Nineteen

I was nineteen years old, sitting in a prison cell, writing a letter to my mom.

A few days away from turning twenty.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I wasn’t just writing to her.

I was writing from a version of myself

that I thought was already finished.

I had just come out of a situation where I lost control.

A corrections officer had cut off my phone call while I was waiting for my mom to come back on the line.

Something in me snapped.

I walked into the control room and cussed her out.

I didn’t put my hands on her—and that mattered more than I understood at the time.

That moment could have cost me years.

Instead, it cost me months.

So I sat in segregation, alone, waiting for the conduct adjustment board to decide what would happen to me next.

Waiting.

Thinking.

Replaying everything.

In that letter, I tried to explain myself.

But more than that,

I tried to define myself.

I told her who I believed I was.

A runaway.

A liar.

A thief.

Not as exaggeration.

Not as emotion.

As fact.

Because when you repeat something long enough,

it stops feeling like behavior

and starts feeling like identity.

But even in that same letter, something didn’t fully agree.

I was asking questions.

Trying to understand what it was that kept putting me in those situations.

Why I reacted the way I did.

Why I kept ending up in the same place, just in different forms.

I didn’t recognize it then.

But that was the beginning.

Not of change all at once— but of something starting to break.

What I couldn’t see at nineteen

is that I wasn’t describing who I was.

I was describing what I had done.

And I didn’t know the difference.

The part that stays with me the most isn’t the prison.

It’s a single line from that letter:

“I know it must be hard for you to try and be proud of someone like me.”

That’s what I really believed.

Not just that I had made mistakes—

but that I was someone she couldn’t be proud of.

That something in me had already settled

into something permanent.

But God never agreed with that version of me.

Not then.

Not ever.

While I was sitting in that cell, convinced I had already become something fixed,

He saw something still in motion.

Still forming.

Still unfinished.

I didn’t change overnight.

There wasn’t a moment where everything suddenly made sense.

In fact, it took years for me to break the cycle.

No single decision flipped a switch.

But over time, something shifted.

The patterns started to break.

The thinking started to change.

The identity I had accepted began to loosen its grip.

Not because I forced it.

But because it was never the truth to begin with.

And even now, decades later, I recognize something I didn’t expect.

That feeling from back then—

that space of waiting, of not fully knowing what comes next— it didn’t disappear.

It changed.

I’m not sitting in a cell anymore.

But I understand that space.

That place where:

you’re no longer who you were,

but you can’t fully see who you’re becoming yet.

Where something in you knows things are shifting,

but the full shape of it hasn’t come into view.

Back then, I thought I was waiting on a decision.

Waiting on someone else to determine what my future would look like.

What I didn’t understand

is that I was already in the early stages of becoming someone

who wouldn’t live that life again.

And now, I can say this with clarity:

I didn’t leave that nineteen-year-old behind.

I’m still walking with him.

Just differently now.

I understand why he reacted the way he did.

He didn’t know how to sit with frustration.

Didn’t know how to process being cut off, being dismissed, being powerless in a moment that mattered to him.

So he reacted.

Now, I recognize those same feelings when they show up.

But I don’t let them lead.

If I could sit across from him, I wouldn’t argue with him.

I wouldn’t try to convince him he was wrong.

I’d tell him the truth he couldn’t see yet:

You’re not describing who you are.

You’re describing who you haven’t learned to outgrow yet.

There are people right now sitting in their own version of that cell.

Maybe not behind bars.

But inside something that feels just as confining.

A past they can’t seem to separate from.

Mistakes that have turned into identity.

Patterns that feel permanent.

Telling themselves the same things I once believed.

But not everything you’ve lived

gets to define you.

Some of it was just the place

where your life hadn’t opened yet.

And that space in between—

that place where you don’t fully recognize yourself anymore,

but don’t fully understand where you’re going—

I’ve been there.

In some ways,

I still am.

Not stuck—

just still becoming.

Philippians 1:6

“He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

#ArchitectureOfGrief

Silent Sentinel

“The watchman has spoken. Let the sleeper awaken.”

Clarity is the beginning of resistance.

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