Feelings are hard to put in words. I don’t know if it’s because they’re inherently complex or layered, or maybe just because our minds (or maybe just my mind’s?) have a limited capacity to process them. 

Like most people, I spend too much time on the Internet. And when I say Internet, I mean mindlessly scrolling through social media (or maybe it can’t be that mindless if I’m thinking/writing about it now?). Yes I use the Internet for other things like almost constantly checking my email even though I can count on one hand (maybe two, but definitely not three!!) the number of times I’ve actually needed to answer an email that quickly (someone once told me I shouldn’t count on my hands in public because other people might think I’m really bad at math. It isn’t relevant, but I think about this a lot but not enough to actually stop using my fingers to count. Also, I’m decent at math).

Danielle Staub saying “pay attention, puh-leez!” – what plays in my head when I get distracted/go on a tangent like I did just now

The algorithms and AI (I know they aren’t the same but they feel somewhat related, kinda like second cousins) know what to show you based on the accounts you engage with and follow. For any of you reading this who may not know me super well, one thing I really do care about a lot is the criminal legal system/forgiveness/justice/community; I put those together because they kind of coexist as ideas in my head, even though some of them feel mutually exclusive in the real world. And when I say care a lot about, I mean a lot a lot. The background story to that is complex/complicated/kinda painful (ugh so close to an alliteration!!!) and maybe one day I’ll grow this writing space into one that can nurture that story being told. But I think once you closely witness the system, and can recognize how the pain it perpetuates is so often rooted in the absence of forgiveness and justice and true community, it becomes harder to move through the world without recognizing its impact & prevalence. 

I saw an Instagram post a couple days ago with photos from a graduation. Another thing about me: I ~*love*~ graduations!! You know how people will cry at weddings usually because they’re so happy to witness a love so beautiful? That is me at graduation ceremonies!!! And it doesn’t even have to be for someone I know! Give me a preschool graduation, a middle school one with a corny song, a high school one or even a stuffy law school one. I’m gonna be there and I’m gonna get all in my feelings. I think it’s something about a mix of the bittersweet sadness of a chapter closing, with the communal sense of joy by those bearing witness and those being witnessed. 

I double-tapped my phone screen immediately (as all non-haters do when we see a picture of people in polyester robes and weirdly shaped hats, à la Jostens). The photos showed young Black men shaking hands with what looked like their professors, hugging one another and beaming with pride. As I scrolled through the photos I noticed a few things I wouldn’t typically expect to see in the backdrop of a graduation ceremony: cinder block walls, fluorescent lights on a ceiling that looked lower than your typical auditorium, and a few news station microphones secured on top of a podium. 

The caption for the post explained that these photos were from a graduation ceremony celebrating the first cohort of students earning their associates degrees through The Yale Prison Education Initiative and The University of New Haven. Right when I read the caption, that was when my feelings became confusing. 

There was a part of me that felt these overwhelming feelings of joy and admiration for these Black men; that they had worked so hard and were able to experience this recognition and have the opportunity to have reached this milestone. Look at how happy they look! Look at how happy & proud their families and loved ones must be to see these men, whom they care for so much, reach this milestone. I don’t feel like I have the verbage to put in words the entirety of the heartwarming “good” feelings I had, but I’m hoping that maybe sets a groundwork for it?

Somehow at the exact same time I felt the flood of those “good” feelings, I felt a series of waves of not-so-good feelings and thoughts. Why did it take these men to be incarcerated for them to have real access to a formalized education? Why couldn’t we as a society make these realistically accessible earlier on, without the traumatic and restrictive parameters of being the subject of an objectively broken, cheap pipe dream system sold as some guardian of safety? 

And if someone could accomplish something like this while incarcerated, why are we even discussing the merits of giving people second chances, when they likely never even had a first chance?

The not-so-good feelings & thoughts are somehow as hard to put in words as they are to identify them. I guess they kind of are like waves. They just keep coming, and it feels like a lot of times there’s a few crashing down at once. And before I get a chance to finish those wave thoughts, there’s another three crashing down. Side note: I realized this was an analogy for something much bigger.

Overwhelming feelings aside, stories and posts like this leave me reflecting on the way Americans look at justice alongside forgiveness. Americans love to ask if someone else is worthy of forgiveness, or a second chance. 

I think part of it comes from wanting to intellectualize Someone’s real lived experiences into some kind of philosophical exercise. We reduce Someone’s reality into an abstract, facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings dialogue. I really think you can only do this if you see a person not as a Someone, but as an Other. And then we continue leaving all of this up for debate by cloaking it as a difference of political opinion. (It kind of feels like those bullfighting contests in my mind for some reason.) 

We convince ourselves that Someone’s very existence, well-being, and personhood is available, for people– so far detached from it no less– to poke and prod and dissect. I’ve spent a good portion of the last decade working and learning in settings where we’re seeing these ideas of communal support and empowerment growing, permeating this broader zeitgeist on a deeper level over time. But sometimes I wonder if these broader discussions we have for building this beautiful, just world that embraces our humanity– are we really applying them in our own lives at the magnitude we’re expecting others to be doing? 

I first wrote this in June and decided to come back to it. It didn’t feel finished. There was something about the photographs from that Instagram post and the news articles about it that sat with me. Whether we like it or not (to be honest, most of us probably don’t like it but that doesn’t make it untrue) we create, or at the very least perpetuate, these environments that undoubtedly give People Who Check Off Certain Boxes a vastly different reality than those Without Those Boxes checked. And then there’s a whole set of Other Boxes that when checked, create a reality that is somehow even more drastically different, almost always more painful and dehumanizing. But then when a person with the Other Boxes surpasses the reality in front of them, Certain Boxes want to hear about them. I think that’s when our society really decides that someone is not an Other but now a Someone you want to hear about, at least for a short period of time. You’ll have Certain Boxes unpack their microphones and cameras, wanting to use that microphone to tell you about this seemingly new Someone. Like they discovered Someone or even built Someone out of nothing. And if it’s a really good day, you might even be able to hear a little something first hand from Someone. 

I often can’t help but wonder, how vastly different the world can look for those who historically have been and currently are neglected. Because for those moments, when everyone, including Others, has that true chance to be seen as the Someone they inherently are and always have been.