscious of their crimes, remorseful to the point of suicide.” She began to realize that, as she said, “There is no ‘other.’ That is an illusion. They are me. I am accountable for what they did.”
My decision to write Mr Snow, now a three-year correspondence, came with my own understanding that the truest test is not loving someone when they’re doing what is right and true and kind, but when they are not, that love comes when our loving someone doesn’t depend on their guilt or innocence, that love and compassion come with seeing our own shadow self in them.
I wish his life had taken such a different trajectory, but it didn’t. It went in this inexorable direction. And I’m not sure what finding Mr. Snow will mean for either one of us over the coming years, but I do know that in reaching out to him, I have found an important part of myself.
I believe we must explore and expand our capacity for love and forgiveness, of ourselves as much as of others. I believe, as G.K. Chesterton said, “love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all.”
We sometimes shun people because they remind us too much of ourselves, of our own vulnerability, of our own shadows. Prisoners fall into that category. My correspondence with Mr Snow—only 10 years older than me—has put me into a small, claustrophobic place of great learning. Not only about him, his denial, his fall, his ultimate humanity, but about what it is to love unconditionally—really what that means. The lessons go farther than prison—for example, I think a lot about this as Emma grows more independent as a teenager–am I loving her unconditionally as long as she meets my conditions, or am I able to love even the parts I don’t like or understand or that anger and scare me?
And, ultimately, my foray into prison has taught me that I, too, am worthy of unconditional love, even my shadow self, that one I don’t show you or you or you. I wonder what would happen if we all owned the fact that we are showing only a tiny bit of who we really are, if shame could be divorced from the parts of us we live in the dark, after the lights are out, when we are alone.
~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~
We create our own prison cells, don’t we? Small confinements in which we place ourselves, denying the larger part—the big Us, the fuller, more human one, the one unrestrained by those governors that restrict the speed on a moving truck or a golf cart, the one in which we might not always shine, but whose grit and dirt and shadow self may cast the public us in stark contrast, the one that—ultimately—makes us human, in relationship with every other human, no matter how superior we feel to them.
