FREEDOM IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE

BY HANNAH BROPHY

There were days I didn't think I was going to make it in prison. Not because another inmate would have bludgeoned me in the bathroom, but that the fragile line we all straddle between sanity and instability would finally be crossed. I am sure I wouldn't be nuts in a specific way, just categorically crazy.

I believe firmly in Marcus Aurelius' words: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

Incarceration can mean years without a sunrise, sunset, or a night sky; locked in a room for sixteen to twenty-three hours a day. If you weren't looney tunes before, there's certainly a chance you'll be long before it's over.

Life, as they say, spins on a dime. I find myself waiting for some terrible, unnamed, unexpected, five-hundred-pound anvil to fall on me. I have become Wiley E. Coyote when I've always pictured myself as the Road Runner.

Prison has changed me. It made me younger. It made me look at my life from a different perspective. It made me less critical of the upcoming generations. It made me discover that I love living with hair stylists, who convinced me to change my hair — which like most older women I resisted because I “knew” who I was and what I wanted and furthermore they withheld the “whore-red-circa-Julia Roberts/Pretty Woman/1990s” nail polish.

"Try the purple or the green," they urge. I do.

Prison isn't hell, but it was a long shot from my vision of heaven.

I read a book where a neurosurgeon theorized that everyone fakes who they really are, when deep down we are all equal amounts of screwed up. Some are better at hiding it than others. While I would readily agree with the first part, however on the second part, I've learned lots of people are more screwed up than you think. One of the many statements one hears to aid with healing is that there are no bad people. We are all just people who sometimes do bad things. I vacillate in my thinking between “doesn't that just let everybody off the hook?” to the words of Sister Prejean “no one is as bad as his worst deed.” This makes the reverse also true, unless you are Mother Theresa.

Many of us who express belief in spirituality rather than religion have adopted the belief that if we are good people and live a righteous life, God (or the Universe) will reward us with a life free from serious dilemmas. But God has signed on to that theory? Judging by the continuous state of wars, destruction, and incurable diseases, I would doubt it.

If life's stressors have morals, the one I'm taking away from incarceration is: The rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Your experiences in life are pretty much what you make of them, which is true of both the good and the bad. | HB

HANNAH BROPHY IS AN ORIGINAL MEMBER OF THE HECATE’S LANTERN WRITING PROJECT AT COFFEE CREEK CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION.