Status Updates From A Minor Chorus

I want a family, is what I’m saying. But I can’t do that until I know I won’t leave them. I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through. I was abandoned. No kid understands that decision.

I lived day to day, man. If I stared thinking bigger than that I set myself up for failure. I didn’t have a future. I had a past.

What I sensed first was [the guard’s] contempt for me, an interloper, someone who cared for someone he punished. I troubled his fantasy of absolute punishment, humanized those he was paid to dehumanize. I was a sign of his guiltiness, something that made him alert to the blood on his hands.

Everything that made up the texture and mechanics of prison-total control, alienation, an atmosphere of fear, the ever-present threat of violence-existed in the world outside it…the idea of an “outside” was untrue…There were many kinds of arenas for punishment and surveillance, and we lived inside them our whole lives. The prison was where all these tactics and arenas existed in their most monstrous forms.

…A punishing government was a burden they could choose, one that would keep them from installing too much optimism in what a future could reap. From yesterday to year things changed very little, one’s threats to existence remained the same, and so liveliness coalesced as the negation of change, of difference. A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.

…Perhaps some wanted to conjure a scapegoat, something (a government) and someone (a politician) to blame when one’s individual or familial struggles to live a good life fell short, acting on a suspicion that the game was rigged against them, though a culture of antiintellectualism would prevent them from diagnosing why…

It appeared as if it were a marker of political action to endorse the cheapening of one’s quality of life, that it was normal and a generational birthright to vote on the side of structurally induced hardship…

…I was squished inside an identity others imagined for me based on fear and stereotypes. As an adult, I had to dig myself out of myself, had to make myself into a ruin from which something new could grow.

He did indeed have an air of femininity to him, though it was subtle, as mine was when I was his age. Sexuality was something other people had, a place others visited, though many thrust the label onto me all the same. This drive to identify my nonnormativity always confused me…I wasn’t thinking about whom or what I desired…