This essay is part of How to Live With Regret, a series exploring the nature of regret and the role it plays in all our lives. Read more about this project here.
I was 11 years old the first time I picked up a gun. I should have been playing Nintendo or riding my bike with friends, but instead I was in front of a mirror, posing with the nine-millimeter Glock pistol I had just stolen from a neighbor’s house. My mom was at work and I was home alone, skipping school for the second time that week.
The thick pistol was heavy in my little hand. I shifted the gun into different positions, trying to see which looked most intimidating. I knew it was loaded because the first thing I did when I got it was release the magazine. I was just a kid, but I knew how. I had seen other kids do it countless times.
It was 1992, and my neighborhood in Tacoma, Wash. — an area called Hilltop — was held captive by the crack cocaine epidemic: overpoliced, consumed by poverty and tormented by notoriously violent street gangs. Shootings were common, something kids like me saw all the time. In Hilltop, you could lose your life over a pair of Jordans. If someone wanted your shoes, you had better be able to keep them on your feet. If you let someone take something once, you were a target forever.
In my early years my home was an abusive one, and by the age of 11, I had been mugged, sexually assaulted and jumped by other kids while walking home from school. I was tired of feeling weak and unsafe. I was tired of being a kid. And looking at my reflection holding the gun, I finally saw myself as a man.
At the time, I thought that gun was the solution to all my problems. But little did I know that my choice to pick it up was the first step in a long journey that would lead me to commit many acts of violence against my own community. It would lead to a night at a bar when I would lie bleeding from a gunshot wound. It would lead me to take a young man’s life. And, eventually, it would lead me to prison, where I am serving a 45-year sentence for robbery and murder.
Picking up that gun is the single biggest regret of my life — one that I will have to live with forever — but years passed before I was able to truly understand the gravity of my actions.
Regret requires perspective. It requires space for reflection. It requires the ability to imagine a future and picture different possible paths your life might have taken. And at the time, I was not capable of this kind of perspective. I had lived my entire life in survival mode. Nothing existed aside from the threat immediately in front of me. I had no chance to process what was happening around me. That kind of life allowed me to make excuses for all of my actions.
As a kid and then a teenager with a gun, I was convinced that I was never going to go to college or hold a good job, and no other path to success seemed open to me. I was poor and hungry and burdened by a childhood filled with trauma.
I wasn’t able to experience regret until I detached from a lifestyle in which I was fighting to survive. Only then could I take a step back and see the damage I had caused so many people in the name of what I believed was my own survival.
I went to prison in 2003 and was more than a decade into my sentence before I began to process the trauma I’d been carrying since my childhood. It’s surprising, in a way, that this processing happened in prison. The word rehabilitation is thrown around a lot in the criminal justice system, but the truth is that prisons are just about the last place anyone should expect to become a better person. Prisons allow hate and violence to fester and intensify. Far from being places where you can reflect on your actions, they can send prisoners like me right back into survival mode.
I didn’t start to reflect on my life because I was in prison, but rather despite being in prison. It began when I encountered volunteers from a group that is now an organization called Collective Justice.
The program offered a respite from prison life. I was able to turn a corner and recognize the damage that I had inflicted on my community because the program was designed to help me and my fellow prisoners address the experiences we’d pushed deep down. Most important, the people working with us had experienced similar traumas and cared deeply about us. They could empathize with what we were going through, and they took the time to build relationships with us.
We sat in tight circles and, as we began to trust one another, we shared things many of us had never said aloud. We talked about being abused — sexually, physically and emotionally — by the very people who were meant to protect us, and the impact that had on our lives. We talked about using violence to protect ourselves and the shame we felt because of it.
I didn’t even realize the effect the group was having on me until I caught myself talking to my goddaughter, who was a teenager at the time, about rape culture. She described her demeaning experiences with boys, and their behavior didn’t sound much different from my own at that age.
Not long after my conversation with her, I was threatened by another prisoner. In the past, I would have responded with violence but this time, I used my words to de-escalate the situation. It was in these moments that I realized who I had been and how far I had come.
And it was at this time that the regret I had suppressed began to surface. It had always been there — I’d just cordoned it off and built walls around it. But I took a human life. He didn’t deserve to die. He was young like me and he was just trying to survive. A lifetime of poor choices that started with the first time I held a gun ended that. My actions took everything away from him and devastated so many others who loved him. Today, there is not a day that goes by that I do not think about the boy I killed.
Feeling regret, and learning how to really sit with it, changed my life. Regret has pushed me to rethink how I live. It has fueled me when I’m burned out. It’s why my work ethic is so strong. My regret reminds me that I owe a debt to society. I repay this debt through mentoring my fellow prisoners. I teach them that violence cannot be a lasting solution to their problems and encourage them to live a life where they give more than they take.
In prison, I am surrounded by men who are living with regret. And that regret is an incarceration every bit as real as the towering walls and razor-wire fences around us.
We should look at regret, and let it be our teacher. But some of the people who most need its lessons are the ones least able to find the time and space to absorb them.
The regret I feel will never subside; it is a part of me now. But what I choose to make of it is up to me. It’s what pushes me to continue fighting to be a better person and to help others be better people, too.
I regret the day I was a little boy who foolishly thought I needed a gun to protect myself. But I am not that boy anymore and when I look at myself in the mirror today, it is with a deeper and more complicated sense of who I am. It may seem odd to say that I’m grateful for regret, but I am. I owe my growth wholly to my ability to feel regret for the things I’ve done. And I hope that, through the work I do now, I can help those around me experience its life-altering power.
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