I am just winging it

Today I want to talk about prison advocacy, because it became a huge part of
my life, and not in some abstract political or theoretical way. I mean in a real,
daily, emotional, practical way.

The truth is, I did not come into that work at a time when my life was calm
or stable or easy. I came into it while my own life was in a very bad place.
I was dealing with divorce. I was dealing with grief and family loss. I was trying
to carry things emotionally that already felt too heavy. I was caregiving. My
father was sick, and then he died. I was trying to function while already
depleted, already stretched, already hurting.

So when I talk about prison advocacy, I am not talking about something I
picked up as a hobby from a position of strength and spare time. I am talking
about something I stepped into while my own life was on fire.
And maybe that is part of why it mattered to me so much.

Because in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, helping other
people gave me something solid to hold onto.
It gave me purpose.
It gave me structure.
It gave me somewhere to put my energy other than just sitting inside my own
pain.

And I think that is important to say plainly, because people sometimes imagine
advocacy as something you do when you are already strong, organized,
emotionally resourced, and ready to give. That was not my experience at all.
For me, advocacy happened inside my suffering, not outside it. It happened while I was tired. While I was grieving. While I was overwhelmed. While I was trying to keep myself upright. And yet, somehow, it still became one of the most meaningful things I have ever done.

What first drew me to this kind of work was the human side of it.
Not the slogans. Not public opinion. Not the simplistic good-versus-bad
narrative people like to use when they talk about prison and crime and
punishment. What drew me in was the actual reality of it.
The people.
The families.
The waiting.
The fear.
The uncertainty.
The paperwork.
The phone calls.
The lack of information.
The way basic things can become impossibly hard once someone is
incarcerated.

The way families are left trying to navigate systems that are cold, confusing,
and often completely indifferent to what they are carrying.
That was the part that got me.
The human burden of it.

And once I was in it, I found that a lot of the work was not glamorous at all. In
fact, most of it was invisible.
It was writing emails.
Following up.
Chasing information.
Trying to find answers.
Trying to get resources.
Helping people understand systems.
Explaining processes.
Contacting agencies.
Looking for options.

Supporting incarcerated people emotionally.
Supporting family members emotionally.
Helping around release-related issues.
Doing work connected to National Lifers of America.
Helping individuals incarcerated in Michigan.
Trying to move things forward where I could.
Trying to be useful where I could.
Trying to make things less confusing, less isolating, less impossible.

A lot of advocacy work is not dramatic from the outside. It is admin. It is
emotional labor. It is persistence. It is follow-up. It is translating systems into
plain language. It is remembering details. It is keeping track of things. It is
nudging. It is clarifying. It is comforting. It is trying again after someone ignores
you the first time.

And I actually enjoyed that work.
I really did.
I enjoyed helping. I enjoyed learning how things worked. I enjoyed finding
information. I enjoyed making things clearer for people. I enjoyed being able to
say, okay, let me see what I can do here. Let me find out. Let me ask. Let me
follow up. Let me try.

That mattered to me.
Being useful mattered to me.
And I think part of why it mattered so much is because when your own life feels
chaotic, being able to do something concrete for someone else can feel
grounding. It can feel like, okay, maybe not everything is falling apart. Maybe I can still do something that has value. Maybe I can still show up. Maybe I can still be effective. Maybe I can still help.

So I do not want to romanticize pain, and I do not want to romanticize
advocacy either. But I can say truthfully that during one of the hardest seasons
of my life, this work helped me

It gave me direction when I felt lost.
It gave me purpose when I felt flattened.
It gave me somewhere to put my love, my effort, my anger, my grief, and my
care.

I want to say out loud that advocacy is not always a one-way act of giving. Sometimes it also steadies the person doing it. But there is another side to this that I think people do not understand nearly enough, and that is the burden carried by the families of incarcerated people.

I really want to stay on this point for a minute, because I think it gets ignored
constantly. Families are punished too. Not officially, maybe. Not on paper. But in reality? Absolutely. Families carry emotional weight. Financial weight. Logistical weight. Administrative weight. Psychological weight.

They are the ones making calls.
They are the ones sending money.
They are the ones paying for phone calls, commissary, visits, transport,
paperwork, reentry costs, emergencies, all of it.

They are the ones trying to hold together relationships across walls, time
limits, bureaucracy, and stress. They are the ones trying to stay hopeful while also staying realistic. They are the ones absorbing fear, confusion, disappointment, and pressure over long periods of time.

And then on top of all of that, society often treats them with suspicion or contempt, as if they should somehow be ashamed for loving someone who is incarcerated.

People love to say, “Do the crime, do the time,” and act like that ends the
discussion. But it does not end the discussion, because in real life, other
people are doing time too.

Mothers are doing time.
Partners are doing time.
Children are doing time.
Sisters are doing time.
Families are doing time.

Not in cells, but in effort, in money, in stress, in fear, in lost sleep, in constant
responsibility, in years of emotional labor that no one sees and even fewer
people respect.

And then there is this attitude that families should just absorb all of it quietly.
The costs.
The emotional exhaustion.
The uncertainty.
The transport.
The phone bills.
The emergencies.
The reentry chaos.
The endless pressure to be supportive no matter what.

And they are supposed to do all of this without complaint, without anger,
without grief, and without needing support themselves. That is not realistic, and it is not humane.

Families of incarcerated people need support too.
They need information.
They need practical help.
They need emotional support.
They need recognition.

They need someone to acknowledge that loving someone through
incarceration and reentry is hard work. Sometimes heartbreaking work.
Sometimes isolating work.

And if you have never seen it up close, I do not think you fully understand how
much falls on families, especially women. Women do so much of this labor.
The emotional labor, the practical labor, the behind-the-scenes labor, the
remembering, the checking in, the organizing, the paying, the soothing, the
hoping, the fixing.

And so much of it is taken for granted. So much of it is invisible.
So much of it is treated as if it is just what they should do, and not just by society.

That is one of the biggest things prison advocacy showed me, not just the
needs of incarcerated people, but the enormous, often unrecognized labor of
the people who love them.

And then there is reentry. This is where I think people become even more dishonest. Because there is this fantasy people have that release is the happy ending. That once someone gets out, the story resolves. That freedom itself fixes
things. That release is the finish line.

It is not.
In many ways, it is the beginning of a harder chapter.
Because reentry is hard.
It is hard on the person coming home.
It is hard on the people waiting for them.
It is hard emotionally, practically, financially, relationally.
There is pressure. There is expectation. There is adjustment. There is
confusion. There is hope mixed with fear. There is relief mixed with reality.

And I do want to say this clearly. People coming out need patience. They need
support. They need resources. They need understanding. They need room to
adjust. Prison does damage. Systems fail people. Reentry support is often
inadequate. The transition is real, and it is not simple.

All of that is true.

But this is the part I care about just as much now, maybe more than I used to:
Understanding why somebody is struggling does not mean you must tolerate
whatever they do with that struggle.

That is the distinction.
That is the lesson.
That is the line.

I think two things can be true at once. Reentry is genuinely hard, and the
people supporting someone through reentry are still human beings, not
punching bags.

They are not there to absorb every lie, every excuse, every act of selfishness,
every bit of instability, every emotional mess, and call it compassion.
They are not there to abandon themselves in the name of being understanding.
They are not there to turn bad behavior into something noble just because the
person has suffered.

A hard past explains a lot.It does not excuse everything.

And one of the hardest lessons for me personally was learning that helping
someone, even fighting hard for someone, does not guarantee they will know
how to handle that help with honesty, gratitude, maturity, or care.

It does not guarantee character.
It does not guarantee accountability.
It does not guarantee reciprocity.

It does not guarantee that because you saw someone’s humanity clearly, they
will treat yours with the same respect.

That is a hard truth.
A very hard truth.

Because when you advocate for someone, especially over time, especially in a
deep and personal way, you can end up investing not just effort but hope.
You believe in what is possible.
You believe in change.
You believe in relief.
You believe that getting someone through the gate matters.
And it does matter. I still believe that.

But one thing I learned is that helping someone get free and being safe with
them afterward are not the same thing.

Getting out is not the same as healing.
Being supported is not the same as being responsible.
Having been failed does not mean you get to fail other people without
consequence.

And compassion is not the same thing as making yourself available for endless
chaos. That does not make me anti-reentry.
It makes me honest about reentry.
Because I do believe in reentry. Deeply.

I believe people need real support coming home.
I believe they need better systems.
I believe they need more honesty from society about what reintegration
actually takes.
I believe families need more support too, not less.

But I also believe families and loved ones need permission to have boundaries. Permission to say: I understand this is hard, and I still will not accept being
treated badly.
Permission to say: I can care about your pain without letting it run my life.
Permission to say: support is not a blank check for chaos.
Permission to say: I can be compassionate without disappearing.

And that, for me, is one of the deepest things this whole experience taught me.
Before all of this, I think I already knew how to care. I already knew how to show
up. I already knew how to be loyal. I already knew how to fight for people.

But what this work taught me was the difference between compassion and self erasure.

It taught me that boundaries are not cruelty.
That truth is not betrayal.
That saying no is not abandonment.
That being understanding does not mean being endlessly available to
dysfunction.

That you can hold empathy in one hand and standards in the other.
And that maybe real compassion actually requires that. Because otherwise, what happens is the person doing the helping disappears.

And I do not think that is the goal of advocacy. I do not think the goal is to lose
yourself. I think the goal is to help where you can, tell the truth where you must, and stay human while doing it.

So when I look back on my prison advocacy work, I do not look back on it with
regret. Not at all. I look back on it as something that mattered deeply to me.
Something that helped me survive my own bad time. Something that gave me structure and purpose when I badly needed both. Something that showed me the extraordinary labor families carry. Something that taught me practical skills, emotional lessons, and harder truths.

Something that made me more compassionate.
And also less naive.
And I think both of those things matter.

Because I still believe incarcerated people are human beings.
I still believe families deserve far more support than they get.
I still believe reentry needs more resources, more realism, more patience, and
more honesty.
I still believe advocacy matters.
I still believe helping matters.
I still believe seeing people fully matters.

But I also believe this now with a clarity I did not have before:
Compassion without boundaries can break you.
And telling the truth about that does not make me less committed to the work.

It makes me more honest about what the work actually is.
It is meaningful.
It is necessary.
It is human.
It is exhausting.
It is invisible.
It is sometimes beautiful.
It is sometimes heartbreaking.

It can save other people in certain ways.
And sometimes, quietly, unexpectedly, it can save parts of you too.
But it also teaches you that support should never require self-abandonment.
That love is not the same thing as limitless tolerance.
That advocacy is not the same thing as sacrificing your own well-being for
somebody else’s lack of accountability.
And that helping people and having standards are not opposites.
They belong together.

So that is what I wanted to say.
That prison advocacy mattered to me.
That it helped me during one of the worst periods of my life.
That it showed me the depth of what families carry.
That it made me respect even more the people on the outside doing unpaid,
unseen, relentless labor for the people they love.

And that it taught me one of the hardest but most valuable lessons I have
learned:
You can care deeply.
You can fight hard.
You can show up fully.
And you can still say, enough.
You can still have boundaries.
You can still refuse to disappear.
And in my opinion, that does not make your compassion smaller.
It makes it wiser.