To Be Alive

If I allow myself to remember the first time I felt alive in prison, it’s too easy for the same physical response to come over my body, On cue, every time. It’s as vibrant a memory as the moment I first saw each of my children moments after they came into the world. Complete awe, a sense of wonder. One of those brief glimpses into how profound it truly is to be alive.

It was early January, just a few days after the New Year. Back then, that tie of year was complicated in my memories. Too many bad ones, too many big ones, all in January. That particular one, in 2017, felt as equally horrible as the others. I had been in prison since the previous August. It had come as a surprise, the prison sentence, and I was not adjusting well. For months I had been suicidal, something new for me. I had known from classes I had taken that my suicidal ideation was serious and dangerous, and that, under normal circumstances, it would’ve been the thing to share with someone I trusted, or a mental health professional. The walls inside my mind were covered in vile filth about myself. I believed it all. And amongst those demonic insides sat shelves: shelves and shelves of schooling. Mnemonic devices I had created for myself to study for chemistry exams in college, more than a decade earlier, sat on those open-wound shelves inside my mind right alongside the equations I had jotted down to make a potent elixir.

Prison is not normal circumstances. Aa a sort-of-privileged white woman from a decent part of town, I had been taught all the proper channels to go through. I knew what resources were available to me because I had been shaped into a good citizen, I thought. I returned my library books on time. Voted. Didn’t litter, most of the time. Until I became an adult, my greatest privilege was the illusion of safety, of potential. I had been told I could be anything I wanted to be. I had been told I was loved. I believed both.

It was the countless little things that made it feel so abnormal. No chapstick. A small inconvenience, yes. But then, also, no hairtie on my wrist, just in case. And when my hands were cuffed behind my back and my annoyingly short hair that wouldn’t stay behind my ears had fallen forward and stuck to the snot and tears on my face, not having a hairtie, that lack of option, somehow made the coolness of the snot tangled with the hair stuck to my cheek suck that much worse. And then it’s the countless strip searches, learning how to “squat and cough,” and what they mean when they say, “show me pink.”

And it’s being called by a number. 228651. Then, at other facilities, 328377. Or by my last name. The one that, just prior to prior to going to prison, I had planned to ditch entirely. I was thinking of something that honored Princess Consuela Bananahammock mixed with some kind of angry middle finger to men. Defiant. It wasn’t even my last name, but someone else’s.

The only way I can think to describe it is the way hotel rooms don’t feel like home. Or how regulars at the restaurant I used to serve at could tell which cook was in the kitchen based on how the bolognese was seasoned. Or how, when moving into a new home, it’s weird sleeping there the first few nights. Not bad, just weird. It’s like that, but amplified to a level that is physically noticeable and distracting. Anxiety-inducing.

A few days after I had arrived, I was escorted to a small classroom and handcuffed to a desk. I was asked to fill out a form about education. I raised my hand. The other women, the inmates also cuffed to desks around me, looked at me like I had pulled out a gallon of ice cream. The staff member nodded to me and I asked where I was supposed to write in my other education. She wasn’t sure what I meant. “There’s a line here that asks me to list if I have a high school diploma or not,” I said, “And I’d like to know if I should add my other degrees to this piece of paper or not?”

The woman looked at me, completely uninterested. “No, just list your high school diploma.”

Looking back, it’s funny to me that I raised my hand. That I asked that question. That I took the time to write my degrees out, with a short little golf pencil, in the margins of the form. As if it mattered. As if they cared. As if I’d get the Martha Stewart treatment. I see now how I used my academic degrees as a shield. They were safe competence. Science is predictable. Knowable. Graspable.

There were a thousand ways prison was different than normal. And also, I had lost custody of my child, to the person who left me for dead in the driveway one January night. His charges, the ones he had gotten after that night in the driveway, were dropped just a few months after I had gone to prison. Primary victim and witness unavailable to testify.

In so many ways, that January 2017 was my low point. Until that point, I had believed all the lies I had told myself.

Until I accidentally killed someone, I had always assumed that murder would feel like something. In the way that I was conditioned to believe I would somehow be different after I was no longer a virgin, having crossed a one-way threshold that can only be gone through once, I had assumed taking the life of another human being somehow would feel like something internally.

But there was nothing. I didn’t even know he had died for several weeks. The accident had happened in October 2015. A grocery store parking lot incident. My victim had been taken away on a stretcher, talking, and I had gone to jail. I spent two nights in jail and then was released, without charges. The lawyer I had hired told me to “sit tight,” that charges would likely come, but he wasn’t sure what.

A custody hearing was held that December. It was during that court interaction that I learned of my victim’s death. The words came from the other person’s attorney. “Your honor, there was a death in the case, it’s only a matter of time…”

I still remember that moment, too. The moment I learned I had killed someone. That he had died. He had left the scene that October day and never left the hospital. I hadn’t known. And in that same breath, the judge stripped my full custody away and handed it to my abuser. They left on a plane that night. Charges came a few months later. I was at home, unloading the dishwasher, when my dad called me. “You’re wanted for murder; your face is all over the news.”

My stomach and heart and butthole all changed places in that moment. I felt hot and flush and dizzy and sick. Cold and sweaty and hot. My heart pounding in my temples, behind my eyes. Panic choking my breath. I leaned over on my counter and grasped for air.

I was sentenced later that year, in August 2016. Utah has indeterminate sentencing, which means that the judge simply sentences a person to prison. The Board of Pardons and Parole then evaluate each inmate’s case and determine a release date. I had no concrete idea of how long I’d be there. It was a third degree felony, so it could be as few as zero days and as many as five years.

Those first few months of prison, death seemed less painful. Looking back, I understand now that those first few months were so painful mostly because I denied my own internal reality. I was still lying to myself. I was still the victim, the academic, the mother. I had thought those things would somehow make me less of a killer. That my actions were somehow less heinous because of how much pain I had been in just moments before it had happened.

I hear Brene Brown’s voice in my head: hurt people hurt people. Pain that isn’t transformed gets transferred. I know that now.

That January morning in 2017, I had been kicked out of some stupid program they had put me in. The woman was a horrendous wretch. The kind of person who validates the bad stereotype against University of Phoenix degrees. She had asked me to “dumb myself down” because I was intimidating the other inmates. I had started teaching a public speaking class with the other women. It terrified them, but they were all rising to the expectation that they could do it. I was watching women start to believe in themselves because I believed they could present a two-minute speech about anything after a six-week class with me. That woman in charge of the program didn’t like me because I knew things she couldn’t fake and that couldn’t be learned with some cheap and quick certificate. So she kicked me out. I was given a few minutes to collect my belongings, and was told I’d be relocated to another facility.

I was shocked, but not really. I cared, but not really. I knew I wanted to get out of prison, and I knew getting kicked out of the program went against that goal, but I knew her program was junk and that the recidivism rate was 75% or more. So I sat there, in a holding cell, shackled and cuffed, with a mesh laundry bag resting between my legs, feeling sorry as fuck for myself.

Sorry about losing custody. Sorry about losing my victimhood. Sorry I hadn’t meant to kill someone. But. It’s a significant but. I had accepted one important reality: I was the one behind bars. Not my abuser. Not anyone else. Me. I had killed someone, even though I hadn’t meant to (because I hadn’t yet understood that intent is not the same as impact). I didn’t know how I had gotten myself there, to a point where I, and not the person who tried to kill me, was in prison. But I was there. That was as real as gravity. I knew I had work to do to figure out how it was that I was there and not in the other versions of my life I had imagined ought to have happened. I was in prison. Me. Lindsy. For something I had done.

Accepting that was the first gift I gave to myself. I didn’t have to like it. I didn’t have to agree with it. I didn’t have to think it would be useful. But I accepted it. And that made all the difference. Realizing that in that holding cell, I said, out loud to myself, “Damn it.”

In that moment, I had essentially realized that I was sitting on top of a big heap of shit that I had created, with help, of course, but I was the only one sitting on it. That knowledge and visualization of me, physically sitting on top of a mountain-sized pile of just the crap of the world, felt strangely knowable. Concrete. Real. Like, it’s not all the world’s shit that got me into prison. Just my heap. It seemed manageable, and I felt just a little giddy. Like potential. I didn’t understand any of it, and especially not why I was the one behind bars instead of someone more deserving, but I accepted that it was real. And also, that it meant I had potential to fix it. Because somewhere in that heap of shit, I could find answers. Set myself free.

Months prior to that, I had made a promise to someone I love that I wouldn’t kill myself unless I was one-hundred-percent certain I wanted to do it, every single moment or every single day, for thirty days. If I had any second thought or doubt about ending my life, I’d have to restart the thirty-days. Feeling that potential that I could fix it, that I could fix me, had made me smile. So I knew I’d have to restart the clock on my countdown to suicide. Damn it, indeed.

A guard opened the metal door and told me to move. I was escorted down long and turning hallways, and then outside.

Outside. In the cold, January air. Cars and trucks and buses rushing by on a main road.I hadn’t realized how downtown and proximal the jail was to everyone else’s lives. It smelled of pizza and coffee and exhaust. There was an issue with the seatbelt that was in the van waiting for me. One of the officers was fiddling with it while the other stood behind me, holding the chain around my waist. We stood there and waited.

The sun was so bright on that wintry day, reflecting off the snow banks. I hadn’t been outside in months. My eyes squinted and watered. I saw my breath in the air, lingering in front of me. A burst of wind ran through the trees and snow that had frozen to branches fell like sticks that shattered on impact. I felt cold; that hadn’t been new since the jail was drafty and frigid, but it was a different kind of cold. I was an alive kind of cold, like the wind that blew that snow off the trees also awakened something in me that reminded me I was still human. I was still breathing. My child was still breathing. My victim was not. Those realities, too, lacking any potential for negotiation at that moment, made me realize I at least had to try to be a better human. If nothing else but for the fact that I got to be the one breathing and my victim did not.

I felt alive. Physically, in my body, I could feel that I was alive. And the world was beautiful around me. Not the wretched human world but the natural one. The one where the clouds form and snow falls without human interference. Where Justice operates like gravity. I realized they couldn’t take that from me, my ability to breathe in air, to watch snow fall, to feel the brisk cold air of winter on my skin. They could call me scum, but I’d still be human. That gave me hope, even if just enough to keep me curious, to make me want to keep going.