Yes, this is real. Yes, I earned it. And No, it is not something you find at the bottom of a cereal box.
It's what you get when you are a criminal and the unpleasant truth of my life is that at one point, I was indeed a criminal.
It's a fact I am far from proud of. in all honesty, it is the great shame of my life that I have never come to terms with on any level.
When I was a kid, I developed a talent for thievery. Even in elementary school, I would steal candy from the local convenient store and over time, it escalated to toys that I couldn't get through normal means.
After high school, when my father lost our apartment and said in no uncertain terms that I was on my own, my desperation to have the means to get by led me to begin stealing money. Turned out I wasn't as good at it as I thought, because I soon got caught at work.
The feelings that went through my mind when that happened are hard to describe outside of sheer terror. I don't think there's a single person who ever makes the conscious choice to do something illegal who believes they can or will be sloppy enough to get caught. Otherwise, why convince yourself to do it in the first place?
Sitting in the security room and having to talk with a policeman who had to decide whether to take me into custody or not, the ONLY thing that saved me was that I was honest. That not only did I own up to what I'd done but that I'd done so because I didn't have a permanent home and that was my motivation. I didn't waste the money on the proverbial hookers and beer.
For whatever reason, they decided it was enough to let me remain a free man, but I was charged anyway. I barely remember what the next few hours consisted of other than I took the bus back to the house I was staying at, and I had to explain to my brother Patrick and his family what I had done.
I do remember breaking down and crying, though. I cried for what felt like hours not because I'd been caught, but because I was so angry with myself for somehow justifying such a choice instead of manning up and just asking for help. I got it in my ten-cent head that it was a better decision to be dishonest than show weakness, which being all of 18 at the time was far from a surprise, to be honest.
Through whatever serendipity I managed to retain at that time, I never spent a day in jail and it never went on my record. The money I'd taken was repaid, thanks in no small part to the people who did help once I asked, and I made the promise to myself that I'd never do anything so undeniably stupid again.
Were that the end of the story, I think I could live with that. But it's not, because no sooner than I was able to start getting clear from that point in my life that an even older and much greater wrong came back to haunt me.
I wish I could say what it was, but the truth is I can't. There are a few people close to me who know and that is only because I trust them not to betray my confidence. The bottom line, however, is this. When I was 13, I did something which has never gone away and I regret in ways that no one can possibly begin to understand.
In just over five months, I went from still being a regular 19-year-old kid who was trying to get his life back on track, to losing my humanity altogether. Instead of having just a name, I had a number as well.
I became 11580049. Most people grow up having to remember just a phone and/or Social Security number. I remember that number because for over a year, I had to say it every time I needed to identify myself to get around the three prisons I was housed in.
When I was finally able to go home, I had a very simple and direct focus. I would start running away from those moments and those terrible mistakes and never look back. The distance I would put between that span of time and the person I was would keep getting wider and wider and maybe, at the end of my life, I'd be able to make some semblance of peace with the terrible things I've done.
Over the years, I've had people say that they empathize or sympathize on some level, but the truth is unless you've gone through the same thing, there is no way for anyone to come close to understanding what it's truly like to have that level of pure, unabashed shame for who you were and what you were capable of when you made the wrong decisions.
Had those things never happened, had I been smarter or better and not done them, I would be an entirely different person. Like my brother Matthew said to me today, my life's difficulty gauge went from "Normal" to "Hard" as a result of that, making it much more difficult for me to feel safe in bringing people into it and getting involved in their lives. To me, I have to be as careful as possible to not let that difficulty bleed into those other lives.
Make no mistake, I've never blamed anyone but myself for what I've done, and I have also done my best to accept and live with the consequences of those actions. All the things I've tried to do since then have happened in the hope that I can convince the world that I am capable of so many more things and that I can't be defined as a "criminal". But I also have never stopped struggling with it, either, living every day with the stern conviction that a single mistake in any form sets me back to square one.
I keep this card to remind me of where I started running from. What I once was and what I never, ever want to be again. I never set out in my life with the intention to hurt anyone or do anything like steal money, but I did and I will feel the shame of that until I die. It's a heavy enough weight I carry for one lifetime.
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