on purpose!!! love people on purpose!!! find someone wonderful and love them and tell them it wasn’t an accident, you had a choice, you saw who they were and realized how lovely it would be to love them, and it is!!! i made a good decision! i love you on purpose!!!
I don’t even know if I have the capacity for normal emotions or not because I haven’t cried for a long time. You just stifle them for so long that maybe you lose them, partially at least. I don’t know.
Everyone laughed when Piper Chapman emerged from the shower during the first season of Orange Is the New Black with bootleg shoes made of maxi pads – and inmates do sometimes waste precious resources like sanitary products with off-label uses. At York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut, where I spent more than six years, I used the tampons as scouring pads – certainly not as sponges, because prison tampons are essentially waterproof– when I needed to clean a stubborn mess in my cell.
That should not lead anyone to think that sanitary products are easy to come by in jail. At York, each cell, which houses two female inmates, receives five pads per week to split. I’m not sure what they expect us to do with the fifth but this comes out to 10 total for each woman, allowing for only one change a day in an average five-day monthly cycle. The lack of sanitary supplies is so bad in women’s prisons that I have seen pads fly right out of an inmate’s pants: prison maxi pads don’t have wings and they have only average adhesive so, when a woman wears the same pad for several days because she can’t find a fresh one, that pad often fails to stick to her underwear and the pad falls out. It’s disgusting but it’s true.
The only reason I dodged having a maxi pad slither off my leg is that I layered and quilted together about six at a time so I could wear a homemade diaper that was too big to slide down my pants. I had enough supplies to do so because I bought my pads from the commissary. However, approximately 80% of inmates are indigent and cannot afford to pay the $2.63 the maxi pads cost per package of 24, as most earn 75 cents a day and need to buy other necessities like toothpaste ($1.50, or two days’ pay) and deodorant ($1.93, almost three days’ pay). Sometimes I couldn’t get the pads because the commissary ran out: they kept them in short supply as it appeared I was the only one buying them.
Connecticut is not alone in being cheap with its supplies for women. Inmates in Michigan filed suit last December alleging that pads and tampons are so scarce that their civil rights have been violated. One woman bled through her uniform and was required to dress herself in her soiled jumpsuit after stripping for a search.
The reasons for keeping supplies for women in prison limited are not purely financial. Even though keeping inmates clean would seem to be in the prison’s self-interest, prisons control their wards by keeping sanitation just out of reach. Stains on clothes seep into self-esteem and serve as an indelible reminder of one’s powerlessness in prison. Asking for something you need crystallizes the power differential between inmates and guards; the officer can either meet your need or he can refuse you, and there’s little you can do to influence his choice.
When the York Correctional Institution became coed during my sentence – merging the old Gates Correctional Institution and the women’s prison – a lieutenant who spent his career at York and was unaccustomed to working with male inmates told a group of inmates that the men would rather defecate in their pants than ask him for toilet paper and get jerked around for it.
To ask a macho guard for a tampon is humiliating. But it’s more than that: it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that, ultimately, the prison controls your cleanliness, your health and your feelings of self-esteem. The request is even more difficult to make when a guard complains that his tax dollars shouldn’t have to pay for your supplies. You want to explain to him that he wouldn’t have a paycheck to shed those taxes in the first place if prison staff weren’t needed to do things like feeding inmates and handing out sanitary supplies – but you say nothing because you want that maxi pad.
The guards’ reluctance to hand out the supplies is understandable because of inmates’ off-label uses for the products. Women use the pads and tampons for a number of things besides their monthly needs: to clean their cells, to make earplugs by ripping out the stuffing, to create makeshift gel pads to insert under their blisters in uncomfortable work boots or to muffle the bang that sounds when a shaky double bed hits a cement wall whenever either of its sleepers move. The staff watches us waste a precious commodity. What they fail to acknowledge is that these alternative uses fill other unfulfilled needs for a woman to maintain her physical and mental health. If we had adequate cleaning supplies, proper noise control, band-aids for our blisters or stable beds, we would happily put the pads in our pants.
There are ways to restore dignity to America’s inmates. For example, we could remove the entire sanitary supply problem if American prisons bought the newly-released Thinx for female inmates, which are super absorbent, stain-free underwear designed by a woman’s start-up. Thinx are expensive – $200 for seven pair – but they still might be cost effective when you factor in the cost of buying disposable pads and the time and energy devoted to the pad power struggle in women’s prisons. But I doubt that corrections systems in the United States will give up the forced scarcity of menstrual products in prison.
Though many argue that prisoners cannot be pampered in jail, having access to sanitary pads is not a luxury – it is a basic human right. Just like no-one should have to beg to use the toilet, or be given toilet paper, women too must be able to retain their dignity during their menstrual cycle. Using periods to punish women simply has no place in any American prison.
by reddit user Cheeseanonioncrisps
We were never supposed to be two. There was only ever supposed to be one of us.
“I hate twins.” My mother once said to me when I was four, after seeing two identical little boys on the street. We were standing in an alleyway as she said it, I was crying because I fallen over when she bolted, still clutching my hand, and scraped my knee. She was still standing, but sort of hunched up, like it was only the fact that there wasn’t anywhere to sit that prevented her from curling up into the foetal position. Beside her, dribbling into the drain, was a puddle of the stuff she’d retched up once we were ‘safe’ in the alley.
In the dream you were talking and I was listening
but I didn’t hear a word that you said.
The sky was blue and the birds
were singing, I remember that.
There were dust motes in your eyes and I
couldn’t stop staring, searching
for the sunlight that brought them
to the surface of your irises:dry leaf curls on pond water, except
water shifts and moves and whispers
and your eyes, your eyes were still—
not as in windless day, but as in
impenetrable glass. I saw your eyes
but I didn’t really; it was less
like looking and more like standing
before a city scape andzoning in on the densest patch
of lights because there is so much
and you don’t know where else to look
and you can’t see the whole picture
so you focus on the little details,
on the firefly-glows from tiny windows
like the dust on the glazed
panes before your eyes.In the dream you were talking
and I think you said something about
me not listening, so I laughed and laughed
until my sides ached. I’m lying.
I can’t remember anything hurting.
I remember the absence of feeling instead,
the sensation of being in a hundred
different places and nowhereat once, the way my fingers felt like
loose keys from a typewriter, how the spaces
between my knuckles seemed to expand
to fill my whole body. Cobwebbed lungs
still breathing, but frozen. In the dream
I have a body but it’s not mine; I am
an intruder wearing a suit of flesh with skin
that has turned into granite.I do not feel.
I feel too much.
There is nothing.
Everything is overwhelming.In the dream we are machines.
No emotion, just flatness: programmed
thoughts, automatic speech and action
without awareness or control. They call it
a coping mechanism, and so I think of pulleys
and gears pulling me up to sit somewhere
in the top of my head and watch
through a frosted lenswhile someone else grips the controls,
moving this body through the motions
of living. Unfamiliarity in familiar
places. Friends are strangers and strangers
are blurs of colour, dabs of acrylic
against bleached watercolour. Fog
fills my mind, pressing against the glass
that separates me from the world.I bang hard on it. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Let me out! You tell me that I locked myself
in this steel-walled room. I say why
would I do that? You open your mouth
to explain but I can’t hear you over the
white noise. Buzz. You pinch my arm—
a whisper: not dreaming. Bruises that fade
to grey, cement skies, ash world.In the dream that is not a dream,
my hands turn into birds and fly
away from me. You catch them and try
to give them back, but I refuse.
They aren’t mine, I tell you even as you
push them back onto my wrists. You
ask me whose they are, then.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I onceknew someone who had these hands,
but I don’t know where they went.
