by Larry Johnson, San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, CA
As I think about three words that best describe me I first had to think about three words that I was not in the past. The words I list will not be in any order because for me they are all as important in my life and all now help me through my life.
The first word I will use is “resilient.” This words means capable of withstanding adversity as marked by resilience. Also tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
Looking over my past life I had or was not resilient at all could not recover from any misfortune or change. If something bad took place in my life I felt that my life was all bad. My thinking turned negative every and any time something I thought was happened to me. This lack of being resilient caused me to think if, I could not overcome what was going on in my life, that I had no worth or that I did not matter.
However, after my rehabilitation, I started to dig deep and look into my own issues, I started to understand that everything in my life was not always going to go the way I wanted. I was not always going to feel good about things in my life and that was okay. The lack of being resilient and some other things gave me all I needed to justify my actions, which I have now been in prison for over 20 years.
The fact that I am now very resilient, that I now see things in life as growing that I now understand that life will always have something for me that I will not want and that is okay. Being resilient has allowed me to face rejection from the board of parole. It has allowed me to face rejection from the governor but it has also given me space to grow.
The second word I will talk about is “Honest.” Being honest is something that I have never been looking back over my life. In my past life I was never honest. I lied to so many people. In my past, I lied about who I was and how life affected me. I would tell people I was okay when really I was being crushed inside.
I would act like I was so happy. I would smile, make others smile, tell jokes and just play this big role of someone who had it all together, while the whole time my life was all over the place. There was nothing going right in my life, but I lied and made people think it was.
For me one real big problem with not being honest was all the negative things I held inside of me. I started to give that stuff to others which caused so much hurt and pain to others. Being dishonest to myself lead me to destroy so many people and families even my own.
Thank the Lord Jesus that I now believe and know that being honest is a part of my life now and it helps me not only treat others right but treat myself right. Being able to look at myself and love who and what I now see is amazing. My eyes being open to what life look like in the positive is also amazing.
I am not going to tell you that just being honest is so easy at first, because it was not for me, but being honest allows you to understand it is now about what others think about you or how others look at you. It is about how you think and look about and at yourself.
The third word I will speak about is “open.” Being closed is to be alone and for me being alone was so hard, even the thought of being alone was crushing for me. But alone is what I brought on myself because I was not open to allow others into my life or into what I was feeling.
Not being open shuts everyone out leaving me alone to deal with issues I did not understand and that caused me so much pain inside that all I did was make other people share the pain that I was too closed off to talk about or look at.
Now for me being open is freedom. It gives me a chance to see myself for who I am and allows others the same. Being open allows space for others to help me walk through any problems in my life, being open means not being alone, being open means real freedom you no longer care about what others think and you can start to become the person you were meant to be.