Growing up was different for me than most. I had experienced death early on as a child. Not once, but twice, and in between the two tragedies, the divorce of my parents. All of this happened before I was even a teenager.
During my teens, I turned to drugs and hung out in and near some bad neighborhoods. All the while I stayed inside myself. Those close to me would say that the events of my childhood had caused me to mature faster than my age group. In part I believe this to be true, but I also know that I isolated my own personality from the world, which caused nobody to see the real me. This had caused me to be discontent with controversy of any degree, and I would avoid it at any cost just to keep myself from emotional outbursts that ultimately would reveal my character. My pain. The hurt inside. To everyone I just came off as shy.
I stayed this way well into my early 20s, when I was sent away to prison for the first time in my life. Alone and scared. The first few years were the most challenging for somebody trying to hide themselves.
You’ll usually hear phrases like “heart check,” which means somebody sooner or later would come to fight with you for the sole purpose to see if it is in your heart to fight or not. To fight or not determines your entire stay in prison. If you’ll be a target for more violence to come or not. Heart checks were a huge deal a long time ago in the underground society of a prison. From my experience, I believe that only the people who appeared as though they had to be checked were the ones who succumbed to such an ordeal.
I had only been in for a few years and already seen people go from the snotty-nosed, nerd kid bullied in school to becoming near god-like by how others treated them once they saw their heart and knew the fight was in them. I’ve also seen the opposite, the bulky football jock-like guy who nobody would dare to confront due to his massive arms and sheer will to lift the entire stack of weights on the rec yard, crumble into a tumbling swirl of depression and outcast because no matter how much weight he could lift, it was nothing compared to the weight of his own fist when that fear set in.
I fit somewhere in between the two. This gave me an advantage. Also my shy-by-nature personality made people think of me as not much of a social threat.
In prison, I managed to avoid controversy for those first several years. Then the inevitable came. At this point in my life, no one knew I was a female. They all saw a young man. And I had to protect the inner me. One day when I sat watching TV, waiting for lunch to be called out, this guy named Benny came and sat near me. Benny knew a lot of the gang-affiliated inmates and had done a great portion of tattoo work on many of them. They liked him. Something stirred in Benny’s head, and he reacted on it by looking at me and saying, “When we get back from chow, we’re going to fight over this bench.”
Expressionless, I looked at him and nodded while looking back to the TV and monitoring my every breath in a tight, controlled fashion as to not give way to the tremendous fear that just set inside me. A few moments later, after a great deal of contemplation, I got up and began to walk towards the restroom. Along the way, the thought consumed me to never show my fear. At that point I saw Benny’s closest friend passing near him. I momentarily paused and whispered in his ear a display of my own courage: “If Benny forces me to fight him over your mistake, I’m coming at you next.”
What Benny’s friend had done came to mind during my contemplation. Earlier that day, he had moved Benny’s stuff from a seat, which caused someone else to sit where Benny had been. If I told Benny that, I’d be a snitch. However, giving his friend an ultimatum was my only dignified way out. If nothing else, I’d have to fight both of them. No matter how much fear consumed me, I knew this moment would set the path for the next seven years of my life in prison.
Go big or go home, and going home wasn’t an option. As I approached the sitting area after lunch, I could hear Benny’s friend talking to Benny and quite a large group of other inmates, other friends of Benny. The guy I’d whispered in his ear was saying, “He said he is going to fight all of us.” Just that simple, blown out of proportion.
Benny saw me out of the corner of his eye as his friend finished. Benny clenched his jaw while standing up, he slammed his palms on the back rest of the bench in front of him as hard as possible, causing the entire living area to become as silent as a nursing home. He got the residents’ attention. “WHO THE F#@$ DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO!”
In my head, the only thought was one single word: calm. People fear calm more than anything else during moments like this. It is a symbol that you’ve been through worse. But I hadn’t. I reached in a mesh bag I had with me and grabbed an extra pair of socks. A prison tactic to wrap your fists so you don’t scar them. I calmly began to wrap my fist and looked dead in his eyes as over 80 other inmates watched, and I said in a normal tone, “You wanna go? Come on.”
Then I walked over to an area concealed to the visuals of the laws. Benny followed, and as I reached the spot, my hands were fully wrapped, and towering over me was this massive, near-six-foot-tall guy, three times my size. As I put my hands where my brother had taught me when I was 11, Benny’s heart began to show. I had called his bluff. I read his cards. The gamble was now in my favor.
Benny folded and walked off, saying, “I’m not fighting over a stupid bench.”
And it was over. My entire life was on the verge of changing. From that moment on, my prison stay would never be the same. I earned respect and never had to fight. The point of this story is that your character can be sharper than any two-edged sword, so long as you never allow fear of any kind to make your decisions. I am always scared.
