Resignation/Resuscitation

You wouldn't think that a prison job could keep a person busy enough to induce burnout, but that's exactly what happened in my leadership role at XSTREAM.

Exhaustion, anxiety, distracted thoughts, and occasional testiness over the past six or seven months tipped me off that I was feeling more stress than was healthy. The hours kept me away from my cell for a minimum of seven (as many as fourteen) hours a day, seven days a week, which you'd think would be nice, considering the environment. It wasn't. Stress gnawed at me, even on the good days, sometimes feeling as if I was being eaten from the inside.

The other members of my team relished those long days at their desks. They'd rather stay at work, typing actor names into the database, than be around their cellmates. I never shared the aversion. Either I value my free time too much or my cellmate of the past two years, Bob, is just more tolerable than most people here. Many were the nights that I left work "early" (i.e., before the building closed at 8:30 PM) because I was just plain beat. My colleagues usually stuck around—I guess because the poor bastards don't have lives of their own.

I gathered Team XSTREAM together last Friday to lay it all out. Not wanting to mince words, I concluded my little monologue: "I don't want to work here anymore." Everyone suggested that I simply take a month or two off, clear my head. That wouldn't work, though. The on-the-job issues I'd been struggling with would still be there, whether I left for one month or for six. There was no fixing this. Still, I thanked them for their kind support.

What made me nervous was approaching our boss, the Recreation Director, about my intention to quit. I didn't want to have to justify my decision and decline a bunch of offers to make changes to the workplace, my schedule, or the workload. I'd reviewed possibilities in my head all weekend, and none of them were quite good enough to compel me to stay. I was resolute.

When the boss came in on Monday morning, I asked when might be a good time for us to have a serious conversation. We sat down in his office a bit later and I explained how I'd been feeling, the conversation my coworkers and I had, their idea for a remedy, and all the reasons that I doubted it could work. To my utter amazement, he shook his head and said, "You're preaching to the choir. I wish I had the option you've got here. I've still got two years before I can retire. I'm burning the candle at both ends." He gave me his blessing to do whatever was best for me.

I thanked him, then made my ask: "Can I count on you for a recommendation, whatever I move on to?" I had planned to put in for a clerk position rumored to be available at ERDCC's Reentry Center, a newly opened facility at the prison, where people within one year of release can request help with job-hunting skills, work on their résumés, and even get vocational training. XSTREAM made a lot of signs, labels, and decorations adding to the building's slick, professional appearance, not to mention video-recorded their big open house event a couple of weeks ago. I hoped that our work would afford me a leg up in the application process.

Within an hour of my request, my boss called the Reentry Center and put in a good word on my behalf. They offered me the job without hesitation, no questions asked. I didn't even have to formally apply. (Of course, even after changing employers, I'll still host TV shows for XSTREAM. The team wouldn't let me get away from them entirely.)

I'm supposed to report to the Reentry Center sometime at the end of this week, to talk about the job and my options there. It sounds a little like I'll get to create my own position, with the possibility of even facilitating classes or programs myself. I love the idea of working face-to-face with people who want to use this time to make more of their lives! This feels in some ways like a major shift; in others, it feels like the most natural transition ever.

My last day at XSTREAM is a week and a half away. This probably won't surprise you, but I'm already sleeping better.

Equanimity or Bust

There's no romance in equanimity. The quality of being at ease with whatever comes one's way seems to be in opposition to our desire for excitement and drama. We want passion, conflict, and speed, almost as much in our lives as we want them in movies and on TV.

A writer once mused that it was impossible to compose a story about a happy man, because plot can't co-exist with contentment. He contended that a satisfied protagonist doesn't yearn, fight, or strive; therefore, anything you write about him will be just a tedious anecdote. Story needs movement. Equanimity, on the other hand, is stillness.

Much of our lives consist of struggle. If you're reading this, you have Internet access and leisure time. You're also privileged to have (here I make assumptions) easy access to clean water, adequate food, and a place to call home. Unless you live in a war zone, you probably have no dire existential concerns. Your day-to-day might even afford time for music and art. If so, lucky you.

The wealthy have all of their basic needs met. They don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. They don't need to fear (depending on how they got their wealth) being murdered in their sleep. They can easily afford clothes appropriate to the season. They are also, according to studies, generally dissatisfied. Without existential struggles, significant friction, and narrative interest to contend with, they get bored. Money can't buy happiness, as someone once said, but it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

It's arguably easier to be equanimous in the absence of excessive difficulty. Study after study shows us that a person regularly faced with moderately difficult challenges will report being happier than somebody living a life of ease. I would argue that this is exactly the thing that the pampered Prince Siddhartha Gautama felt, gazing beyond the walls of his family's palace, before he ventured out on the quest that led him to become the Buddha, an icon of equanimity.

I understand why it's said that following the Eightfold Noble Path—practicing Buddhism, that is—constitutes a different way of being in the world. It changes your life, reveals the impossibility of an independent self in a universe structured upon interconnectivity.

This concept, no-self, is tricky but perhaps best illustrated with the koan "What was your face before your parents were born?" Everything we think we are depends on the existence of everything else. In a world without our mother and father, where can we be said to exist? Our existence depends on them, and on so much else. How much can be taken away from who we believe we are before we aren't us anymore? Are we our designer wardrobe? Our love of 1950s sci-fi movies? Our award-winning hot sauce recipe? Our career as a hospice nurse?

Meditation is the study of the self. To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to become one with the universe. I'm no Zen master, but I feel a teensy iota of this oneness when I sit in meditation. It's a little scary. How does one avoid the pitfall—which I can only imagine exists—of slipping not just into a state of nonidentification but of nonidentity? It's one thing to forget the self; it's another to be subsumed by a conception (however misguided) of selflessness. Maybe this is where a teacher comes in handy, but I don't have that luxury where I am.

Sometimes I see myself, in my meditation, seated at the precipice of a great void. Leaning forward, I'll tumble into nothingness, into an inconceivably vast absence of concepts or observable phenomena, wherein I'll know only stillness and imperturbability. Leaning backward, I'll tumble to meet the irrefutably solid ground of a phenomenological reality, a consciousness stuck in this gradually declining meat-machine that I call my body. Neither option feels comfortable, yet maintaining equipoise takes so much effort.

I don't want to become one of those frustratingly chill bodhisattva stereotypes, seemingly indifferent to everything going on around him and, in a word, boring as shit. Nor do I want to keep going through this life with the same hangups, limited perspectives, and stressors that have for so long defined who I am. Yet I wouldn't be practicing if I didn't welcome a change.

These are just the worries of someone who's unsure but trying, the expression of thoughts by someone walking a road he can't see. I guess that's everyone, though. I'm nothing special, just one projection of the steady breath and beating heart of the universe.

An Afternoon Furlough (Almost)

The Missouri Department of Rehabilitative Services probably doesn't get much press coverage. Such is its lack of notoriety that I can't even describe for you the relationship between DORS and the Department of Corrections—and I've been a prisoner in the DOC since 2002. They did hit a significant milestone here at ERDCC yesterday, though, with a ribbon cutting for the Missouri Reentry Center, the state's biggest and probably most modern facility of its type. I not only got to be there for the big event, I even got to hand out purple octopuses.

The display table offered to XSTREAM was in recognition of everything my coworkers and I do for the institution, and for all we did for the Reentry Center in the leadup to yesterday's event. We not only cut adhesive vinyl numbers to mark the building's doors, we also made big decorative wall stickers—inspirational slogans, logos, and a career-centric word cloud. We even made the 6-by-9-foot Reentry Center sign bolted beside the front entrance, which the administrative team posed beside with giant scissors before cutting the ribbon.

We put a 55-inch TV beside us, looping a brief promotional video I compiled for the occasion. A 32-inch model on the tabletop continuously displayed our octopus logo. After recording the ceremony, a coworker and I sat and fielded questions from educators, law enforcement officers, visiting staff from other prisons, members of the Bonne Terre Chamber of Commerce, and a newspaper reporter. One of my ambitions is to make XSTREAM a recognized production outfit outside of the prison, creating media content for entities outside these fences. Yesterday felt like an opportunity to move toward that.

While pitching our production work to the public, I handed out swag to everyone who came close enough to talk—because who doesn't love stickers? Our logo is iconic enough to be cool without context, but with any luck the little octopuses I cut in royal purple and baby blue will prompt the person who took one to remember our unique display whenever they glance at the laptop, clipboard, or binder they stuck it to. Who knows, somebody might even strike up a conversation with them about it.

By prison standards, the Reentry Center is really nice, and I'm happy to have played a small part in making it look that way. Being allowed to attend the open house event and talk with everyday people about the work I'm so proud of felt like an afternoon away from prison.