One Year

May 23, 2025 was a Friday. I walked out of Monroe on a Friday because someone had decided, probably for administrative reasons that no one will ever explain to me, that Friday was the day. I have not had occasion to thank that administrator. If I ever meet them, I will offer to buy them a coffee. They will turn it down because then paperwork would need to be filed. Friday meant a weekend to figure out who I still was, before the Monday calendar reasserted itself.

Today is the first time I have written down that date and not felt my stomach drop.

The math, again

I have done the math on this year more than once. I have done the math the way I did the math in jail during my first count — by adding up the increments, the weeks, the meetings, the visits, the small humiliations, the smaller graces — and the math always comes out to “a lot.” Which is, mathematically, useless. But useful, in the only way the math has ever been useful: as proof that the days went somewhere.

A year of Community Custody is its own genre of “out.” ¹ 1 A colloquial term used to describe no longer being in total confinement. I am out, technically. I am also reachable by phone at hours that other adults are not reachable by phone, and I am occasionally asked to provide proof that I am where I said I would be. This is not a complaint. This is a description of how things work right now. The thing I learned inside — that you can be inside a system and still be a person — turns out to apply to the outside, too.

A year of Community Custody is its own genre of “out.”

The room

A year ago this week, I walked into a space for the first time. The space had coffee, and it had people, and the people did not ask me what I was in for. They asked me what I was drinking. They asked me how the week had gone. They asked me, eventually, what I was good at, and what I wanted to be good at, and what I needed help with. They were the first people in a long time to ask those questions in that order.

I have walked into that space every week since. I will keep walking into it.

The people in that space have, in the course of the year, become some of the closest people I have in my life. This is the kind of sentence I would have rolled my eyes at three years ago. I would have read it in someone else’s recovery memoir and thought: yes, sure, the soft-focus community gratitude beat, very moving, please write a real sentence. I am, now, the person writing the soft-focus community gratitude beat. The joke is on me. The joke is also, gloriously, beside the point.

The list

There is a list I keep, mostly in my head, of people I owe.

My father and step-mom, who called with me every day throughout my entire sentence. Just having someone to call, when many others do not, is enough.

My best friends, Jerrett and Anna, who wrote letters, video visited, in-person visited, and called with me throughout my entire sentence. They let me feel the friendship remained two-way for them, in whatever small ways the visit-and-letter format allowed.

The therapists and program facilitators who taught me how to recognize a thought, how to sit with a feeling, and how to do the small unglamorous work of being a person who is trying.

The friends who picked up the phone for the calls that cost them or their families money. The friends who wrote back to the letters. The friends who, after release day, did not ask me how it had been but asked me what I wanted to eat.

The space. The people in that space.

The list is incomplete. The list is always going to be incomplete. The list is the right size of incomplete: large enough that I am unlikely to ever finish thanking everyone, small enough that I can hold the names in my head while I drink a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning.

The anniversary

I am not going to mark this date by doing anything large. I am going to mark this date by doing the same things I have been doing for a year. I will go to that space. I will drink my coffee. I will return the phone calls and texts. I will, in the small ways available to a person on Community Custody on a weekday in late May, try to be the best version of myself that the day permits.

Which is, I have learned, mostly what becoming the best version of yourself looks like. Small days. Repeated. With the same people, in the same space, doing the same small things, on the kind of schedule that — a year ago, two years ago, five years ago — I would have found unbearable.

Today I find it the opposite. Today I find it the answer.

To everyone who has been in that space — all spaces — with me this year: thank you. I am, against significant earlier evidence, going to keep showing up.