My Lost Decade, Ten years in prison, a lifetime learning how to escape my own mind

My Lost Decade deals with the Reality of life behind bars as I experienced it and mental health issues like depression anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Coming to Terms with Ourselves Mental illness. Madness. Insanity. Call it whatever you want. The moment we stop denying it and finally admit something is wrong, that’s where healing begins. That moment gives us a new level of awareness. We stop running from ourselves and start facing the truth. Like many people, I spent years ignoring the warning signs. I convinced myself I was fine. Most of us do — until life forces us to stop. Sometimes it’s the death of a loved one. Sometimes it’s the breakdown of a relationship. For me, it was the day I was arrested. Thursday, May 8th, 2014. The day my entire life changed forever. Over the next ten years, inside some of America’s most notorious prisons, I was forced to confront the mental health struggles I had spent most of my life trying to avoid. I could have taken the easy route and accepted the medication prison psychiatrists handed out so freely. But from what I saw, those drugs didn’t heal people — they numbed them. They turned human beings into walking zombies, easier to control and easier to manage.