Felon’s Alphabet: Q is for quiet
Prisons are noisy places. Thanks to Hollywood and serial television cop shows, the world at large knows what prisons sound like: the yelling, clanging of cell doors, banging, people arguing, loudspeaker announcements, and correctional officers (COs) shouting orders. There is no dearth of the above-mentioned din.
“Q” is for quiet.
Webster’s Dictionary defines quiet as “the condition of being calm and peaceful; not easily excited or upset.”
There are no quiet places in prison. I remember vividly that during my first year, I was overwrought emotionally and in search of some peace and quiet. I was on the Main Yard, and so I wandered off past the track, found a patch of tall grass, and sat down. Those of you incarcerated and reading this already know what happened next.
One minute I was sitting there with my eyes closed, and the next I was accosted by a CO. He was kind about it, after he realized what I was “not doing,” but he made sure to “educate” me on areas that were out of bounds. So off I went, “educated” but still overwrought, and my quiet interrupted. Years later, I would learn the skill of finding quiet inside myself and being less affected by the external acoustic madness I was surrounded by. But that is a talent, a learned talent that required cultivating.
In order to find the quiet inside, one must move their focus inward and be quiet and still. You cannot find the quiet without actually being quiet. So, stop talking just to talk and learn to relish the silence that each moment affords you.
Some stillness is built in because being incarcerated forces you to be still. The loss of freedom compels a freshly incarcerated individual to visualize montages of moments missed: a sister’s wedding, a parent’s death, the birth of a child, the promotion never gotten, the dream car never purchased, the dream girl or guy never met, or even worse, met, married, and left behind. It is sad. It is real. And it is something we all have in common. Because although our life montages may be different, they are all eerily similar in that they depict dreams deferred.
There is shame in that montage. There is pain in that quiet. But rehabilitation happens in those moments when past losses and the hope for a better future collide. In the lives of those whose past was shaped by trauma, instability, addiction, and gang life, quiet is rare, and chaos is normal.
Quiet can cause a person to face that which can no longer be avoided. The early days of incarceration can be some of the hardest ever in life, not because of the loss of freedom but because one is dropped into stillness, into the quiet. For some, this silence is overwhelming.
Close your eyes and imagine those cold, lonely, uncertain nights when all you have are your own errant, guilt-ridden thoughts and raw regret to keep you company. All the woulda, coulda, shouldas.
However, for those brave enough to do the work, salvation can be found in that quiet. You can find your lost authentic self in that quiet. You just have to be courageous enough to be still, process, accept responsibility, and make the right amends to the right person at the right time.
Quiet can be found in the synergy of self-help groups when the processing gets deep. Quiet can be found when a lifer “connects the dots” of their life crime and begins to address their causative factors. Quiet is attained when, instead of staying busy, staying high, staying angry, staying numb, one chooses to be mindfully present in the moment.
The first crack in the façade of denial happens when you can be present in the moment, be still and sit face to face with your childhood trauma, the harm you have caused, the harm done to you, accept the consequences of your poor decisions, acknowledge that while some dreams are no longer attainable, you can and you will dream again, and that those new dreams are well within reach.
