Reentry taught me that strength is often a costume. I wore it for years—shoulders back, voice steady, answers ready. The costume said I was fine. The costume said prison didn’t touch me. The costume was…
Ritual is a repeated action done with intention. It is not the same as routine, though the two overlap. Routine is the bus schedule. Ritual is the moment you stand at the stop, feel the…
Last Tuesday, around eleven at night, I sat at my kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote a letter to someone I owe amends to. I won’t send it. Can’t. A no-contact order sits…
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a cell at 5 a.m. It is not peace. It is the quiet of a building full of men who have learned to wake before…
Ritual is a set of actions you do with purpose, in a particular order, at a particular time. It’s not habit. Habit runs on autopilot. Ritual is a choice. For those of us who’ve been…
Stability isn’t handed to you. Not if you’ve been locked up. Not if you’ve slept on the street. Not if every system you’ve touched has made it clear they don’t think you’re worth the time…
Ritual is not a luxury. It is not a scented candle or a morning yoga flow reserved for people with clean bathrooms and disposable income. Ritual is a sequence of actions you do with full…
Stability is a lie they sell you. The idea that if you just get the right job, the right house, the right routine, nothing can touch you. I learned that lie early, and I learned…
Last Sunday morning. Kitchen table. Coffee gone cold. I opened a notebook I hadn’t touched in two years and read my own handwriting. First month in the halfway house on Northeast Glisan. The letters were…
Stability isn’t a feeling. It’s not a place, a person, or a promise. For those of us who’ve lived inside systems built to break us—prison, poverty, the grinding machinery of exclusion—stability is a practice. Something…
When the structure you were promised dissolves—parole, a job, a relationship, a reputation—the first thing that goes isn’t hope. It’s the floor. You wake up and don’t know what to do with your hands. The…
The list lives on a legal pad, folded in thirds, wedged between a cookbook and a jar of instant coffee that I keep forgetting to replace. Sunday mornings, I sit at the kitchen table and…