25. Do your current colleagues know about your background and how do they react to it? . . . Pedln

25. Yes, most of my current colleagues know about my background. I've been a part of the JCC (college) community for almost 10 years now, in varying capacities from student to my current position as coordinator of disability resources for two campuses.

I really don't know how to adequately describe the respectful support I've been blessed with throughout my years at the college. Former professors, who are now my colleagues, have truly celebrated all my successes right along with me, and I'm sure this loving support has as much (or probably more) to do with my personal development and spiritual growth as anything I've done for myself.

The common denominator of all the formerly incarcerated individuals I've ever known, who have moved forward successfully in life, has been the presence of supportive mentors (more often than not coming in the form of caring teachers).

26. Do you feel your incarceration has had an effect on their relationships with you? . . . . Pedln

26. I recall some years back, an English professor I knew from working as a student assistant in a campus writing center, and who was very vocal about her non-support of prison education, kept asking me if she could read something I wrote. She told me my own professors had told her about some of my writings, and she kept asking and asking to read something. I knew how she felt about former inmates and that she supported the ban of Pell grants for felons, so I was afraid to let her read any of my stuff, because it all related to my past in one way or another.

Well, one day I felt so angry about something she said (which I perceived as plain old meanness and ignorance) that I pulled out an essay I'd written titled, Nobody Ever Dreams About Growing Up to Become a Junkie, and I handed it to her.

She took the essay to her office to read, and after about an hour she brought it back to me, in tears, and told me that she had no idea . . . and that I had really caused her to think hard about her narrow and unfair opinions, and that she was truly sorry not only to have hurt me with her words, but to have been so disregarding of others as well.

27. How do you feel about monkeys today?

27. This'll probably sound like the doggondest thing you've ever heard, but I never disliked real monkeys, only the monkeys of my nightmares or the ones from Oz scared me.

My dad used to marvel over how I had such terrible nightmares about monkeys, and yet I always seemed to love them. At the zoo, I'd run to the monkeys first. I drew pictures of monkeys, begged for stuffed monkey toys, heck, just the other day I got down on the floor at my dad's house and had my picture taken with my head up next to a life-sized stone monkey statue/end table in my folks' family room!

And yes, I still kind of get the creeps when I see those those evil winged OZ monkeys, although of course it's all toned down a few notches from when I wrote about it for the book.

31. The need is then to address the underlying issues. Right? . . . . Bobbie

31. Yeah, not only do I believe that many answers live inside (or even underneath) those underlying issues, but I also think it's important to go back and "re-visit" those same issues from time to time. Our psyche's are so complex that as we grow and change, our perceptions grow and change too. I'm so glad to be anchored into a recovery program that (when done as is suggested) has me looking over and over again at various situations from my past.

I can tell you from experience that many of my "issues" that I once aproached with an attitude of anger and resentment (toward individuals who really did hurt me) are now the very same issues I'm approaching with an attitude of forgiveness and even remorse on my own behalf.

Just this past year I finally became able to, on several occasions, apologize for my own regretful actions that stemmed from inappropriate reactions to the hurtful and abusive behaviors of others. In other words, just because somebody treats me badly, I do not gain the inherent right to turn around and act like an abusive jerk in response, so if that's what I did, then I've been an abusive jerk, and the sentence should end there; it should not continue with a conjunction like "but" or "however." Most always the clause that follows the conjunction is a rationalization or a justification that creates a barrier to me and change.

Prior to the book publishing, I figured my ex-husband should hear about it from me. My current husband and I took him (the "Bobby" of my essay) out for dinner one night last January, and I told him about what I wrote. I also brought a list of what I was ready to claim responsibility and apologize for, and after we ate dinner and I explained about the book, I read the list off to him. It took some years for me to be able to do this without including any kind of justification for my actions, and it was really, really hard to follow through with.

I was pretty sure he would interpret what I was telling him as claiming full responsibility for most of our problems, which is exactly how he reacted. I just clenched my teeth and stuck with the script, because I wanted to and needed to be free.

Up until I decided to move forward with writing my essay for the book, I'd tried hard to "let go" of all that hard and hurtful stuff from my past in this relationship (and Wally saying I felt ambivilant about writing it out, and then going public with it, is an understatement). I'd never really succeeded, though, in taking responsibility for my own actions in the relationship. Although I'd managed to move on, thinking back upon the years of my life I'd spent with him still caused me to feel so angry, resentful, fearful, anxiety-ridden, etc.

After having that meeting with my ex, I felt so relieved -- like something in my soul that died a long time ago became revived, and it had nothing to do with him; it had to do with me reclaiming a piece of myself that I had given up to him many years ago. And thusfar (almost a year later) I still feel that same sense of peaceful resolution.

This is only one example of dozens I could give concerning how this process works. Today I'm not really afraid to look back at anything, and I'm learning that the more I'm able to practice forgiveness, the more my own sense of shame and regret lessens. Funny how that works, isn't it?

37. Nancy when you first started your draft, how did you begin it?

37. In my original draft, the first page held the entire crazy and disjointed poem that I wrote about in my essay. Wally thought the poem gave away too much at the beginning.

Much of the imagery in my essay was drawn from that one crazy and disturbing piece of poetry that I wrote the night all my repressed memories began re-presenting, as I watched the film in my college class.

Eventually, the poem/graphic collage was left out of the book, I think partially because we would have had to get permission from a company that I "borrowed" some artwork from (the flying monkeys) and then superimposed a childhood photo of myself into, along with a singed edged copy of the poem. I have several other creative/healing projects that I've saved over the years, too; for as far back as I can remember, I've used artistic expression, along with writing, to help me in my healing process.

I am beyond the brainstorming stage of a potential new project (book) that I may take a stab at co-authoring with a psychologist friend of mine who specializes in art therapy. That's about all I wish to say about it for now, but in some form, I do plan on writing more.

Seeing how my essay started out and then evolved, in subsequent drafts, was such an amazing experience for me, and it really woke up my "writer within." I hadn't written anything (other than assigned college papers) for 7 or 8 years prior to when Wally asked me if I'd be interested in doing this. Now I'm a writing fool again, but I wonder if I ever would have really written again without the prompt from Wally (???); I really doubt it!

38. Are your journal entries the same as what you wrote or have you altered them for the same of the chapter?

38. Yes, the jounal entries are for real. I juxtiposed the order some of them really appeared, and I cleaned up sentence fragments, tense, subject/verb agreements, etc., but for the most part, they are what they've always been. You should see the original copy of the angry written rant from my last night in prison -- it's pretty intense in its original form, bold and scribbled!

Responses to Questions 1 - 12!

Responses to Questions 13 - 24!

Responses to Questions 39 - 44!

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