Joe Loya

And I'm like, I'm going to be Nate.

Well, I'm like, I might as well be like melting my armor because that's what I need.

And the armor is what I need to survive in here.

So it was scary.

Like it was super scary.

And then of course, you know, there's all the grief that comes up that I'd shut down and the conscience.

I had a conscience now that was a baby conscience and I was so distraught.

to think about all the harm that I had caused, I opened up a little bit of my conscience and everything was waiting and just all the bad that I'd kind of pushed away.

And there was a lot of bad and a lot of regret.

It was a lot of shame.

So it was heavy on me.

It was super heavy.

I wasn't sure how I was going to cope with it.

So the writing was super helpful that way.

Yeah, you know, there's this interesting thing where I was raised Protestant, Christian, evangelical.

You know, they always tell you you got to forgive people.

I also got this little Buddhist tract in solitary, and I started doing this correspondence course with sort of Eastern ways of looking at the world.

And what was interesting about that was that I had been forgiving my dad for years, and it never took.

In fact, when I came out of prison, there's a lot of people who've been forgiving their dads, and it doesn't stay.

It's hard to do that.