FRIENDSHIPS
Incarceration changed everything.
Relationships with friends and family I’d maintained for decades have come into doubt. I no longer know where I stand with the vast majority of people, I believed were true compatriots.
Like the cheese, there are days when I stand alone.
There was a point in my life where I jokingly said, “I can't afford to be friends with women who are still on plan A or B. Give me someone struggling with plan Q, that’s the person I want by my side, because she's been through a life with obstacles and has learned to survive.”
It never occurred to me that when I became the person on plan Q others would not feel the same. In the nicest possible way, I have been abandoned. Break ups due to incarceration are the equivalent of, “It’s not you, it’s me." But the unspoken words are, “You're out of my life. You have become too much trouble.”
Thus, the truth of the cliche, “If you want to know who your true friends are — go to jail.”
Even the relationships that don’t forsake you are shaky in ways they never were previously. No longer is it an association of equals. I have become the needy one. The one that others have to care for and/or deal with. I have been reduced to being a child in a world of adults.
Wait! That is so wrong. I have always been the strong one. I have always been the one that others look to for advice and comfort in times of adversity.
At various times in my life, I have felt the world would be improved if people just did what I recommended. I assumed my insight could run other people’s lives much better than the mess they’d made of it. Standing on the outside I had no hindrance seeing where someone else’s train had jumped the tracks. And their difficulties were easy to fix as I dispensed cheap, thoughtless advice, “Do what I say and your life will be hunky-dory.”
The problem, of course, being that just because one can’t see the invisible strings that bind and twist people into caustic situations doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We on the outside only see a small sliver of the pie of someone else’s life.
There is an ad for hemorrhoid cream, HIV, or some other dreadful medical ailment in which the spokesperson says when diagnosed, “I didn't know who I’d be.” That’s how I feel about getting out. Who will I be? Certainly not the person I was. Even though my release isn’t imminent, I wake up most mornings with the sick feeling of a stone in the pit of my stomach from worrying. And there is no way I can confide my fears to the few, already overburdened, friends I have left.
After all, what could they say, beyond, “There, there, now, now.”
While a consoling word and a hand pat might provide instant relief, the truth is I must push forward, step after step until I’ve completed this trip through the ninth circle. Avoiding pain is not an option, but mending a shattered heart has nothing to recommend it. I HB