I used to teach writing at a women's prison. Just as a volunteer. Nothing very formal, and I wasn’t trained as a teacher. Mostly we worked on journaling and letters home to their children and their families. Sometimes a woman wanted to work on a short story, always presented as fiction, and then, during a reading when she would be overcome with tears, she would say, "This actually happened to me." 

I learned so much out there, about their lives of course, but more about the power of words, of a sentence, a title, the perfect beauty of what is left out and not revealed in black and white. As many teachers say, more often than not, I was their student.

There was a big lesson, of course, one that I think of so often and one that continues to shape how I interact with people at work and personally, even over the internet.

They were writing about their families - kids, their parents, a boyfriend or husband, the ever-present EX, whomever they chose.  I had them work on the same piece for a few classes, longer than some of them thought necessary. My goal was for them to make the person, the image, the memories multi-dimensional. "What else did he do?" I'd ask after reading about an ex-boyfriend who used drugs. Did he work? Visit his mother? Was he an athlete in high school? Did he sing? What else? Sometimes those questions worked and an essay suddenly became a true picture of a full person, a real man or child, a grandmother. As writers, they started to get it.

One week, a woman who was in prison for murder and had a life sentence wrote a piece about the mother of the person she had killed; a short piece that showed just a trace of what this mother might be living through after the murder of her son. I pushed for more. "What else?" I asked. "What else might she be thinking? How are her nights? Her mornings?"

I had gone too far. Asked much too much.  The inmate, there in her faded polyester 'denim' work shirt looked up at me with tears and said, "I can't. I can't. Don't make me. I can't put it down. It will kill me to write it." Not sure what to say, I went with trust. I trusted her. "Ok. Stop with this. This is enough then."

I wondered about her that week while I went about my life on the outside. I wondered if she thought about the idea that writing had helped her in the past. She had seen, week after week, that writing gave the women a sense of empowerment, a feeling of control over something, their words, their stories.

The next week when I saw her, she discreetly handed me a letter she had written to me.  (Volunteers were not allowed to ever take anything from an inmate.) She was so quiet in class that night, but I didn't push. I trusted. When class was over and I got to my car, I finally read her letter.

She thanked me for volunteering. She liked the class. She liked improving her writing skills and her letters home. She liked hearing the other women's stories. She appreciated that I pushed and showed them the power of words through the books and tapes I brought in. But. There was something I would never understand. Never. Because I didn't live at the prison, because I wasn't locked up, I wasn't an inmate and only visited as free person, I would never understand. "Please trust me," she said.

She said that when I asked her, and sometimes others, to go deeper, it was emotionally dangerous for them. The risk and toll it took to reveal their pasts, their failures, their losses, their regrets.... it was too much. In the class, for one hour once a week (unless a guard cancelled our class) it was relatively safe. But once class was over and they had to walk out into the prison yard, anything could happen. Another classmate, who had promised confidentiality to her in the class, might change her mind and reveal something she had written and shared. A treacherous piece about past abuse might haunt her while she tried to sleep or work, and there was usually no one, literally no one, to whom she could safely go for comfort. Writing about missing children, sometimes children who had not visited in years, was so deeply painful that it could undo all the strategies and mechanism an inmate had created within herself to get through her life in prison.

The example she used for me was this: outside the prison, at an AA meeting, someone might talk about something that was really hard and painful for them. After the meeting, they could go to coffee with other group members, or call their sponsor. They had another group the next day. They could find support over and over again. That's how it should be when one goes deep into their pain and uncovers a truth. But in prison, it's not like that. The women were up against too much. Rules, guards, different housing units, poor conditions not conducive to sleep and peace. There was no real place to recover, to regroup after such a deep reveal. It just didn't exist there.

I'm at that place now, here. I can't go any deeper with my writing here. I've dredged as much as I can dredge, at least publicly. This is not a life many of you can and should ever understand, and I am unable and unwilling to go any further, publicly, to explain it. I shared what I was able to, and tried to do so in a way that might help others who struggle with this. Every time I post here, it hurts, physically and emotionally. And though many, many of you have been so kind and gentle with me, there is still no real place I can go for comfort and peace after I post. Thus, I feel too vulnerable and exposed, and honestly, I have no reserves to deal with it anymore.

I will continue to answer messages, so if you are reading these blogs for the first time and you want to contact me, please do send me a note. I will respond. Or, contact one of the commenters on these posts. Many of them are people who understand. I only have one story, one perspective. There is likely another that will mean something to you.

Thank you for reading.