She Escaped the Past -- While in Prison

Suzanne Lucas guides her readers through the prison epiphany of Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the murder of her college roommate. (She has since been exonerated and released.)

Lucas quotes Knox:

Image by Frankie Fouganthin, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

I didn't know what an epiphany should feel like, but it was...cold. Like a clear breeze blowing in and brushing the back of your neck, making your hairs stand up.

I knew something deep down that I hadn't known before, and I spent the next several months peering into that epiphany, trying to consider all of its implications, like watching the ripples spread out from a drop of water in a pool.

My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.

I'd thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else's life (the life of a murderer). I wasn't. I never had been.

The conviction, the sentence, the prison cell -- this was my life. There was no life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me. [bold added, italics for emphasis in original]

Lucas likens Knox's subsequent thought process to the Yes, and... improv comedy technique, whose benefits she summarizes as follows:

It's surprising how much this principle benefits you in life. It makes you look at the present and forward and not dwell on the past.

Lucas also provides an example from business of a company that could have benefited from just such a process, but failed because it could not let go of the past.

-- CAV