Life in Fear

As do so many others, I live in a state of anxiety and uncertainty. My environment, this prison, with its faded green roofs and lethal electric fence, represents the epitome of unpredictability. Something could happen at any time that sunders whatever intentions I dared to set. My circumstances are pretty far from ideal. Imposing a level of suffering is the point of prison, after all.

I fear random lockdowns, which keep me from going to work at the job that I love. Lockdowns are declared for a plethora of reasons, but most often because of staff assaults, staff shortages, and staff barbecues. Some can last for minutes. Some engulf hours. Some drag on for days. During lockdowns there's no showering, no visits, no phone calls, no hot meals. If there's a search team en route, the cold water to everyone's cell is turned off to keep anybody from flushing contraband down the toilet.

I fear running out of ideas for my writing. Determined as I am not to become a "prison writer," I often turn away from writing about topics that hew too close to the standard, clichéd narratives of Hollywood movies and true-crime novels. "Write what you know" becomes a tightening noose when your vista of fresh experiences is limited by the number and type of books you can read, the conversations you have, and the discoveries you can make at your (admittedly amazing) job. Listening to other people's stories in weekly Gavel Club meetings adds perspective, and I sometimes catch Stories from the Stage on PBS, but my truly new experiences have become as infrequent as they are narrow in scope.

I fear the loneliness that follows loss. I'm not talking here about a misplaced hat; the loss of those I love, whether to out-of-mindedness or death, is a dread that chills me to my core. "Who am I in the absence of others?" is one of the great questions in Zen Buddhism, but I'm just not ready to grapple with this question outside the realm of abstraction. I profoundly love and cherish the people in my life. I don't want a life without them – especially not while I'm in prison. To live the kind of life as the forgotten here do seems unbearably sad. In my worst dreams I become them.

Living in prison's just the half of it. I fear the helplessness of decrepitude, of mine and of my mother's, neither of which is yet a challenge but very possibly will be, in due time. Worry for an aging parent in dire straits is bad enough when you're capable of providing at least some of the assistance they need. When you're literally trapped on the other side of the state, without impending prospects for release, the matter takes on a different, more bitter note.

I fear leaving prison. This is not to say that I'm by any means institutionalized but that I worry about my prospects in that brave new world you all have built in my absence. My period of imprisonment predates the iPod, the Patriot Act, smartphones, twerking, both Matrix sequels, the Iraq war, Billie Eilish, augmented reality, and cronuts. If my prison sentence were a person, it'd probably have an associate's degree by now. That is a lot of time to miss, a lot of cultural currency to be deprived of. I'm quick on the uptake and fairly tech-savvy, but could I find a suitable place in the world, one that's decent and self-supporting? No one can say, and the unknown is the scariest thing in the world.

I fear for the future of humanity, amid climate change, rabid partisanship, and our own shortsighted egocentrism that's created both. I fear that this thing on my arm could be cancerous. I fear that my petty, arbitrary aversions keep me from doing things I could learn to enjoy, or at least not mind. I fear becoming boring. I fear that I might never see New York City, London, or Tokyo. I fear that I'm too concerned with my looks. I fear that I don't practice zazen diligently enough. I fear never writing another publishable book. I fear dying in prison. I fear meaninglessness. I fear squandering time.

As I said before, these concerns are nothing unique. On the contrary, I know that you share some of these very same worries. The question is, what do we do once we identify them? Is acknowledgment enough? Do we bottle them up, letting them gnaw at our psychological well-being, a challenge to see how long we can live so repressedly? Do we resolve to change, then labor at reforming our subconscious? Do we break down and cry from sheer helplessness? Indecision will cripple us. We can't move without knowing how to decide, but we can't possibly know how to decide. Whatever can we do but live? The only true way out is by going through.