MY SEARCH FOR PERSONAL ACCEPTANCE IN PRISON

For me, coming to prison and committing to really making some deep changes in my life means death to self. Death to the person I was before the indictment. Death to treating myself with kid gloves because I think I should tiptoe around my anxiety instead of diving in to explore the true causes and underlying issues. Death to any kind of double life or hiding anything. Death to shame of mistakes. Death to explaining myself.

It is time to accept myself and really accept me for me. It is time to finally appreciate life and celebrate it. It is time to let go of unspoken questions about why things happened to me. It is time to live each day in the present. Right here and now is when I will embrace my life and learn to live each moment noticing the miracles. I have decided that the journey to accepting myself looks more like a scavenger hunt some days and that is ok. I am constantly searching for clues for what works and what helps me. Here are 4 ways I have learned to accept myself.

1. I HAVE TO TELL MY STORY

In prison, there is safety in numbers. It is the place I learned to let the pain leak out. I am surrounded by people with similar stories, so I did not have to worry about judgment, or the crazy looks people tend to give because there was no shock factor. Here you cannot surprise anyone. But where do you start? How do you begin to share your story you stuffed down and hid from even yourself? You just start peeling.

I went from afraid to tell anyone the tales from my dark side, to coming to prison and what started as a tiny leak sharing only a tiny portion of my pain, turned into a full-on fire hydrant. For me it started in a class where I was encouraged to tell my story of how I got here. It felt so good I have not stopped. Now I am cool with broadcasting my pain to anyone and everyone.

Now I recognize the irony of my openness. I am in prison without an internet connection. As I write story after story, putting more and more of me out there, I do not receive the feedback. You can email me with positive or negative feedback, but I do not get it. It is cool because I can leak out all my pain and use it as armor. I have realized that when I do not have secrets, I disarm my enemies and myself. I do not have to worry about being misunderstood, I gather my courage right here in my trust tree and share my story in hopes of making someone else more likely to share theirs.

Now during the madness of my mess, I would not even keep a journal. I would never consider writing down anything because I would not want to incriminate myself. What? Did I think I was a gangster? I robbed myself of writing. I robbed myself of the most powerful therapeutic tool I can imagine, because I was scared to death. I was scared that someone might find it, read it, and really see me.

I do have to wonder if I would have been so courageous to put myself out there if I had to see the backlash. Would a negative comment or email have derailed and stopped me? Being able to write freely and share my life has been such a blessing. I just hit send and it disappears out into the abyss and into the hands of my loved ones. The most beautiful part is when I come out, I will not have to hide a thing. I will not have that thought in the back of my head about whether I tell this person I am a felon. Nope. I might just make a tee shirt and wear it proudly.

I try to write without judging myself and heal my bruises and scars. As I do this, I learn more and more about myself. I am writing my own instruction manual. I pray that the wounds of the past come to mind, so I can write about it and drain that festering wound. It is simply the only way to heal.

At first, writing scary things was hard. Those real deep stories I share, I often struggle with the first sentence. This used to catch me up. I would think how could I possibly write this if I cannot even get out the first sentence? I cannot even get this thing started to tell this story and get it out of my head so it cannot hurt me anymore?

I have learned that the first sentence is not exactly step 1. Now I just jump right over the beginning and land right in the pond and wallow about in the murkiness just trying to make some sense out of what I want to say. Who cares about the first sentence? I write the hard parts first.

Sometimes the big bombs are what I am dying to drop. The excitement of anticipation can be too much to handle to think of the parts of writing in a logical manner. I have misconstrued this as writer’s block. But no! It is just fear of what I am about to share. I write that story without trying to rationalize, without an explanation. There is something purely magical about bringing the ugly parts of your life to light. Once it is out, and it is free, then I decorate it with sentence structure and organize it to make sense to someone reading it.

I am empowered each time I share a tale from my dark side. I heal myself and I hope to encourage someone else while giving my pain an outlet. This has been a powerful tool in my acceptance of myself.

2. I AM GENEROUS WITH COMPASSION FOR MYSELF

The best gift and guide I can give myself on this crazy search for personal acceptance is compassion. When I am driven by fear, I let things like self-doubt and hopelessness creep in and set up a permanent residence. Even the most confident person with great abilities and resources can be plagued by fear. It’s paralyzing if you hide your fear and insist on stuffing it down. After a while it is just easier to give up and give in to the opposition that is coming against you especially when you joined in against yourself.

Life is so crazy, and the roads and paths force us to make choices and it can be so confusing. I used to beat myself up on a regular basis for my mistakes. My slope became so slippery because I lacked compassion for myself. When you are stuck in your own mind and buried in your thoughts all day every day, you should consider saying some nice things to yourself. If someone tells you that you are a failure, you start to believe it. The person saying it to me, was me.

How can you possibly search for possibilities and hope when you are swimming in a cesspool drowning in your own murky existence, abusing yourself all along the way? You will always find what you are looking for if you try hard enough, so be careful what you search for.

I remember back when my hopes and dreams seemed to get further and further from my reach. The space between where I was and where I wanted to be seemed to swallow me whole and only seem to get deeper and deeper. In this space I became stuck in my own shame of any and every mistake I had made, where my self-doubt reigned. Instead of embracing failures and learning from them, I got lost. I drowned.

Now instead of beating myself up for a mistake or wrong path that I took that brought me to prison, I write about those wrong choices. As the stories make their way out on the page, I find compassion and acceptance for myself. Shame held me in a more restrictive prison than this camp could ever be.

I still make mistakes and I will always have failures but now I approach myself with compassion on how I react. Failure is not the end of the road. Something just did not work, so I picked myself up and kept moving.

I look around this prison camp and I find myself inspired by so many of these ladies. Many bless me with their stories of their lives and share their pain with me. They let me in for a tour behind the walls they have so carefully constructed. The more stories I give acceptance and compassion to others, the more I can give myself.

I am such a sucker for a good comeback story or a good work in progress. I am so drawn to the broken people. They are my tribe. Some people do not even realize how strong they are. They seem shocked when I tell them how much they inspire me. I think it is so important to let someone know when they spark inspiration, they need encouragement, compassion, and all of that allows someone to accept the beautiful creature they are.

Telling my story and getting other people to tell theirs has provided so much depth and understanding for myself. It helped me to accept myself.

3. PATIENCE WITH ME

I am a work in progress. Everyone is. Some people may have reached their goals and moved on to new ones. That is great. That is their journey, and it has absolutely nothing to do with me. When I see others are progressing, I am inspired, but often find myself in a hurry for progress.

It’s human nature to want to get in a hurry, to want to be at the finish line. But do we really? Personally, I have some huge hurdles coming my way. When I come out of prison, I will be coming into a whole new world. New technology and I must realize that life has gone on without me. Sometimes those thoughts panic me. I find myself getting in a rush for that part of my life. I lose my mind wondering what it all will look like. But I am not done with where I am right this second. Right here and now is where I must live. I must be patient. I must reel myself in and take my tiny steps.

I must completely rely on my faith. When I became incarcerated, I found a new way. I found God. And while I will never again pray for patience, I learned an awful lot of it here. That is a running joke among many inmates. All of us prayed for patience at some point, and prison is a really good lesson in patience.

While I must give myself some slack and corral my crazy thoughts, I must do it all while being patient. Prison has taught me the value of time. Time is a precious commodity and how you steward your time depends on your patience with yourself. When I lose my way 50 thousand times a day, but I continue to pick myself up and head in the right direction repeatedly, I must remind myself that that is perfectly fine.

Humans are not quick learners; we must be patient with one another and especially with ourselves. Nothing that is worth it happens overnight. Everything takes time. I must keep reminding myself to slow down and not get ahead of myself. I must have patience with me and this whole process.

4. NOT AFRAID TO BE EXACTLY WHO I AM

I really did not accept myself until I accepted God. I am pretty sure it is not a coincidence. I think until you fully accept the fact that you must work like it depends on you and pray like it depends on God, it is hard to get anything right.

I had a flawless childhood with super loving parents that were involved and always encouraging. I had great opportunities and resources, but I just could not accept myself. Body image and body dysmorphia were my first plagues as a teenager.

I remember going to Hawaii with my family and crying in the bathroom afraid to come out because I was ashamed of how I looked in a bikini. It took everything to get the courage to go out to the beach and enjoy the day. I finally did it and I had random strangers asking to take pictures with me. Instead of taking it as a compliment, I thought things like “oh yeah they want a picture with a beached whale…” I never told anyone. I kept it all in my head and it festered and oozed into other parts of my life. I was not even 16… that is no way to live, but that is how I carried on for a long time. I could not look at myself and be ok with what I saw.

Years later, I looked back on those pictures of that specific day. I was shocked to see defined abs and muscles that I must not have noticed or maybe my mirror was broken, but they sure were there. Right there in the picture that commemorated a day that I was so mean to myself. I would have never taken that abuse from anyone else and yet I was abusing myself in my own head, saying crazy lies. My struggle and the image I had in my head were so far off from reality. This picture and seeing it all the years later were a defining moment and made it perfectly clear that my own mind and the picture I had in my head could simply not be trusted. I must be ok with me, just as I am, every day and tell the liar in my head to shut up.

It took me finding God and falling in love with Him to find me and fall in love with me. Things in my life would have been so different if I had done it all those years ago, but my testimony would have been a lot different. As I watch the bigger picture painted right before my eyes, I am in awe. It’s more than I could have asked or imagined, but that is how God works.

God qualifies the called, He doesn’t call the qualified. The bible says 365 times to fear not. So as all the madness of the past begins to come together, and while I never have all the answers, but I learn that priceless lesson to take everything to God and give it to him, a new picture begins to appear. I see my weaknesses and fears transform to passion and some days feel like superpowers because it is a blessing to be perfectly ok with simply being me.

In conclusion, life is such a crazy ride and a mission to accept myself feels more like a scavenger hunt with so many stops along the way. It’s trial and error on a hunt for clues to feel comfortable in my own skin. We are all wired differently but in my search for the ability to accept me for me took telling my story, giving myself compassion, having patience with my progress, and accepting God so that I could finally accept myself. •