An Open Letter to My Classmates in Prison

A letter written to the inside students in a course that I'm taking as part of my Master's degree. The course emphasizes that students from Drew and those within the Correctional Facility are all classmates, studying together. It is not traditional "prison ministry" but in fact a partnership.

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Dear Inside Students,

I am an Outside Student who may never know what it is to be an Inside Student, or even what it is to be on the inside. Studying in a prison setting is a new experience for me, and I admit that it was just a little bit easier to do it because I was going in the company of friends I already knew and faculty I already trusted.

Maybe you didn't know anybody when you first went in. I imagine it might have been difficult not only to be sentenced but also to be sent somewhere without a familiar face, especially the kind of loved one who knows who you are so well that they can remind you from time to time when you're down and out. For better or for worse, my identity is wrapped up in the relationships I have, the jobs I do, the clothing I wear to portray a certain image of myself—professional or casual or colorful or quiet. So much about these parts of your life might have changed when you got to the premises—old relationships reshaped by new circumstances, new relationships forged, new jobs assigned, personal fashion minimized. Individual identity as we know it in the contemporary western world is difficult to express under such limited parameters. This, at least, is my understanding so far, though I would rather hear your experience from your perspective, and I hope to do so over the next few months.

It's just that, as you began to talk about some of these things, even as briefly as we spoke before we moved on to discuss our actual course material for the term—music's role and expression in different world religions—I began to realize just how much certain elements of your current experience remind me, in some way, of my own. With that, I began to realize how much you could teach me and nurture me in even a few short hours. And lest you think I'm just getting sappy and waxing poetic here, let's just say the potency of the whole thing knocked me on my ass. So that's why I'm writing this. Because, sooner or later, potential energy turns kinetic. Sometimes.

You see, I had never been to prison before this week, but I've been locked up for about five years now.

The officials who give names to such things call my prison grounds Depression. I and others here have known it to be Hell.

Maybe you are locked up here, too. Maybe you know many prisons. As far as I can tell, knowing one is one too many.

Whatever built the walls around you, I can't possibly imagine that I know what you are experiencing. No two prisons are the same, nor are two people's dealings with depression. Incarceration and depression are not the same. But they share common ground. I think you and I may share common ground.

I may have shown signs of anxiety and depression in childhood, but I was what The Powers That Be consider high-functioning in most aspects—yes, I was (am) awkward and content to spend inordinate amounts of time alone, reading or writing or messing around with art supplies to no remarkable end except personal relaxation. But I had some extraordinary friends and high marks in school and a surprisingly positive attitude, which all mostly outweighed the low self-confidence and the phobias and the panic. So maybe that's why the first major lockdown five years ago still took me by utter surprise.

Since then, I was paroled a few times—had brighter days, months, seasons here and there. For a little while I thought I'd even gotten out for good. But somehow I keep finding myself in Depression. It's not always exactly the same as before; the way that the pain and the exhaustion and the loneliness manifest changes a little every time, I learn a new lesson now and then, and what exactly I am able to accomplish while in the thick of it varies, but it's just a different circle of Hell. It's just a different cell on the same old block.

It's a place where sometimes it doesn't even matter that I have relationships and work and clothing to identify myself; because my relationships become strained with heightened conflict or in my isolation, my work suffers in the midst of mutism and fatigue, and dressing myself becomes either a mindless ritual or a burden. These are just outward signs of the inward loss of identity, an inner hopelessness in the realization that I am not me, or at least I suspect that I am not me but I'm having trouble remembering who I was in the first place.

Even worse, I begin to wonder, what if? What if this is me now? What if I am stuck with this me for the rest of my life? What if signs of healing and hope aren't even real, like a mirage in desert heat? What if I'm only healing because I'm too scared of being broken, and in my haste, I'll put the pieces back together wrong?

Maybe I don't need to worry too much about being hasty. These days I am undergoing some sort of really long, drawn-out parole process. One step forward, two steps back, and a splurge of two steps forward when even I don't expect it—makes it hard to replicate it when I want to. I am not quite in but I am not quite out, either. I still haven't figured out how to earn my way out, how to prove myself worthy of freedom. It seems kind of arbitrary, if you ask me.

I imagine it may take longer than usual, because this last bout really threw me for a loop. I've never been so thoroughly stripped of what I thought made me who I am. I've never been so voiceless and vulnerable. I've never had so little concentration and common sense—utterly unable to retain information, picking up a hot baking pan with my bare hand, falling asleep and boiling off a whole pot of water, forgetting things and forgetting that I've forgotten things. I've never failed so damn perfectly to care for myself with the most basic tasks or to complete the coursework that I've had my heart set on doing ever since I discerned a call to ministry, a call which thus far refuses to go away in spite of my inabilities and failures. And I've never felt so scared of the next time I'm going to end up here; scared that someday I won't make it out.

When I first sought help, a school administrator asked me to paint a verbal image of what I was facing. It was no easy task since so much of my depression was and often still is a sort of mutism, a struggle for words.

One of us, whoever it was, eventually described the proverbial pit. In the midst of this metaphor, she talked about how hard it can be to climb the ladder and get out.

I looked at her in genuine awe, because the part of my brain that was visualizing the pit suddenly short-circuited: "There's a ladder?"

Not in my pit! At least, I didn't see one there, even while actively seeking help. I knew I needed to start talking to people about what was going on, but I still didn't see the way out.

I guess I wonder if no amount or type of treatment is going to get me entirely out of Depression. And even if I do get out, I'm always going to carry around this record. It's going to make people look at me differently. It's going to make it easier for some people to know and trust me, but it's going to make it harder for others. The more I try to bury it, the more persistently it will sow doubts in me about what I'm capable of doing and whether or not other people love the real me. The more openly I speak of it, the more authentic I will feel; but the more authentic I feel in that, the clearer it will become that this struggling, fragmented person is in fact who I am.

Before we left for the correctional facility to meet you, we heard from a former inside student who said she eventually realized: "I wasn't who people in Blue said I was. It was a bump in the road that didn't define who I am or could be." She said that we outside students would be gift-bearers, bringing hope; bringing your minds outside of the wall—to our everyday world, to the worlds of the texts we read and the music we hear. She said it's easy for a person's mind to become trapped along with her body and to become immersed in despair and loneliness and uncertainty because of where she is.

What you may not realize is that I am in the opposite situation: my state of mind easily incapacitates my body, and I don't know how long I will live in this situation. I do know that partnering with you in this course that has everything and nothing to do with liberation—this foray into the music of the world's religions—is already helping to liberate me in some small way. That's because this program challenges the very definition of liberation.

In my case, my mind is locked up, and coming to see you and work alongside you means that my body is not imprisoned by the state of my mind.

It means that I have something meaningful to go and do; bright, friendly people to speak to and listen to, even when my inner consciousness tries to persuade me to shut down and shut people out.

It means that I will spend a few hours of the week with people who value freedom as much as I have come to.

It means that even my mind will be freed in a way I may not have known was possible; learning your insights and seeing the world anew through your lens, just as the outside students share our ideas and perspectives with you.

You may want the freedom of stepping off the premises more than anything else. Maybe a freed mind, as our orientation speaker called it, is just one small freedom you willingly accept for now. I want to step out of the grounds of Depression and free my mind as much as I want my next breath. But if it turns out that I reside here all my life, or if it follows me out the door like any complicated past that one would rather leave behind, it does not need to mean that I am lost to it.

That is what I have learned from you already. And I have learned that we are not so different, you and I, in at least this much: We are not who they say we are. And if someone has convinced us otherwise, then we must help each other to remember who we are and imagine who we will be.

See you in class,
The Outside Student Inside Different Walls