SOLITARY SOLITUDE

Its easy to forget what i once took forgranted... Having spent 22 years in solitary isolation, locked down in a cell.The effects take different tolls on folks.
just as we are all a diverse world, such is the converse effects that this type of of sencory deprivation has on each individual. The effects vary person to person, Indeed what solitary confinement does to the human psyche is still be studied to this day.
We know it's very disabeling to the mind, deeply effecting ones memory, short term to long term memories.

Forinstance I find that I have a hard time remembering things i would not give a second thought to. It can be something so simple as a song by a rock band I have known for decades. They release a new single and i hear it- - later that day I write to tell a fellow music lover and For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the song!
Then there is my humorious side of my coping mechanism's telling sharing with people how I can misplace something in a 8 by 10 cell... Go plum crazy trying to find it! Diging through all my property for an hour...coming up blank! never finding it! drives me crazy. The next day I'll be diging for something like a document or a snack - there is that mysteriously lost item!
No it did not reappear from the void Noid! BUT the place I put it! that is the mystery of the subconscious mind at work!
When I search for something obsessively compulsively i really take notice ! its then i recognise the effects of my environment. Within the DSm manual there are many mild to extreme disorders detailed. Yet in solitary confinement i think that new forms variations arise!
Having read about seasonal effective disorder amazed me. I've experienced it- in winter gray cludy day - loose track of the time of day. it feels like vening time its only 1pm.
Within prison's across the nation diverse people of all walks of life share in comeradere - we are able to improvise, adapt and share in the most special neatest ways.
Like how we play chess in here.The chess board has numbers down one side, letters on the other. Remember your old childhood battleship game - were you call out your moves. same principle. B 7 to your E 4 - my rook takes your pawn. or sinks your battle ship....What I could do with that game in here. We would have such fun. We play scrable, diminos and card games like Magic the gathering. improvising - being creative - we make our own hand made cards. prison will not let us have the actual cards as they have values ranging in the hundreds to the tens of thousands!
Whilst you all sit at home - bord to tears, thinking about the loss of things you enjoyed every day - please take amoment to think of someone less fortunate like a child in a hospital who is isolated suffering from cancer. A person who has lost hope thats terminal, or a man who has has been outcast by society even. We are all human beings capable of compassion - all hope is Not lost. Dante had that wrong - never will I abandon hope.

In Solidarity,
Chuck Thompson