My Story …. (Cont’d) Behind the Walls (Age 30–33)

Corrections, Trauma, and the Road to EMS

When I turned 30—actually, about a month before I officially hit 30—I stepped into a world most people will never really understand.

Corrections.

Not the version people think they know from TV. Not the dramatized version where everything has background music and somehow wraps up neatly before the credits roll. The real thing is messier than that. Louder. More unpredictable. And a hell of a lot heavier.

It’s concrete walls and steel doors. The constant jingle of keys against your leg. Radios that never seem to shut up. The smell of disinfectant that doesn’t quite cover sweat and stale air. It’s a place where tension doesn’t come and go—it just exists, sitting in the background all the time, waiting for a reason to surface.

What makes it even harder to explain is how normal it can look right before everything goes sideways.

You can stand in a dorm and watch a group of guys sitting around playing cards, talking, laughing like it’s any other day. And then something shifts—sometimes so small you almost miss it. A tone change. A movement. A look. And suddenly that normal moment is gone, replaced by chaos.

That’s one of the first things you learn in corrections.

Everything is fine… until it isn’t.

And it doesn’t take long before you start adjusting to that reality. You stop focusing on faces and start watching hands. You pay attention to body language in a way most people never have to. You learn who’s all talk and who actually means it, who’s trying to manipulate you, who’s desperate, and who’s just completely broken.

Over time, you start to realize that the most dangerous situations rarely announce themselves. They almost always begin as something ordinary.

Working in that environment changes how you see people. It strips away a lot of illusions. You don’t get the luxury of ignoring the darker parts of human behavior—you see them up close, every day. Violence, addiction, mental illness, desperation… sometimes all wrapped into one person standing in front of you asking for something as simple as a phone call.

There isn’t much room left for naïveté after that.

At the same time, though, something very different was happening outside of work.

Around that period in my life, I had started rebuilding my relationship with my mom and my younger sister. After years of distance and silence, we were slowly finding our way back to each other. There wasn’t a defining moment where everything suddenly got better. It didn’t look like some emotional scene out of a movie.

It was quieter than that.

Phone calls. Random conversations. Small check-ins that gradually turned into something more consistent. It was less about fixing the past and more about figuring out how to exist in each other’s lives again.

By that point, my sister had already had her baby.

So stepping back into their lives didn’t just mean reconnecting—it meant stepping into a version of life that had already moved forward without me. There was already a routine, already responsibilities, already a rhythm that I had to learn how to fit into.

Eventually, I moved in with my sister, and that’s when that contrast in my life became impossible to ignore.

I would spend my days in an environment where everything felt tense, controlled, and unpredictable, and then come home to a space where life was happening in a completely different way. There was a kid in the house. There were routines, responsibilities, normal moments that didn’t revolve around crisis or control.

It grounded me, whether I realized it at the time or not.

But that part of my life wasn’t as simple as I wanted it to be.

After being distant for so long, I didn’t really know how to re-enter those relationships in a healthy way. I think part of me was trying to make up for lost time, or maybe just trying to prove—to them and to myself—that I was present now, that I wasn’t going to disappear again.

So I didn’t set boundaries the way I should have.

I said yes more than I should have. I took on more responsibility than I was prepared for. I became more involved financially, stepping in where I could, helping out when things got tight, trying to be someone my family could depend on.

At first, it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like showing up.

But over time, it started to blur into something else.

The more I gave, the harder it became to recognize when I was stretching myself too thin. I didn’t know how to balance being there for my family without slowly draining myself in the process. And I didn’t talk about it—I just kept going, kept working, kept carrying more.

Looking back, that period of my life feels like two different stories happening at the same time.

On one side, there was healing—rebuilding relationships, reconnecting, becoming part of a family again.

On the other side, there was the job.

And the job was quietly stacking weight on top of everything else.

Corrections doesn’t just expose you to difficult situations—it surrounds you with them. You’re constantly dealing with people at some of the lowest points in their lives. Anger, withdrawal, psychosis, desperation, manipulation—sometimes all in the same shift.

And then there are the moments that stick with you long after they’re over.

Suicide attempts are one of those things people outside of corrections don’t really understand. They happen far more often than most people realize. When someone loses their freedom, their family, and any sense of control over their life, some of them reach a breaking point.

And when that happens, everything moves fast.

Radios go off. People start running. Medical is called. Everyone moves toward the problem without hesitation.

You fall back on your training. You do exactly what you’re supposed to do.

But those moments don’t just stay in the building when your shift ends.

They follow you home.

And over time, you start to notice changes—not just in yourself, but in the people around you. Burnout isn’t something rare in corrections. It’s almost expected. The humor gets darker. The patience gets shorter. The empathy starts to fade.

Not because people don’t care.

Because the job slowly wears them down.

There’s also a part of the job that doesn’t get talked about much—the way it can follow you outside of work.

There were times when inmates made threats, not just toward me but toward my family. Most of the time, you understand it for what it is—manipulation, an attempt to get under your skin.

But it still hits.

Because the moment someone brings your family into it, the job doesn’t feel contained anymore. You go home, but your mind doesn’t. You sit on the couch replaying conversations. You lie in bed running through worst-case scenarios. You try to relax, but part of you is still on edge.

That’s one of the hardest parts of corrections.

You don’t really get to turn it off.

And in a culture where you’re expected to handle it and keep moving, most people don’t talk about it. They just carry it.

I did the same thing.

Until my body started making it impossible to ignore.

During that time, my mental and physical health started to decline. Anxiety and depression became part of my reality, even if I didn’t fully acknowledge it at first. Then the physical symptoms followed—tachycardia, constant tension headaches, weight gain, pre-diabetes, idiopathic intracranial hypertension.

At the time, I didn’t connect any of it to the stress I was under.

I just thought something was wrong with me.

Looking back now, it’s hard not to see the connection.

Your body has a way of holding onto things long before your mind is ready to face them.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, there was another layer of stress that came with the job—investigations. Two internal and one criminal. Even when you know you didn’t do anything wrong, it doesn’t matter. It still feels like everything you’ve built could be taken away.

All three were eventually ruled unfounded.

But that kind of pressure doesn’t just disappear.

In my case, I believe I was targeted in part because of who I was—a gay man in an environment that isn’t always welcoming—and because I was outspoken as a union organizer. I wasn’t quiet, and I wasn’t willing to just go along with things.

And sometimes that comes with consequences.

But the moment that stayed with me the most had nothing to do with any of that.

It was something much more personal.

One day, as a volunteer with a support group, I found myself on scene when a deputy I knew had been killed in the line of duty. I knew him. I knew his wife. And I stood there, watching CPR being performed on someone I had actually talked to, someone who had a life outside of that moment.

There’s something about that kind of experience that’s hard to put into words. It doesn’t feel real. Part of your brain keeps waiting for someone to say there’s been a mistake.

You want to help. You want to do something.

But there’s nothing you can do.

You just stand there, feeling completely helpless, watching it happen.

That moment stayed with me in a way I couldn’t ignore.

And it forced me to finally ask myself something I had been avoiding for a long time:

How much longer can I keep doing this?

By that point, everything had started to add up—the stress from the job, the impact on my health, the pressure I was carrying at home, the weight of everything I had seen and experienced.

Corrections had hardened me in a lot of ways.

But it had also made one thing clear.

I needed something different.

That realization is what pushed me toward EMT school.

And that’s where everything began to shift again.

Because leaving corrections didn’t mean leaving trauma behind.

It just meant stepping into a different kind of it.