Programming

I signed up for the Thinking for a Change class for the wrong reasons. The right reasons would have been: I wanted to change. The wrong reasons were: it counted toward Good Time, it got me out of my cell three afternoons a week, and the man at the desk who was running sign-ups had a face that did not invite hesitation.

There were eight of us in the class. The facilitator was a counselor I will call Mrs. Reyes. She had been doing this for twelve years, she said. She did not look like a person who had been doing anything for twelve years. She looked like a person who had decided that morning to start something new.

The first thing she taught us was how to recognize a thought.

I had not known thoughts were the kind of thing you recognized. I had assumed they were the kind of thing you had. But Mrs. Reyes drew a circle on the board and called it a thought, and a square and called it a feeling, and an arrow from the circle to the square, and an arrow from the square to a triangle, which she called a behavior. And then she asked us to identify the thought, the feeling, and the behavior in something that had happened to us in the last week.

I identified mine. I wrote it down. I did not show it to her. I sat with the piece of paper in my lap for the rest of the class. It was the most useful piece of paper I had been handed inside, up to that point.