YOU THINK YOU HAVE IT TOUGH

YOU THINK YOU HAVE IT TOUGH:


So there I was, in a day room surrounded buy dudes that were high, drunk, or just fucking weird in the head 24/7. Everyone around me was highly unpredictable.

Another time, all the time, another place, every place, and now it's hostile, control freak guards yelling at, and attempting to bully inmates.

At all times, you get the noise. It is never quiet in prison.

At any time a guard can stop you, wherever you are at, and strip search you. And at certain times they always do.

You get to go to work for 12 hours and get paid zero. You can steal to hustle, or choose not to.

Your cell can be shaken down at anytime buy any guard with a hard on for you.

You get to move around at designated times. You go to chow, to work, to get clothes, to the showers, to the recreation yard, to the day room, to school.

Learn from your environment. Mainly, you will learn on your own..

Count time--line up and present your ID card. All day, multiple times a day.

TV trippers in the day room. Seating arranged buy inmate groups who only want to sit with their friends or other members of their race. Race, and its issues, are big in prison. Everyone blames the other groups for the ills of prison, and the world, yet each group acts exactly the same.

Outside recreation, everyone trying to look hard with not many succeeding.

A million little sub issues to deal with every day. The ultimate school for learning to multitask. 

Did I mention that during all of these maneuvers you have to keep your radar on for signs of trouble that you may have to deal with??

Anything can be perceived as disrespect. 

Paranoid war zone thinking. Everyone who leaves prison probably has some form of PTSD.  

So you got it tough??

I survived 28 years in the twilight zone that is prison, with all of its weird moves and countermoves, because I decided that I wanted to survive it.

So your day is tough, deal with it. 

Everyday you wake up you don't have to worry about getting into a fight. You don't have to worry about getting caught in the day room during a riot. You don't have to worry about what all the high, drunk, stupid people in your environment are going to do at any minute. You don't have to worry about some guard doing something that could, potentially, keep you in prison for the rest of your life. 


This is what my neighborhood looked like for the last 10 years of my life. Sure, I got placed in segregation for fighting. So this was my country, my state, my town.


This what my home looked like. A steel bunk, a steel toilet, a shower head on the wall, a table. Imagine coming home to that every day. Imagine waking up in that everyday--for 10 years.


And when I did get to go outside I got to go work out in a cage like this one. This was my outside time. An animal in a zoo.

You do not have it tough. as long as you are physically free, not confined, you have the ability to change your circumstances. You make up your mind to do something and you do it. 

An oversimplification you say?? Nope. I believe in the power of the person and the mind. Because I did it under the worst circumstances, you can do it under less severe ones. the hard shit in your life is an illusion. An illusion of your own making. Decide to do what it is that you really are passionate about. then be determined enough to do it.

Some people can't figure it out. sure. Some of them just never develop that drive. But that doesn't mean anything in your life. So what what someone else can or can not do. What are you going to do?

You don't have it tough.

You just think you do. start thinking a different set of thoughts.


Accept who you really are. Go with that. Go with that critical voice in your head that tells you how you need to go this way, not that. Because that's you talking to you, attempting to get you on track.

DO SOMETHING...




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