by John Rodriguez
So I grew up a follower. Even when I was little, I had a keen eye for things around me. I guess that might have been because as a child I bounced around from home to home, living at one of my mother’s friends for a few months and then to another. I had to pay attention. I followed tradition. I shut up when I was supposed to. When people asked how home was, it was perfect, like any other family. At school, to explain bruises, well, I just accidentally fell.
I didn’t like many of the things around me. I hated that just about every woman in my family was either single or divorced, that everyone drank, that half of the guys (those who were alive) were involved in gangs, and nobody in the household showed any emotion whatsoever. You dealt with shit and sucked it up. This was normal, or so I lied to myself and believed. Even though I didn’t like it, I just went with it.
Looking back, I see I didn’t have the willpower to go out on my own and do stuff that wasn’t familiar. So I crept inside my shell and did what others did. I held everything inside. I stopped writing in journals and instead I wrote on walls. I traded in my paint and crew for weapons and a gang. I traded in myself to be accepted by the collective mind.
I did want to be different, but I was too scared. That’s the truth of it. I was scared, so I conformed. That was the biggest lie I ever told myself.
I went to prison, the place I thought I was destined for. From the time I was seven, Mother told me this is where I’d end up. Deep down I hated her telling me that, and I wanted to prove her wrong, but sadly, I didn’t. I was stereotyped as a Hispanic who grew up in a bad neighborhood and went to jail.
I knew I was different. I always was. I never fit in. Back then I didn’t understand that, but sometime during my prison sentence I discovered that when I chose to do what I liked, I felt good. I didn’t feel ashamed of myself. When I chose to do what I liked, I began to like John, but not in a narcissistic way.
The rituals were clear: Shave your head. Put a symbol on your body that shows others what you think you own and what you are. Talk in a manner that shows you’re a man, whatever that means. Walk stiff jointed and when you stand, spread your feet in a 120-degree angle to show off your posture. Don’t lend a hand, because you’re living in a place where every individual has taken a leg. Don’t be you. Leave all memories of your past life at the entrance when you check in. Forget any small acts of kindness you might have known, and never attempt to bring them back. Conform. Don’t question. Feed into the repetitive cycle. This was especially true for the younger ones, for those like me, sentenced as an adult at 17.
I knew prison was never for me, but I was in there and had to deal with it. Now, finally, I had a chance to do things differently. I had a huge roadblock ahead of me, the same one I had seen when I was younger. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t give in and conform because deep down I knew wrong from right. If I contributed to the madness inside prison, I would die inside. I wanted to be me, even if I got hurt, even if I was killed. I had to do what I believed in. Finally, that’s all that mattered.
First I began to fix myself. I got my GED. I stayed away from alcohol and weed. I went to self-help groups. I backed down from situations I’d never thought I could back down from. I got my AA degree. I became an English writing tutor and a clerk for the college. Along with a friend, I began to sit down with the guys who had just arrived in prison and give them a full layout of what to expect—in school, doing time, with family, with themselves. I played Dungeons and Dragons with some of them. I even role played.
Now, I’m a horrible dancer, but we got a group of youth offenders and took a dancing class together just to say to everyone, “What the heck.” People laughed, sure, but so did we internally, because we actually were having a good time.
I didn’t help other people in prison because I wanted credit for helping; I didn’t want thank-yous or a certificate to certify what I had done. For the first time in my life, I began to do things because I wanted other people to see that it’s okay to be yourself in any environment, even in prison.
I couldn’t reach out to every single person, but when I saw a few of the guys finally get that it was okay to talk about shit, that you didn’t have to be all macho, that you could be a bookworm or a geek, that you could play volleyball and have fun, that you could spend your time doing all this simple stuff that we had never experienced as kids, I knew that was all that mattered. I helped a younger me, the me of five or six or seven years ago. The me who went to prison at 17 after years of not paying attention to my real self. I had desperately wanted someone to show me the way, but I had to do that for myself. And I knew it wasn’t right for others to suffer. I began to change what I didn’t agree with.
And without wanting it to or expecting it to, becoming myself paid off. Ten years ahead of my release date, Governor Jerry Brown commuted my sentence and released me. There are a lot of details in between the day I went in and the day I walked out, but this sums it up.
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