Dear Young Theron,
You don’t know me yet, but I know you better than anyone. My name is Theron. I’m you — thirty years down the road — and I’m writing from a place you can’t imagine yet.
You’re ten, and you’ve already seen things no child should ever see. You wonder why your father left and never reached for you when you needed him most. You wonder why your mother keeps choosing the drugs, why the house keeps filling with shouting and fists, why she stays in those rooms where love hurts. You carry questions that feel heavier than your body: Am I the problem? Am I the bad kid?
The state will come and say it’s for the best. They’ll call you violent, out of control. That will be partly true. You’ve learned that being quick with your fists can feel like safety when the world has none to give. But the deeper truth is this: You are a scared boy living in a constant earthquake. You don’t know when the next shake will hit, so you brace in the only ways you know how.
They will take you from your mother, but they will not take your worry. For thirty long nights in Wayne County Juvenile Detention, the small, tough ten-year-old who fights the bigger kids when the doors open will cry into his pillow when they close. You will have a clean bed and warm food, and shame will sting because your little brother does not. He is left in a house without heat or water, without clean clothes, without you. That thought will break your heart in a way no punch ever could. It will become the drum that keeps you moving: Get back to him. Get back to him.
You’ll pass through violent boys’ homes and foster placements that never feel like homes at all. You’ll start telling yourself you don’t care—because caring hurts, because hope gets punished. The gang will feel like a family that says you belong. It will give you a story to wear when you don’t know your own. Many kids in gangs are broken in quiet ways; you will feel broken in loud ones.
Fifty-eight days after your eighteenth birthday, everything will shatter. You will kill a man. You will be sentenced to life without parole. You will spend thirteen years in solitary, three of them in a Supermax in the New Mexico desert, where silence is a blade and time is a fog. There will be stretches where you feel like a shadow of yourself, where hopelessness is the only voice you can hear. You will think this is the end of you.
It isn’t.
Somewhere in the long dark, a switch will flip — not a miracle, not a movie moment, but a stubborn decision, made again and again: If I’m stuck with me, I will build someone I can live with. You will start to live differently. Your attitude will change. Purpose will feel like oxygen in a room that used to have none.
You will study. You will listen. You will apologize — to others and to yourself — and you will mean it. You will find teachers in books and in people you once thought were enemies. You will learn to lead from inside a place designed to erase you. You will help build programs and push for laws to change. You will sit at tables with administrators, lawmakers, professionals, educators, healing practitioners, and students. You will introduce a famous artist — twice — inside a maximum-security prison, because you will have helped create a space where art is allowed to speak to wounds. You will even sit with a governor. The boy who was told he was nothing will become a man people listen to.
Because you kept choosing the next right thing, your sentence will be commuted —from life without parole to life with parole. The locked door will open a crack, and then wider. Hope, once a stranger, will start to recognize you.
I won’t lie to you: the pain does not vanish. The questions don’t evaporate. You will still wish someone had come sooner; you will still grieve what can’t be undone. But you will not be defined by what happened to you or by what you did on your worst day. You will be defined by what you do next, and next, and next.
So here is what I want you to hold onto when the nights are longest:
You are not bad; you are wounded. Wounds can be cleaned and closed. Scars tell the truth and still allow you to move.
You are not alone. Even when it feels like it, there are people placed along your path who will see past your armor. Let them.
You have a purpose. It is hiding in your deepest ache—protecting those who cannot protect themselves, beginning with that little boy and his brother.
You can lead. Not by fear, but by integrity. Not by power over, but by power with.
You will become a beacon. Your story will become light for others trapped in their own darkness.
One day, you will look in the mirror and see a man of integrity and principle. You will not be the scared little boy anymore. You will be Theron—the man I am now—alive, accountable, and full of a hope you helped build from the ground up.
When you feel the urge to fight, fight for your future. When you want to disappear, stay long enough to take one good breath. When you think you’ve reached the end, remember: it’s a bend. Turn it.
I’m here, waiting at the far side of your hardest days. Keep coming.
With love and fierce belief,
Theron
Thirty years ahead — holding the light until you arrive. | TH