My jail cell from June, 1999. This warrior's mission began. – Jeff Emmerson Photo courtesy of the Waterloo Regional Police Service (I'm very grateful for their cooperation).
My world was literally turned up-side down as I sat in one of the very holding cells as the one in the photo above. Heck, that may have been my actual cell from June of 1999. The bed was steel, no mattress, no nothing. But the toilet looks distinctly similar.
I was thinking about what to write about this morning when the perfectly fitting topic rushed into my mind – after all, my memoir book is finally coming out this fall, and up here in Canada, we call this the “May two-four” weekend. You call it Memorial Day in the U.S., of course.
It would be silly of me to let the cat out of the bag regarding what landed me in this cell, suffice it to say that my actions were the cause, of course. But that’s NOT where my world fully changed. In fact, many of us have screwed up in life, whether or not we stayed in a jail cell as a result. The REAL story is what this stay (and being transported to the Waterloo Detention Centre to await my bail hearing) did to my very soul, my entire identity, and the vicious determination that these hours ignited within me. My very D.N.A. was changed, make no mistake, and I was in for the fight of my life. I kid you not.
What I’ve learned in the near 5,000 days since those events has been nothing short of life-changing, mind-altering and so very worth writing a raw, uncensored and inspirational story about. I contemplated suicide in that cell, but there were no ropes or sheets to use for my demise….Twelve years later in the summer of 2011, I had a metal cable at my disposal, and it hurt too fuc#ing much, or rather, I wanted to live just enough to be unsuccessful when the rubber met the road.
There’s a ton in between those two instances of wanting to die out of pure despair, shame and perceived weakness.
Once you stop your “9 to 5″ mindset for a moment, put on some emotional music, watch a very emotional TV show, or whatever else gets you switched back to the mindset of fragility and the fact that life is a gamble, my story will hit home, and rest assured – it will stay with you. Odds are, we aren’t so different. Who knew.
Read with caution, read with a soul wide open. Then, you’ll let me in. This is as real as it gets, folks. There’s a journey here that you don’t want to miss. Once you’ve read it, please pass it on to someone who could benefit from it.
