I wrote this piece on my return home from a service trip in LA with a group of high school students. The trip had focused on social justice, seeking to find hope in the many ways that individuals are trying to combat inequality and disconnection in our world. This piece details an experience at Homeboy Industries (homeboyindustries.org), a remarkable place where previously incarcerated or gang-involved individuals come to find a new community to work and contribute.
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Sitting at the table across from him, a young man by most accounts, his varied life experiences make it hard to tell how old he is. There is a hardened quality to him. His dark brown skin reveals subtle tattoos along his arms. His eyes seem weary — not that he is ready to give up, but that he has seen some shit. Maybe it is the look that occurs when a person has come back from the “fuck-it” stage to start trying to move forward again.
He tells me that much of his youth was spent running in circles. Sure “the game changed”, moving from dime store candy theft to burglary and gang-banging. But no matter how the external acts evolved, he was stuck on a track, living out the programming of his environment. Victim to his dad’s untended pain from marital failure, he was a child with emotional wounds too deep to feel. He says that it was easier to become someone else than to face what was really inside.
Yet, as I sit with him now, he can see all of that. He recognizes how his life had been on loop. He sees the time lost, he professes guilt at the example he set for his younger siblings, he wants to commit himself to growing. It is impressive. He says all the right things. With his repertoire of change talk, it would be easy to overlook the odds, to dismiss this evolution as easy. But beneath the words, beneath the confident talk, I can feel the daily struggle. The allure of the high is real — he nods knowingly when I suggest it is like “an addiction”. He can see how his habit had grown, how simple theft had lost its potency, yielding to increasingly extreme heists.
At moments, his eyes glimmer talking about the money, about the people he knows with cars so far beyond their means. He has lived this life. He knows how intoxicating it was. How it feels to be absolutely fitted — the clothes, the jewelry, the fast cash to burn. I almost worry commenting on this allure, as if my words might be the tease that sends him back into that world.
It will need to be his choice. He knows that. And this is what is so impressive. He realizes now that he must live his life — that he must become his own person.
It is this step to rise above the expected confines of one’s environment that is so miraculous. This is Homeboy. A place where love and support provide the necessary conditions to step into the pain and take steps towards authenticity.
To me, this is restorative justice — it is about allowing the space for an offender to envision who they really are, beyond the personalities formed to defend against pain and fear and chaos.
It is a privilege to have this chance to cut apart the fallen logs of life that block our onward expansion. Many never gain the space to do this work. Whether it is the frantic pace of making ends meet, the outward focus necessitated by parenthood, or the depths of pain too great to approach, rarely can we look at the boundaries of our life and figure out how to carve new paths. Instead, we are left like my new acquaintance, running around in circles, caught in our enclosure — less a clearing than a cage.
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Lastly, turning to play, my method of inquiry, I propose a few possible experiments to begin unlocking this cage:
1) Take 5-10 minutes each day to write about moments when you acted automatically — what motivated this? How else could you have acted? What would you need to remember to act differently next time?
2) Ask yourself what is something that you are currently avoiding — an emotion, a person, an activity — and develop a way to experiment with it. Maybe set a timer for 5 minutes and just try to feel that emotion for that set time. Maybe engage in conversation with a person you’ve been avoiding. Notice what comes up for you, what forces are driving your avoidance?
3) Make two lists. Label one list “Ideal self” and the other “actual self”. Begin putting down adjectives, traits, skills under their respective headings — how would you ideally be? And how do your current or actual self? Once you have created these lists, take a look at the ideal self and note who values these qualities/traits. Are these values of your family, your friend group or beliefs you have developed over time? Take each, one by one, and recall times you have demonstrated this trait, even just in the smallest way — when you think about it, do you feel a sense of joy? Or what do you feel? (Next level: take the ones that are accompanied by a feeling of joy and design an experiment for a way that you could test out being more of “that” in your life).
Happy playing! Remember, any experiment or intentional consideration begins to widen the circle. Call it exploration — how can you know what’s around you and where to go if you don’t explore?