After all, who wants to live in a place with zero privacy? Where every phone call you make is eavesdropped on and recorded. Every piece of mail, torn open and read.
A place where you’re told when to eat, when to sleep, when to shower, when you can use the bathroom. A bathroom that you share with 160 other people.
A place where you’re forced to work for pennies a day. That punishes you for refusing to do the work of maintaining the prison that holds you captive.
A place that throws you into solitary confinement for six months if you defend yourself in a fight.
A place with routine shakedowns. Where the little property that you are allowed is tossed around without regard. Everything you own dumped on the floor. Your clean folded clothes scattered around your cell. Dirty boot prints left on the sheets and pillow of your bed, where you’ve tried for years to get meaningful sleep to no avail.

A place that feeds you just enough to survive but not much more.

A place without family. No mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons or daughters.
A place with nothing but men. Testosterone in every voice, every movement, every odor, every motivation. Where touch is limited to acts of violence.
A place without women. Without the other half. Without that indescribable, and all too often, under appreciated feminine energy.
A place without balance.
A place of concrete, steel, and razor wire.

Make no mistake, this is a ‘place’, in which we reside, not a ‘home’. And although the qualities in life that we search for may not be found in abundance here in prison. And though the imagined comforts and ease of the free world seem to be a perfect place to fix our minds. Or when the safety of the past beckons our attention. We must be careful. For when the distant past or the uncertain future, that we build with hopes and desires, begin to feel more real than the present moment, we are in danger of becoming lost.
If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that: rarely is the ‘easy’ thing to do but also the ‘right’ thing to do.

I’ve heard this question posed numerous times since I’ve been in prison: “If you could sleep through your entire sentence and wake up on the day of your release, would you?”

It’s been asked by different people, in different places, at different times. A question that fascinates me. A question that I have began asking to other inmates. I’ve found that roughly 19 out of 20 people say “yes”. Many of them without even thinking. But every once in a while someone will answer “no”. To which someone will inevitably ask, in a tone of utter disbelief: “why?”
As if this answer was made in haste and the question wasn’t fully understood. As if only an idiot would choose to be awake through such an experience. But I’ve come to find that it’s quite often the opposite. The person who answers ‘no’ has always understood the question to a deep degree. Much more so than the majority, who so quickly answer “yes”.
The answer to this question speaks volumes of a person. Those who answer “no” are always the standouts, and not just in the way they answer but in the way they live their lives and carry themselves here in prison. They are introspective. Concerned with growth. They are the layered. The moving. The redefining. The interested and excited. The ones who have yet to admit defeat. They are the strong of heart and mind.

What a waste it would be to sleep through this experience! Yes, it would be easier. Easier, but completely fruitless. A complete sacrifice of the all too limited and infinitely important years of your life.

We’ve become so conditioned to run from struggle and difficulty that we do it at all costs. Is the point of life to make it through unscathed, having learned nothing meaningful? There are certain lessons that can only be learned and appreciated in the highest degree, through the overcoming of struggle and adversity. If the point is avoidance, then why not just sleep through it all?! Fuck it, maybe we can find a way to avoid life all together.

Those who would answer yes to this question are at best confused and at worst a coward. You have little understanding of this life if you think that the unpleasant is to be avoided at such a heavy cost as your time here. You are the blind, the timid, the frail of spirit, the soft of heart. You are ‘already’ asleep. What an insult to your existence if you cowardly flee from the opportunity of struggle.

Make no mistake, this question isn’t merely hypothetical. How many of us ‘sleep’ through our lives, waiting for something better in the future?
The most self destructive sleep is one of the heart and mind. Yet it is the most common.

As you draw yourself into a self imposed slumber, especially in prison, you lose everything and gain nothing. You lose the appreciation for the things in life that you once took for granted. A true appreciation for food, affection, freedom, women and love. An appreciation that only absence can instill. An appreciation that will never fail you. Never leave you.

In your sleep you lose the chance to see that the human spirit, your spirit, can survive through anything. Not just survive but thrive. You miss out on the rare and special bonds made in a shared struggle.

The friendships of a lifetime. You miss out on the deepest laughs of your life, found in the freedom of gallows humor. You miss out on seeing with clarity, those rare gems in your life that love and support you in a time when they can have no self-serving motives to do so. You miss out on the chance to know who’s truly in your corner. To know who will be there when the chips are down.

You miss out on acquiring and honing self-reliance. You miss out on the chance to listen, to learn, to see what you’re made of. You miss out on the chance to rise from the ashes, indestructible and new.

You miss out on everything and you gain nothing.

It’s easy to fall back asleep in a place like this. To start living in an imagined future while life passes by you. You start to assume that life doesn’t happen behind fences this high, between walls this thick, and surrounded by razor wire this sharp. But you are wrong. Life doesn’t just happen in the brief moments of pleasure, ease, or comfort. On the contrary. Most of the shit that counts happens in between the moments of ease. The whole point of this beautifully terrifying rollercoaster ride called life, is the sudden drops and the stomach turning rolls. For those are the only things you talk about after the ride.

So don’t close your eyes. Don’t look away. And whatever you do, don’t go to sleep.