Throughout a lifetime of bad decisions I had the ability to convince myself that I was doing the right thing. All the while I was ignoring my instinct – the limbic brain that gives you that uneasy, far off warning bell. The limbic brain kicks in when the four answers pop up on ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ – you can’t quite explain why it is that one answer appeals to you. All too often we start to employ our cognitive skills and examine all of the answers, invariably talking ourselves out of the right answer. The lesson in life is to listen to the instincts that we all possess.
But that’s not easy. When I was a kid I was always warned not to talk to strangers. I had no bother with that, strangers were the big idiots that couldn’t help but pinch my cheeks and condescend to me because I was getting SO big. But when I was brought to Santa’s grotto the big red fellah stank of booze and proper put the shits up me. I started kicking and screaming, my limbic brain telling me to leg it – but my parents taught me another lesson, “Run away from strangers UNLESS they are dressed in a red costume with a fake beard – those guys are OK.” The more I learned to ignore my limbic brain, the easier it became to do it – I missed so many warning bells as a result.
In relationships there are compromises, but when those compromises made me uneasy, instead of listening to the warning bells I supressed them. My logic was easy – ‘That’s what you’re meant to do in relationships. You put the other person first!” I kept bottling things up, with each little, insignificant warning adding a decibel to the volume of the alarm. But instead of recognising the impending danger I kept hitting ‘snooze’. It will go away, won’t it?
It never went away. At some point I would have a tantrum, a meltdown or explosion as all of the shit I built up was released. I bumbled my way into murdering somebody because I didn’t trust my instincts, when the tiniest of interventions could have led to a profoundly different outcome.
Since coming to prison I have started to heed the little warnings of my limbic brain when I make decisions. If I find that I am searching for sketchy and evasive reasons support a particular course of action, or if I am pre-rehearsing excuses in case it doesn’t work out then I really ought to stop what I am thinking about. This blog is perhaps one of the best examples.
In early 2018 my pal suggested I start writing about prison and my experience and that he would publish them as a blog. I thought about it for a while and figured it would be a good idea. It might be a bit cathartic on one hand, and perhaps one day, if I achieved parole, it would be a good diary for me to reflect upon to guard against complacency.
Then I started to wonder if it might cause trouble with the prison – was it a breach of the rules? I knew that lads had been nicked for maintaining social media from prison, so I started to study the prison rule books. There were certain things that were forbidden (detailed in the terms and conditions on the ‘Home Page’), but I reasoned that I could do I without getting into any trouble.
But as I started writing the first blogs in prison I started to feel a bit uneasy (limbic brain!). I rehearsed scenarios where my offender supervisor summoned me to her office to explain what I was doing. I tried to predict the questions she might ask. Then it came to me as clear as a bell. I had to tell her in advance of my publishing anything.
If I was confident that I was doing nothing wrong, then I could have no qualms about notifying her of my intentions and providing details of the T’s & C’s I would be employing. I also reasoned that if I wasn’t willing to notify her in advance then publishing my blog would be the wrong thing, and as the saying goes, “There is no right way to do the wrong thing.”
So I notified my Offender Supervisor, who notified the Offender Management Governor, who notified the No 1 Governor, who notified the Ministry of Justice Press Office and word came back down the chain (6 months later) that I would not face sanction for my blog as long as I stuck to the terms and conditions I had laid out.
So three years later my conscience is clear, the alarm bells are quieted and in order to avoid sanction I can’t tell you anything about Shergar, Lord Lucan and John F Kennedy….
