What Keeps Me Going In Here

- by Ryan

You wanna know how I get up every morning?
How I keep breathing in a place where so many men just... give up?

Her.

My wife.
My reason.
My home, even when I’ve got no walls around me.

Before her, I didn’t care if I woke up or not.
Some nights I prayed I wouldn’t.
Laying there in that dark-ass cell, wondering if anyone out there would notice if I stopped breathing.

But now?
Now it’s different.
Now I’ve got a woman who sees me. Really sees me. Not as a number, not as a criminal.
But as a man who’s still worthy of love—even when I don’t feel it for myself.

She’s the one who fights for me when I feel like folding.
She walks through hell with me barefoot and still holds my hand like I’m not covered in scars.
She is the reason I haven’t become just another ghost in here.

But it’s not just her.

It’s the hope she planted in me.
The kind of hope you can’t buy off commissary.
The kind that survives lockdowns, write-ups, lies, and abandonment.
Hope that whispers, “This ain’t the end of your story.”

It’s the writing.
These words? These are my lifeline.
They’re how I bleed without bleeding.
It’s how I scream without raising my voice.
Because when I write, I feel like someone might finally hear me—might finally understand what it’s like to be stuck between who I was and who I’m trying to become.

It’s growth.
Books. Faith. Conversations with men who are still trying, just like me.
It’s looking at the mess I came from—parents who were addicts, being shot up with meth at 13 by my own father—and deciding that I’m not ending there.
I’m not dying with their demons strapped to my back.

Because the truth is:
If you let it, prison will kill you slowly.
It don’t need a rope or a shank. It’ll take your mind.
Make you forget who you are.
Make you believe you deserve to be forgotten.

But I’ve got something to prove.
Not to the system. Not to my haters. Not even to my family who gave up on me.

I’ve got to prove it to her.
To the woman who answers every call, writes every letter, holds me up from hundreds of miles away.
To the woman who saw me at my lowest and still said, “That’s mine.”

She’s the home I’m building.
The life I’m choosing.
The reason I’m done being a repeat statistic.

I’m not doing another bid. This is my last.
Ten toes down, I mean that.

I’ve got something worth coming home to.
And more importantly, I’ve got something worth staying home for.