Prior to prison, I had many blessings which I took for granted. After being locked up, I found faults in my thinking. For instance, I found out how valuable my family and friends were and how I’d been less than appreciative. I didn’t discover this through inner reflection alone but from witnessing what it was like for people on the inside who didn’t have what I had. It was sometimes painful to watch. In the process of my education, my family heard and read the things I was learning and it grieved them also, teaching me another lesson about their capacity for empathy. And I thought you might like to read some insight about the topic of gratitude but it has been a beast to write. I have had a hard time getting the tone right. I still struggle with the matter of authority. I’m not a Brene Brown, or a Deepak Chopra. I’m just a man who’s been in prison.

In my attempts to practice gratitude authentically, I found that there is a relationship between acceptance and gratitude. To express genuine gratitude I had to become better at accepting things I was given whether good or bad. Because even the things I think are bad can result in good.

The two, acceptance and gratitude, are linked. You may accuse me of confusing acceptance with receiving because in this context I am talking about the capacity to accept a gift, whether it is a natural talent, skin color, gender, a compliment or a present. I believe that how we react to the gifts we’ve been given (and we have all been given gifts) is an indicator of our own mental health. I’m calling it acceptance but I understand if you prefer the word receiving.

When I was young, I was terrible at receiving compliments and gifts. I was content with my natural condition. I didn’t give it a lot of thought. But at some point in my childhood, I got the idea that I was not worthy of compliments or gifts and so my reaction to receiving either was a mixture of extreme discomfort and shame. I knew what was socially acceptable when receiving a present but I was clueless about compliments. And acting socially adept is not the same thing as being so. I might once in a blue moon say thanks if somebody gave me a compliment, but usually I dismissed their consideration by denigrating myself or saying things like, “Ah, it was really nothing. Anyone could have done that.”

That’s what “good” people do. Heroes always give the “Aw shucks” line and people are even more enamored of them afterward, right? So that’s what I did. And I am not saying it’s wrong for heroes to respond that way. I’m saying that in my own life, my motivation for responding that way was not heroic. Not even a little bit. In fact I’m kind of embarrassed about it because I spent a bunch of time insulting people who were trying to give me a gift. I didn’t truly accept the gift.

Now I didn’t overtly insult a person when they gave me a compliment. But by failing to accept the compliment, I was covertly insulting them. In my secret mind I was thinking, “That person must be stupid anyway to give me a compliment. He doesn’t even know what a fraud I am.” I suspect that many times people were put off by such dismissal. I occasionally saw a bit of hurt in their faces though I didn’t recognize it until I remembered a few instances where it was obvious I hadn’t handled a compliment well.

I suppose it’s fitting that I didn’t learn the true meaning of acceptance and gratitude until I was given a prison sentence. And before I could accept this sentence, I had to deal with all of my past guilt and shame. This was not something I could shrug off like an unwelcome compliment. This was like a tumor or a boil or some other gift that doesn’t just go away when you dismiss it out of hand. It was here to stay for as long as the State mandated. Whether I completely accepted or not, it was reality.

Eventually I figured I had to surrender to the circumstance and accept the situation. I was responsible for the choices I made which brought me here. So, how was I going to accept it and not become bitter? I didn’t know. I did realize that I needed some sort of silver lining to cling to, and one of the positive things about being in prison is time. I might be out of the world, but now I had a lot of time. How was I going to use it? Well I spent a lot of time looking at myself. I found a lot I didn’t like because that was easier to do. It goes hand in hand with not being very good at accepting gifts. It was really easy for me to see the “bad” things in myself and think of ways to improve, but the things I was good at, I tended to dismiss. It goes back to that childhood belief that I deserved no praise.

Something useful came from this self-examination. I stopped being ashamed of my flaws. I guess the novelty wore off. I used to generalize about myself rather than pay close attention and therefore I told myself I was a good person. Then, when I took a closer look at specific behavior I was shocked. But the more I stared the more objective I became about the flaws I found.

I used the time I had also to study the Bible. I read that it was OK to be flawed, and it was also possible to change. Everything. On top of that, the Good Book taught that God wanted that change for me. As a gift.

I offer no apologies to atheists and practitioners of other religions here because I do not offer offense in the first place. People have learned self-examination and change without a prison sentence and The Bible. I am just relating how I learned it.

So I continued to look into my self and I watched people around me. People with so little and yet so much gratitude. How could that be? Yes, there were people who believed they were owed the things they received and some things they didn’t receive. But they held no fascination for me. What I wanted to know was this: How could a sixty-seven-year-old Viet Nam veteran be so grateful for a cup of terrible freeze-dried coffee that someone had given him? How could a twenty-eight-year-old alcoholic, be so thankful for a message sent to his girl? And, why wasn’t I like that? Something was broken. How do I become like that? It seems way more satisfying than the way I had been.

One of the passages in the gospel of John really hit home but it took me a long time to realize how deep the statement was. In the third chapter of John’s gospel, John the Baptizer’s disciples and some Jews are arguing. John’s disciples point out Jesus nearby baptizing and they tell John that the people are now turning to Jesus and away from him. His response is about Jesus but he says it in a general way. So it can be interpreted both specifically about Jesus but also about us. John the baptist responds to his disciples,

“A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven.”

John 3:27

Of course he’s talking about Jesus being the Messiah and that he has received his authority from heaven. But I was struck by the fact that he had used this generalization about one’s reception or acceptance of what he’s given. John tells his disciples that every gift we receive is “from heaven.” But there’s more to it than just receiving something. What John is saying is that we must count our gifts as sacred. And he includes everything we receive. “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven.” The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the food we eat, the air we breathe. We may have done some things to provide for ourselves, but where would we be at all if the universe hadn’t first been created? I am not responsible for that. Even if it all evolved from primordial soup, I had no part to play in it. My whole existence is none of my affair. My life is a gift, given to me by my parents and whoever created them. So I have no just cause to be triumphal about anything.

What I noticed in prison about people who showed genuine gratitude was that they recognized their smallness in the universe and their dependence upon something greater than themselves for their daily sustenance.

“Preposterous!” Says the so-called, self-made person. “I am the cause of all of my own success!” But you are not the cause of your own existence. Where would you be without that? And even if existence, as Ayn Rand suggests, is proof of one’s right to exist, one of the rare tenets of which I agree with Objectivism, we are not the cause of that existence.

I didn’t intend to lay out a philosophy but to give an account of my thinking and how I came to that thinking and how I began to notice that the people around me were doing acceptance and gratitude so much better than I was.

People. In. Prison. Throwaway souls.

Now, epiphanies often evolve and expand and blow one’s mind long after one thinks they’ve figured it all out. The “aha” is just the beginning. At least that’s what I’ve discovered in my own life.

For many months I talked with my family while in prison about what I’d like to do when I got out. Between phone calls, I concentrated on being truly grateful for the letters, and the money put on both my phone account and commissary account. And that took accepting myself because I knew I didn’t “deserve” it. No amount of “specialness” I could contrive would provide worth. I spread some of these gifts around. The gratitude I received was often a perfect example of how I could improve myself.

But it really hit me after I was released. I arrived at home and had a room furnished with every comfort. I had clothes. I had cheese. More cheese than I thought plausible. I had pined away so often, lamenting the lack of cheese in prison, that there was a refrigerator full of it awaiting my arrival. The night I arrived home we had mostly cheese for our late supper. And something else kicked me in the gut.

I often talked about simply being outside and pulling some weeds in a garden. At the top of a small box filled with various toiletries and treats were two pairs of coated cloth gloves designed for garden work. My mother made sure they were included along with many things she, my sister and friends had provided in welcome. Such a minor thing in the grand scheme but it was the result of genuine listening, and genuine wishing. How many times have I told people I want ‘X’ when I really wanted ‘Y?’ Of course I’d be disappointed in ‘X.’ Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t ask for what I didn’t want so I wouldn’t have to be thankful for it were I to receive it.

I have already worn holes in one pair of gloves and the other is coated in dirt. I find myself in awe of the care which motivated my mother to purchase them. We are a couple of weeks past Mother’s day and I especially am thankful for the mothers in my life, real and adopted. I don’t deserve you but I sure am happy for the gift of you.

I know I have often hung myself up on the idea of what I deserve. I’m not sure it is a useful concept. Self-worth, even if you have a good healthy sense of it does not entitle you to anything. In fact, I suspect that acceptance and gratitude might be best practiced while believing we deserve nothing and that what we get is icing.

And that is the essence of what I’ve observed in the art of gratitude in those who I’ve admired doing it well. The people who practice gratitude as an art, never treat a gift as if it was owed and they always accept the gifts they’ve been given with joy.

Let me know what you think…

The day I walked out of The Walls unit in Texas was both terrible and wonderful. Having been locked up for six years and having hoped daily to return to a normal existence, I was visited by every doubt imaginable every hour of that day. Even as I left the door of the prison, belongings in hand, anxieties and fears whirled about my person. Though I had spent much of my time in prison practicing acceptance of life’s ups and downs, this particular day held too many opportunities for doubts to attack. And attack they did. I was influenced by every whisper.

It’s hard to tell whether or not prison employees know what goes through the minds of the inmates they’re releasing. Some must be tweaking people on purpose. I don’t like to assume the worst about people but it can be hard to avoid. Yet there are also remarkable humans who deserve praise. This day there was one man who seemed to understand how fragile the inmates felt. He was a long time employee highly experienced in the release process, a professional and a gentleman. I’ll call him Mr. Frank.

Mr. Frank did his best to make our last day in prison less stressful than our first day. He was gregarious, had an outrageous sense of humor and encouraged the group, telling us that with patience and respect we’d make it through the process as free men. “Men, I don’t care what you did to get here. You’ve done your time and you’re about to go home. I don’t ever want to see you again,” he said with his deep, fatherly voice. Yet, his efforts likely would never have calmed those of us who were first timers. Veterans who had experienced the release process before tried to supply their own wisdom, but it did little good. See, it is impossible, no matter how strong your character is, to put the possibility out of your mind that someone has made a mistake and you’ve been wrongly chosen to travel with those who are really going home.

I am speaking for myself but I did not talk to a single person of the forty or so who were walking out the door that day who didn’t share more or less the same uncertainty I felt. I admit that my skepticism was not rational. I had just completed a nine-month program mandated by parole. I had a certificate of completion which should have given me a great deal of confidence. The parole board had voted that I be paroled. Here I was, on the very day that I had been assigned to leave, waiting to sign my parole certificate and walk free. Yet, these facts did not provide comfort. Other inmates completed the same program and had languished for months waiting for beds in halfway houses to become available or for their addresses to be approved only to be shipped off to other units and delayed once more.

“But I’m here,” I kept telling myself. “We’re about to get our clothes. See! There’s a guy over there receiving his ankle monitor! If there were some mistake, I would already have been called back. Wouldn’t I?”

“They still have time,” my doubting self replied.

I can’t blame TDCJ for my anxieties but I can say that they do not make it easier on inmates and the doubts began as I waited for a release date weeks earlier. The release date is an inmate’s holy grail. A common claim is that once you have a date, you’re within two weeks of release, unless its more than two weeks. Yet a date makes the release concrete. Theoretically.

To make matters worse, in order to find out whether or not you have a sacred release date, you must either send a request to your unit’s parole office, have family check the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website or, if you do not have family backing you, ask a friend to have their family check for you. TDCJ plays the belligerent by refusing to notify inmates internally that they have been assigned a release date. I’ve often wondered why. There would be so much more confidence in the official nature of your release date if it arrived by mail written on TDCJ letterhead. It’s as if they have forgotten that their charges do not have internet access. “Hey, we posted it on the website,” I imagine the bureaucrat at headquarters saying. “What more do these ingrates want?” So much stress and anxiety could be minimized if only they were transparent. But then that applies to many of the things they do.

Maybe TDCJ wants to reserve the right to call it all off, to change their minds. Even when your date is published on the website, the caveat “subject to change” appears next to it. My family was as nervous as I was about the date changing but it was more on account of my own fragile condition I think rather than their own doubts getting the better of them. My jaundiced attitude toward TDCJ’s sincerity was long known to them.

And on the day of, everything conspired against my reason, using the past as a weapon.

For the prior couple of weeks I had to wait at the Goree unit. I had a celly named Tom for all but one of those days and we were a likely pair, sharing, disputing and worrying about the same things and making light of things we were actually seriously concerned about but not brave enough to admit. Tom was discharging a few days after me. My date was Friday the 10th, his was the following Monday the 13th. We both had to undergo similar administrative processes; fingerprinting, Dynamic Risk Assessment, and final blood work. You would probably assume that this made me confident in my certainty of release. After all, I did the DRA, was fingerprinted, and even had conversations with guards I knew from my year long stay on the unit about my homeward status. But I was barely credulous. TDCJ is ruthless.

I knew of the prison authority’s meanness first hand. But Tom, my celly, had just come from the Estelle unit.

The first night Tom arrived we broke the ice and got to talking about our experiences. This is common whenever one gets a new celly no matter what the situation. The topics of conversations are always the same: first, feel each other out about the cell “rules,” then, share news that you’ve heard, then tell each other about the units you’ve been on. Rarely, if ever, do you discuss the reason why you’re in Prison. It just isn’t polite. “That aint yo’ bidness dawg.”

On the second day, Tom was telling me about his job as an SSI (janitor) on the Estelle unit. He was assigned to the area where death row inmates were cared for.

“I saw and heard and smelled things that I didn’t want to see and hear and smell,” he said after we had come back from last chow.

“What do you mean?” I asked and he told me about a death row inmate they had brought in named Bill Gates.

“Billy had been brought in because he had diabetic gangrene in his toes. They cut off his toes. He didn’t heal and the gangrene spread so they cut off his feet. Then they cut his legs off below knees. Then it spread again and they cut them off above the knees. Pretty soon his penis hung farther down than the ends of his legs.

“It was the way he would plead. I never heard a man so mournful. ‘Oh, God, PLEASE, don’t move me,’ he would beg. I could have gone my entire life happy without hearing that. The nurses needed my help to turn him over. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t squeamish and I was glad to help. But it hurt to listen to his cries. But they had to, you know? It was sick. They were keeping him alive so that they could inject him when his time came up.”

Would TDCJ have any qualms about revoking my parole and keeping me longer? I think not.

In fact, I had seen it happen more than once. Guys I knew had been granted a short way release, transported to The Walls and at the very last moment their release was revoked and they were sent back to their unit without any word of explanation other than, “your short way was revoked.”

So it was on my last day, having been shipped to The Walls the day before my release date, that I was in a state of suspended belief. The atmosphere of The Walls does not lend itself to optimism either. The transit area where I was housed is underground and many inmates call it “The Dungeon.” The moniker is not undeserved. The transit cells are dark, claustrophobic and ancient. Thus I was only slightly less nervous when at 4:00 AM on the 10th, my alleged release date, that an officer woke me up and told me, “Get your property packed up. You’re going out to the slab when we roll the doors.”

As relieved as I was that I finally had official confirmation of my status, uneasiness grew from many seeds. We were herded from our cells to a large concrete area in The Dungeon and made to wait five hours before an official arrived with a clipboard containing the names of parolees and discharges.

As if I were the butt of a cosmic joke, I was not called as part of the first roll. These were only those who had just arrived from the Holliday unit that morning. To make matters worse, a rumor was spreading that due to the previous night’s storms and flooding, all chain buses had been directed to take part in the evacuation of southern prison units which were deluged. And that wasn’t all. They might be canceling today’s release activities.

Some of those who were being discharged – as in the completion of their entire sentence – were outraged. “They can’t keep me here. I’m discharging today. They’ll have to pay me,” said a Hispanic man to my left. I recognized him from my bus ride here. The tattoos on his face seemed animated as he spat out the words.

To make matters even more obtuse, one of the officers who was assigned to handle our group let us know just how precarious our situation was. “Boy, you guys are lucky. If I hadn’t called in this morning you might have had to wait til Monday. I had to come in to get the release list. You would have been left here all day, ” he said, and he laughed the sort of laugh only a discontented government employee could laugh.

He was trolling for something. Maybe an argument. Maybe a compliment. All I knew was that his statement enforced the idea in my mind that TDCJ could easily have made a mistake in my case. At this moment, I seemed to relive every past feeling of not belonging and the conclusion I drew was that I couldn’t now possibly belong among those finally exiting prison. And this in spite of the fact that I was standing here with a lot of other inmates waiting to leave.

Finally I was called, paired up with another inmate and told to wait until everyone on the list was accounted for. Some were not. Turns out that malfunctioning doors had kept some of our number locked in cells. The entire five hour wait was peppered with outraged screams from one of those who was stuck. The cavernous Dungeon swallowed up the words so they couldn’t be recognized. Thank goodness I didn’t understand what he was complaining about.

Another three excruciating hours waiting in the prison’s visiting area, each of us had to sign papers, stare into a retina scanner and put on clothes that were rejects in the seventies when they were first put on retail racks. I am called last to conference with the reentry lady about my destination. Last! I am going to get on a plane and fly out of state within hours of walking out the door. I am certain that she is going to wrinkle her nose and let me know that such won’t be tolerated, that I have to accept a bus pass and take Greyhound to Oregon where I am headed. But no. She acts as if parolees fly out of state all the time. Is it a trick?

And then I am signing my parole certificate. On it is listed my conditions of parole. The reentry lady reads them and then says, “You’ve got somebody waiting outside to take you to the airport.”

Though I knew I had a ride, I was surprised. “How did you know that?” I asked. “I talked to them on my way in,” she replied in a knowing and self-satisfied way. Huh. Maybe this is going to really happen, I thought to myself.

They then led us out the doors. I am dressed like a pimp, carrying my worldly belongings in a red bag which is normally used to hold twenty pounds of onions. On my feet are the canvas shoes issued by TDCJ which we all call “Jackie Chans.” The morning is cool, the sky partly cloudy with deep blue peeking through the patches. In spite of the rain, the humidity is not stifling. I should be in awe rather than looking around for the guy who is about to shatter my world.

“Sir, I’m afraid there’s been a terrible mistake. Whoever thought YOU should be walking around free has already been fired. Come with me.”

But it didn’t happen that way. I must have looked like a lost kid at the airport. I stared at the prison’s walls from the outside as if I’d never seen a prison before. A family to my right, about twelve Hispanics of all different ages, erupt into shouts of joy and welcome toward somebody walking behind me. At first I think the elderly woman with tears in her eyes is looking at me but then realize the truth. Part of me wants to see who the inmate is. Do I know him? The other part of me, the one running from that man who’s trying to put me back on the other side of those looming walls urges me to move on; to find my own ride so I can be reunited with my own family. I’m suddenly a prison escapee. I have to move. I’ve got to get on with this before I’m caught.

After a bit of confused wandering I meet my ride. He’s someone my family arranged to pick me up and we don’t know each other. He opens his brand new bad ass four door truck and shows me the things he’s brought: modern clothes, some of which he’s bought and some of which he’s raided from his son’s closet, a carry on bag with wheels, and two pairs of his sons shoes, size eleven. Of these, one pair is expensive looking flip flops. The other bright red Nike Air Jordan’s. Neither fit. I am so eager to shed my prison persona that I change clothes right there on the sidewalk. I put on a pair of classy shorts and a t-shirt and over the t-shirt a tasteful plaid button down. It was only forty minutes prior to this that I was wearing prison whites. My new friend is comically taken aback at my eagerness but raises no objections. I am stuck with wearing my Jackie Chans. This will cause me more anxiety later.

Jay, the friend, hands me my very own Samsung Galaxy. It is already full of joyful texts from my friends who have been leaving well-wishes for several weeks. “Oh, I need to take a picture,” Jay says. Later I will discover that my sister needed confirmation as badly as I did. Jay had been instructed to get a picture immediately as proof of life. I finish transferring my things into the carry on, and embark. Jay steps on the gas and makes haste our escape. It seems preposterous but, to be polite I talk to Jay and his friend and only text my family. I guess I didn’t want Jay and his friend to think I was ignoring them. I thought it would be rude to jump in the back and immediately start talking to somebody else on the phone. Another part of me shouts in a loud voice which I hope only I can hear, “You’re doing this all wrong! You’ve been out of prison for fifteen minutes and you’ve managed to alienate your family and prove to a person you’ve never met that you’re some sort of alien zombie type. Get it together man!”

I am mesmerized by the view out of the backseat window. I marvel. On a prison bus the windows are covered with perforated steel plate. You only get a hint of what is outside the window. But wow! Texas seems beautiful along this stretch of I-45. One would never know the dark side of its justice system by looking at the landscape.

Within forty-five minutes, we arrive at the airport. Jay tells me he can only drop me at the curb. I tell him what a callous jerk he has been. No, that’s not true. I thank him as if he were the Dalai Lama and I were an acolyte. I am touched beyond words at his act of kindness.

Suddenly I am alone and I have to remember what its like to travel without shackles and with no particular place to be or order to follow other than “be at the gate before boarding.” It takes me around thirty minutes to figure out that I am allowed to take my carry on bag without paying extra. Before I was locked up this would have taken five minutes tops. But I can’t concentrate. Each time I think I’ve got myself into the correct line, I find a reason why I’m mistaken and I go back to carefully read a sign that any eight year old could understand. Once I’ve sorted the luggage rules out, I find the TSA line. I realize that all of these people are in prison too. Just put white clothes on them and we could be in any work detail. I am about to consent to a strip search when the TSA lady screams at me to take off my shoes.

Shoes. Oh crap. I am wearing standard issue TDCJ Jackie Chans. If you’ve never seen these they’re just a Van’s knock off in black canvas. But the only people who wear them are felons. As I remove them I nervously look around, certain that everyone near me is now aware I am fresh out of prison. One nice looking older woman smiles at me. The rest of the travelers are staring at their cell phones. Now I am laughing like an idiot. These people neither know nor care that I’m a dangerous felon, according to the State of Texas.

My first meal is in a lounge near my gate. I order a cheeseburger and pay for it with a gift card my family shipped to Jay.

My next purchase is a giant drip coffee from the Starbucks next door. Heaven. I have had freeze dried coffee for the past six years and forgot what real coffee tastes like. By now I’ve talked to my family, texted a bunch of my friends and still I feel like the other Jackie Chan is going to drop.

I can’t concentrate. I said that already but the overwhelming nature of such immediate freedom after so long being locked up has me acting like I suffer from a severe case of ADHD. I know that some of this is a natural reaction to the circumstance. Yet I am sure that I had some sort of strategy for this in the past. I was already a bit skitzoid but I masked it. How? Oh, I remember. I smoked. Staying quit is going to be a chore I realize because right now a cigarette would be amazing. It would calm me. It would also instantly hook me. I abstain. No relapses for me.

I am awed by the terminal. A lot has changed in just six years. The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived and the undead stare with cold eyes at their devices as they walk to catch their flights (or eat the brains of the living?) and every table has a power outlet to charge up handheld devices and laptops. Instead of banning guns, I wonder how many lives might be saved by banning handheld devices in public places. No wonder so many people succumb. They never knew to duck. They didn’t notice the dude in the cammo holding the AR-15.

Within six hours, I am home with my family, my fears all proving naught. We were all dazed and at a loss for the “appropriate” reaction. My concentration, even after two weeks home, is still diminished. I am amazed I was able to sit long enough to put the account into readable sentences. I must be making some progress but I often wonder how long it will take to come to normalcy and how other escapees, especially those who are being released after several decades behind bars may have felt on their first days out.

I hope everyone leaving prison is cared for like I was. I hope you might lend somebody a hand who is on their way out. They need all the assistance they can get.

A.T.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Most likely if you’re stopping by, you are a friend and want to catch up on happenings because I’ve dropped off social media.  Don’t let the moniker scare you away. If you don’t know me and found this spot through serendipitous means, I have been recently released from a Texas prison, confined there for a crime I did not commit, though I did succumb to pressure to sign a plea agreement.  In other words I am considered guilty under the law.

Throughout my ordeal, my friends and family constantly encouraged and supported me. I plan to tell the story of this on these pages. I hope you find it interesting enough that you involve yourself in helping out the incarcerated in some way, either by supporting one of the many organizations which tackle various aspects of the Mass Incarceration problem, or by finding an inmate and visiting or writing an encouraging letter.  It probably will alter your life in ways you never expected.