Eric and I had dinner with our sweet friends Beth and Dustin last week, and Dustin shared a bit of blogging wisdom with me. Dustin has been keeping a blog…or maybe more than one…for years now. Another friend of ours had apparently complained to Dustin that the blog was only about Dustin’s opinions. Dustin’s response? That’s the point of a blog! If you don’t want to hear what the blogger wants to say, you stop reading the blog. Problem solved.

I think that’s what I need to remember as I start my little blogging adventure. It’s weird to write about yourself. It’s uncomfortable. It’s like writing a college essay or a cover letter over and over. Throughout our lives, we’re told not to talk about ourselves but rather to be good listeners. To listen to what others have to say and to encourage them to share what is on their minds. But you know what? That would make for a very boring blog.

So here goes…I’m going to [attempt to] get over my insecurity and stop wondering what y’all (or you…if it’s only Mom reading. Thanks Mom!) are thinking about me as you read. Because you know what? If you’re bored or if you hate it, you’ll just stop reading. And I’ll never know the difference.

There are several reasons why I’m nervous about this move.  I’ve never just not had a place to live in the States.  I’m the one in charge of finding a permanent place to live, buying a car, and joining the hospital (more on how that works…well…when I figure it out).  I’m the one who speaks the language, but when I speak it, it ain’t pretty.  Driving down there is ridiculous, but metro won’t get me to work.  They say everything in Panama takes three times longer than you expect it to take.  And Eric has a trip to the Czech Republic scheduled for the first week of February, so I’ll be on my own for a week.  Eek!

I know, I know…poor Julie, she’s moving to 80 degree weather in the Tropics.  I get it.  I’m also really excited.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s just coming up really soon!

My impending departure from my current job at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services is also hitting me a lot harder than I expected.  For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been a civil rights attorney here for nearly four years now, and I’ve worked on post-conviction criminal cases for a little over a year.  To be clear, my clients are all prisoners.  There’s a chance that one or two of them are innocent and wrongly convicted, but most of them are guilty.  And most of them admit that they are guilty, even the post-conviction clients.

But these are my guys.   They’ve been through hell.  I wrote a long explanation of all that they are and all that they’ve been through, what they go through each day, how hard their lives have been, how completely forgotten they are…and it was beautiful and touching and poignant and exactly what I wanted to say.  And then WordPress flopped on me and I lost my draft.  And I cried because I had poured a lot of my angst and anger and frustrations and fears and embarrassment and shame into those lost words.  I’m going to have to come back later and explain the complete guilt that I feel over abandoning these…dare I say friends? …that I have made and fought for over the past four years.  But for now, I’ll say these few things.

It is so important to me that people understand how important prisoners are as people.  They are people.  Do you get that?  When I first started reading letters from these guys, I didn’t quite get it.  The first time I went to meet a guy though – a second degree murderer at that – I got it.  Let’s call him John.  John was the most cordial and respectful man, even though he was housed in the most intensive control unit in the state.  He could not have been more courteous to me, and he even sent me a thank you note for the visit afterwards.

These guys look to me and my colleagues because, in a lot of situations, we are their last hope.  We may be the last chance they get to claim innocence and escape a sentence of life in prison for something they didn’t do.  We may be their best chance to prove that officers are continuing to beat them up even though they have severe mental disabilities that prevent them from being able to control much of their behavior, yet do not have access to proper medical care.  We may be the support that they have because their families abandoned them years ago.  So when we cannot help, it hurts like hell.  They do not take our rejection of their cases lightly.

When I have a close professional relationship with an inmate, however, and I know I am about to have to abandon him after fighting along side him for years…I can’t imagine how some of these guys take that.  They don’t cry about it.  They get angry.  They feel hurt when no one is around to see it.  They tell their next attorney they don’t trust them because that Paris woman left them and she didn’t know what she was doing.  I lose all my credibility by leaving.  Credibility that I’ve spent years building.

There’s no way to explain my leaving to my clients.  I can’t even justify it to my own social justice focused heart.

And…here come the Sarah McLachlan lyrics in my head…”Hold on, hold on to yourself.  This is gonna hurt like hell.”