Sometimes I believed that I had everything I needed in prison. Books. Running. Access to hormones. Enough food to sustain me. Solidarity and fellowship. But I didn’t, of course: I didn’t have control over my life, didn’t have freedom, and was treated by the prison guards as less than dirt. In order to survive, I tried to avoid dwelling on any of that, but by 2016, six years since I’d first been locked up, it had become increasingly clear that prison was corroding my sense of possibility and connection with the future. I began to sink into despair. Anger bubbled up more often.
