As I turned over in my head the years of fur and love and mistakes, I started writing about that raw feeling of regret, but also about addiction and recovery and comebacks. I put it all in a Twitter thread—real tweets, not on paper like in jail. Someone at a criminal justice news website, The Marshall Project, saw my tweets and asked me to make them into a personal essay. There were freelance gigs, speaking engagements, and interview requests—including one from Terry Gross, whose voice I’d once listened to on the way to skating practice, long before I knew anything about prisons or heroin.
