🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
I want to take a break from traumatic events and offer an apology. Not an “I’m sorry” apology, but an explanatory note to elucidate and/or illuminate the tragic reflections my recollections often cast. Which of the two depends on whether you wish me to be clearer or to shine a light on a gray area. You choose. I do not believe that any trauma I have ever been subjected to can be used to justify any action I have ever taken. I do not hope for justification, so I do not offer excuses. The inexcusable harm I have caused has cost others that which I can never repay.
No, my purpose here is not that. My memories do not control me now as they once did. I allowed the pain to lead to defensiveness. That was followed by aggression, which was a prelude to violence. As in all of physical nature, due to the nature of physics, consequences to my actions came through reactions. Such consequences built into resentment and metastasized into hate. Man, the poison that oozed from that tumor was terminal. I do not allow these memories to control me in this way anymore. I have found that emotions are the fuel in the vehicles that move us through life. The route in which we steer those vehicles is most definitely a conscious choice, though. These days, I pick my routes more carefully. I have a more trustworthy GPS now.
I cannot change my past. I won’t be arrogant enough to say I wouldn’t even if I could because that would lessen my responsibility for the harm I have inflicted upon others. I cannot be my own judge in that regard, for one. I also will not ignore the remorse and regret I feel by ignoring other people’s pain at my hand.
Now, instead of following those same dark roads, I let these same memories lead me to new places. I trace my pain to the trauma and it shows me my weaknesses. Instead of becoming defensive, I choose to be accepting. My acceptance leads away from aggression through a healthy assertiveness that heals more than harms. The healing doesn’t lead me to violence, nor the hate that follows. It leads to an accepting and healing love that enlightens the traumatic weakness so it can be overcome. Maybe then I can more forward.
Thus, my apology is this: I present to you my trauma to show my weaknesses and failures of my past. I also hope to show how those events shape me through my entire journey, which is not yet complete. Even though I am yet short of my destination, I have forgotten those dark roads in order to remember my more enlightened route. I do not justify, offer excuses, or defend in any way the deplorable decision I have made. I only offer you an opportunity to understand how I was able to so choose and, at times, why I did.
For a long time I allowed such memories to consume my thoughts. It’s probably not difficult to imagine why when one considers I have spent 24 years in prison. When you are in a cell with nothing to do and no one to talk to, you soon become your own worst enemy. And your own best friend. Your own entertainer. Your own entire world.
I would venture to guess it may have been somewhat more difficult to cope in my case because I have always been a thoughtful person. Thinking, in prison, is often not a good thing. It is much easier to pass such dead time in the brainless monotony of a regimented routine. Such a method allows for the abandonment of personal responsibility by allowing every decision to be made for you. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Go to yard. Go to school. Go to church. Eat lunch. Take a shower… Pass the time thoughtlessly.
Time. This is what the US penological system is built on. Politicians call it a “Department of Corrections”, but after 24 years I have seen no systematic attempt to correct any men’s beliefs, characters, or valves. There are “treatment programs” offered, but that consists of a number of groups, such as “violence prevention”, that require nothing other than sitting in a chair at a specific time for a number of hours in order to pass. This is a warehouse for flesh: A prison industrial complex where the system survives off of the incarcerated.
I don’t wish to continue that line of thought here, just give a glimpse into the hor-glass that is used to measure our lives. Time is relative in more ways than one. It is another one of those physical properties of nature that motion alters the rate of time. The faster you move, the slower time elapses. Well, in prison, we are stagnant. Frozen since we were commanded to, “Freeze! Put your hands up!” Entropic in being held in place until each of our worlds spin beyond us into universal dispersal.
Time is also relative to the situation. I have had entire lifetimes pass in a moment, while some days pass in a fraction of a moment. I received a letter from my younger sister telling me that my first love, my teenage girlfriend, had hung herself. That letter took a few seconds to read but an entire history passed in those seconds. The next few weeks were gone when I blinked.
Maybe God made the relativity of time as a sort of acknowledgment that a mere mortal like me needed some moments to take longer to allow me to process, then compress those that I can’t process to even the whole thing out.
To return to, and fine tune to a conclusion, my point in this line of thought, it is exactly such traumatic events that I want to share in hope to be understood. Not to offer justification or excuses. Not to ask for forgiveness or vindication. Only to offer an opportunity for understanding. I pray that such understanding can be reciprocal.