Lived experience | constraint | environment shaping emotion | creativity under pressure | maladaptive environments.

It all started in a prison cell, the size of which was akin to the average sarcophagus.

The metallic cage I was containered in echoed the screams of women who’s names I would never know, or who’s faces I was unlikely to see, as they detoxed their way through a sensory disturbance; their bodies purging the toxins they had come to rely on to survive. In the outside world, these women had consumed heroine, spice and crystal meth to anaesthetise the pain derived from compound trauma, abuse and neglect.

I had access to razor blades, but not sanitary products.

I could see out of a triple glazed window that opened as wide as the glass was thick - about two inches. The view was a forty foot concrete wall, decorated with rolls of razor sharp chicken wire at the top.

I slept on a wooden plinth with a plastic foam mattress that squeaked each time I moved. The sheets were both starchy and scratchy. Sleep was evasive and the court of one’s own consciousness in the hours after dark is not a pleasant place to peruse.

My own thoughts turned as dark as the solitary nights spent supine, rigid on a plinth.

Environment informs emotion; emotion influences behaviour - behaviour is who we are.

In maladaptive environments, how does one regulate?

As I thought up an intervention strategy, I initially capitalised on my creativity:

I considered staging the prison scene from Chicago as a 108-woman strong flashmob performance for the moribund male officers; but then I realised it was that exact sort of instinct - the one that says “I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t do this but let’s try it anyway” - that landed me in prison in the first place.

So instead I settled for teaching exercise to the other women, in the vain hope that it might keep them alive, and possibly pain free (physically and emotionally speaking).