“No one needs a fresh start more than me”

Something I noticed today is that my partner, Christian, is much more open when we are one on one than when we’re with the big group. This might be just for Christian, but I feel like all of the guys overall are much more reserved when we are all together. Maybe this is because they are worried about speaking up in front of everyone, especially their friends. Whenever Professor Dolson asks for their input, their response is always “don’t matter to me.” I wonder if it really doesn’t matter to them or if they just don’t want to speak up. I wish I knew what they were thinking in their heads because I feel like 95 percent of the time they are not voicing what they really think. They don’t seem to really trust us yet, which is understandable.

There were two quotes that really stuck with me today: “There’s not a lot else to do” and “No one needs a fresh start more than me”

“There’s not a lot else to do” came up when we were talking about sports. We were curious how often they got to play basketball or work out, and this was one of the inmate’s response. It really made me think about what the guys do all day. While this isn’t exactly a deep revelation, it really made me think about how boring doing the same thing day after day must be.

“No one needs a fresh start more than me” came about after our first day of school discussions. Professor Dolson commented when we all came together at the end of the hour how she was often the “new kid at school” and how hard that was for her. One of the inmates begged to differ saying that he would love to be the new kid. “No one needs a fresh start more than me.”

Overall, I hope that in the coming weeks the inmates start to slowly open up to us more. I know that it’s hard to trust a group of people you barely know with your life story, but I would love to get just a little more insight about them and their lives. I also would like to think of a new word to use in these blog posts to replace “inmate” or “guys.” The former I don’t like because I feel like that labels them too much as bad people, which I don’t think they are, and the latter seems too general. If anyone has any words that they think work well in this situation, please let me know.