Living Today the Freedom You Imagine

The week after Christmas is a melancholy time in prison.

The feast is over. The hope of a letter wanes. What remains during this strange week of “vacation” from our prison jobs are bowl games and books. There is little reflection about the year that passed or the year to come. The only resolution is to keep doing time until your time is done.

By my fifth year inside, I knew that none of my efforts would increase my chances of parole. Still, I did “good time.” I volunteered. I served. I sponsored and mentored. These are the things you do as practice for the life you want to live outside the walls, while carefully avoiding the terrifying prospect that the free world might send you right back behind them, as it does for so many.

The only true hope I had while serving time was freedom.

I organized my life and my decisions around that goal, even when I tried to convince myself I was doing it for purer reasons. There’s no escaping it. We are born to be free, even when we sabotage our own freedom. You can feel it in your bones when you’re compromising it. Your decisions and indecisions seep into you like oily sludge, the residue of trauma settling into the marrow, weighing you down. It fills your head with stories that hover just above you, blocking the light.

Freedom is our lifelong quest. 

You can see it at two years old when a child insists, “I do it myself.”
At sixteen, when a driver’s license becomes a passport to possibility.
When we leave home.
When we leave home.
When we start our careers

We are all motivated by freedom. But we often reach for things that masquerade as it: pleasure, approval, control, escape. They promise relief, but they don’t deliver release.

Prison forced me to confront this truth: if freedom was something I could only live later, then I was already imprisoned long before the bars.

So I had to learn to be free inside a place designed to strip freedom away.

That required imagination. I had to define the life I would live in freedom before I could ever touch it.
What would my relationships feel like if they were grounded in choice, not need?
How would my work feel if I weren’t driven by fear or self-sabotage?
What would financial stability look like if it flowed from integrity rather than urgency?

Then I practiced.

I practiced freedom in how I related to people, putting their needs alongside my own, not beneath them.
I practiced freedom in my work, even rooting for my boss’ success while doing my prison job with care, even when no one was watching.
I practiced financial freedom by budgeting my commissary, delaying gratification, and learning restraint.
None of this shortened my sentence.

But it changed my days.

I learned to live each day as if I were free, not by pretending I wasn’t incarcerated, but by refusing to let my inner life be dictated by my circumstances. 

Hope wants to be free.

If what you’re chasing is not aligned with how you want to live in freedom, it will weigh you down. You’ll know it in your bones. 

So for the new year, don’t just choose goals. Choose freedom. Define what it means for your relationships, your work, your money, your time, and start living it now.

Otherwise, just keep doing time until your time is done.