Building a Better Me: A Year of Growth and Renewal

2025. This year is different from the last. Maybe I see the truth due to seeing so much darkness: gangs, drugs, pain, loss, imprisonment. But now, it is as if this life is getting old and grimy. It’s painful and leads you nowhere but here — in prison, alone, out of sight, out of mind, and just left behind. Plus, so much destruction is done to yourself, and when it is all said and done, you’re left with nothing. And it hurts — it does.

So, this year, I want to keep improving myself into a better person. I want to keep educating myself, get my GED, stay healthy, and just keep on building a whole new, better person — someone who is kind, respectful, hardworking, healthy, and more social. Someone who just keeps on learning and trying to do better, leaving the old person behind.

This will be my mission every year that passes: making changes for the better, doing better, transitioning into a good man instead of a gangster. A gangster — that is my past. And the present is a new man, a good man, looking for a better way, with positivity and success in his heart…