Writing Helped Save My Job by Mark Bierman

“I’m done with all of it,” I thought aloud to our empty house in the fall of 2010.

My wife and our two girls had gone shopping, and I was on a day off from my job as a correctional officer in a maximum-security prison. A position I’d held for over a decade. The years had been filled with a daily diet of violence, personal assaults, disrespect, denigration, unfounded and underserved stigmatization inflamed by the media and Hollywood. I felt purposeless and discouraged with my profession. The “impenetrable” emotional armor that I’d foolishly thought would render me impervious, had failed, exposing the vulnerable human underneath.   Read More