A FEW YEARS into my incarceration, I came to the realisation that being so far out of your comfort zone does something positive to you.
I had to fend for myself in a place for which nothing in life can really prepare you. It taught me things about myself, the people around me, and about life that I otherwise could never have learnt.
I met, talked and lived 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over eight years with individuals I would otherwise never have met, let alone exchanged a word with because we were from vastly different worlds. To gain a new perspective on the simplest thing, something which you could not imagine anyone possibly having a different outlook on, is a very refreshing experience and I had that experience repeatedly on the inside.
While incarcerated, there were times that I felt grateful for my experience. I know it sounds unlikely, and I was very surprised myself when I first realised that sentiment.
When I had reconciled myself with the idea of doing life, I used to imagine that if God came down suddenly and gave me the option either to magically erase those years from my life and mind, or to be released having lost those years but gained that life experience, I would immediately choose the latter. So long as I could retain the lessons I had learnt, I would easily sacrifice years of my life to become a person moulded by that terrifying, tragic and bitter yet enlightening experience.
I cannot change the past, and I would not even if I could. I was meant to learn certain lessons a certain way, and have become a better person for it.
Today, whenever I face a difficult situation, or things don’t go my way, I simply ask myself, “So you think this is bad? Compared to what?”
That always lightens my heart – almost anything beats being locked up. It is a gift being able to walk into a shop and buy what you like (well, besides chewing gum in Singapore). To be able to lean out of an open window. To go for a walk if you can’t sleep.
I constantly remind myself of that because it is so easy to forget.
Years of prison cells made me realise that something about wide expanses of nature appeals to something deep inside us. The sight of trees and mountains as far as the eye can see makes us see the world, and ourselves, with more clarity; it makes us feel emotions more fully, everything from ecstatic felicity to cutting sadness, and perhaps even induces them.
I like being outside my comfort zone now – a true oxymoron, I guess. Putting yourself in a position that is unusual or contradictory to what has become normal for you is a scary but invigorating experience. I tried a number of different types of jobs, ones that took me out of that comfort zone. The memory of incredulous faces at the two construction sites in Singapore where I asked to work as a labourer still makes me laugh. They assumed I was some sort of undercover government inspector.
I spent time after my return travelling. I would pick up odd jobs just for the heck of it, to feel like a ‘normal person’ doing ‘normal things’. Usually, it would be some form of menial labour that paid peanuts and involved getting dirty. I have spent days digging holes in the ground for, literally, cents a day because even that was a fantastic dream when I was sharing a two metre by four metre cell. That work produces the best kind of sweat – the type that rolls down your forehead and stings your eyes because the cloth tied around your forehead is already soaked. My skin became darker than it was even during my army days.
Many times, as I toiled away and the calluses on my hands hurt, I would think back to the prison jobs I had held, some of which involved sitting in an office at a computer. I would wonder who was doing that job at that moment, and then look up at the open sky and smile that I was where I was, however tired and aching and dirty (and probably earning about the same) because I could walk off at any time, in any direction I pleased.
Of course, I could never really understand what it was like for those who toiled away beside me. Any assistance I could possibly need was never more than a phone call away, but for them there was no safety net – that was their life. For them, getting sick or injured meant an empty stomach, usually for more than just that person alone. I merely dabbled for weeks in what to them had been daily reality for years past, and would almost invariably remain as such as long as they were physically capable.
Perspective is certainly humbling.
It was eye-opening how some people treated me then because they assumed that I was as uneducated, needy and desperate as others beside me. Many times, I was tempted to tell them exactly what I thought, but I realised that learning not to was part of the reason I was there in the first place.
Then, and even today, my mind sometimes wanders back to jail. I look at my watch and add the requisite number of hours to get the time in Sydney. I remember the jail routine, and recall what I had been doing at that particular hour for all those years, and I wonder who is sitting in the seat I sat in, lying in the bed in which I lay, or looking out from between the bars my hands held.
There is no description of how that makes me feel; it is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just an unusual, nameless emotion.
But there is an especially peculiar feeling when I calculate that it is 3pm in Sydney. That really is the end of an inmate’s day, the start of the minimum 17 straight hours in his cell. I usually take a walk in the open air when I realise that.
Anne Rice says in Queen of the Damned:
“It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”
It is so true. I would not change those last years – they opened my eyes to so much.
I was blind; perhaps now I am less so. And that is really something.