No One Else Drove Me Here

A confession from San Quentin on owning my crimes, losing my family, and finding true freedom

A Different Kind of Independence

Most people think prison means the end of freedom. For me, it was the beginning.

Behind San Quentin’s walls, under harsh fluorescent lights and the weight of my own crime, I was forced to unwrap every story I once used to protect myself. Stories that blamed my childhood, my marriage, my stress; anything but me.

When my young daughter sat on my knee during a prison visit and asked:

“Why Daddy?”

The Question That Undid Me

Her question sliced through everything. It demanded an answer no courtroom, no therapist, no cellblock had ever truly asked of me.

This essay, offered as our nation unfurls its flags and fires rockets into the night, is not just a confession. It is my personal Declaration of Independence from the unexamined stories that once drove me. It is the story of how I reclaimed the wheel of my life, for my children, their mother, and my own hard-won freedom.

I saw then how little my armor mattered. Inside the circle with a room of men who had taken lives, as I had, we stripped away our excuses. No declarations were drafted, no bells rung. We simply laid down our stories until each man stood with nothing left but his choices. It turned out the wheel had always been under my own hand.

Meanwhile, my ex-wife was finding her own freedom. She raised our children alone, fought through heartbreak, and built a life our marriage could not survive. I honor her independence, though it came at the cost of us.

So this Fourth of July, I mark a different kind of independence. My ex-wife stands free, no longer tethered to my failings. My children grow, learning to hold their own magic hands. And I stand here, finally emancipated but not from iron bars, but from the illusions that once bound me.

I promise them all this much: I will never again surrender the wheel of my life to unexamined pain. My hands (mind, body, work, love, and joy) are mine to strengthen, for their sake and for my own hard-won freedom.

If you know someone lost in their own fog, I hope this story becomes a lighthouse.

As Camus wrote:

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”

I offer this not as justification, but as a stable structure of thought, emotion, and ownership. May it serve as a lighthouse for others lost in their own fog, or as a clear target for those who would critique it.

This essay, offered as our nation unfurls its flags and fires its rockets into the night—a time when we celebrate independence—is not simply my confession or a reconstruction of ruin. It is also my personal Declaration of Independence, drafted within prison walls, declaring freedom from the unexamined stories that once enslaved me.

This eternal query of young children has pleased and perplexed parents from time immemorial. This particular ‘why question’ I had been preparing to answer for more than two years. Still, I was startled by my girl’s presumptuousness. As only a daughter could ask a father:

WHY DADDY?

My EX-wife was frustrated that day. In the past, I would have misread her as ANGRY, just as our daughter did now. But the source of her short temper was more one of frustration-driven disappointment. She had found her own independence in my absence. Raising our children alone, forging a resilience that would break our marriage yet preserve her spirit. I honor that hard-won freedom, though its cost was our life together.

Daughter promised to coach me on how to deal with ‘angry mom’ that she and her brother had faced alone since my incarceration. But this day, as she sat on my lap in San Quentin’s visiting room for one of our monthly visits, I realized that both my girls wanted to understand the same thing: why I used to drink.

Daughter was more in the mood to understand than to condemn.

Early on during my recovery, we discussed as a family how I was drinking and driving that night of my accident. I explained that accidents happen, but drinking and driving was WRONG. A crime I would answer for. What was left unasked was WHY I drank in the first place. Like a hidden splinter under the skin, this gap in understanding was the source of my EX-wife’s lingering pain and my daughter’s question.

“Dad drank because he had been depressed for a long time,” my EX-wife had told them after I went to prison. This explanation troubled my daughter, who feared she somehow contributed to my unraveling.

I could not let this misconception stand. Both deserved the truth.

As I gathered my thoughts, she asked again:

WHY DADDY?

I have asked myself those very same questions each and every day since the accident. If there is a grace to serving at San Quentin, it is the arrFay of groups that provide psychic tools to delve into the mind. I had taken full advantage of these opportunities. Now was time to squeeze my hard-won realizations into a shape Daughter would understand. My goal was to both assure her I had indeed been the very happy daddy she remembered and share what I had learned about myself over these past long years of prison work and seclusion.

The Magic Hand

FWhat I told Daughter was the story of THE HAND OF MAN. I presented it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, false starts and redundancies which are the timeless modulations of story-telling.

AND SO...

Daughter; While you consider yourself a human girl, you are also a HAND, THE HAND OF MAN. While a hand provides humanity with the amazing ability to make wonders in the physical realm, know daughter that I speak of a different hand. This is a magical HAND. Just like with physical hands, humans do the most amazing thing with THE HAND OF MAN.

I took her hands in mine and asked, "Did you know that each one has 106 bones? All these bones work together to make and control the sources of the hand's power, its fingers."

"I shall explain the FINGERS of THE HAND OF MAN to you this day. These are true magic and work to hold a life force, their very soul, on the path to enlightenment."

“But I’m a girl Daddy” Daughter said with a shy smile.

“Yes you are! And this Magic Hand is yours too,” I replied with all the warmth I could muster.

I had captured her complete attention that cold but sunny day in San Quentin's visiting room and planned to use this moment to show as well as tell my girl my hard won knowledge. In this magic hand, I would explain the parallel structure of a psychic state based on a physical hand.

What I told my daughter was the story of THE HAND OF MAN. It is a story about how we hold our life with five fingers. The mind that points, the body that sustains, the ring of accomplishment, the fragile pinky of love, and the opposable thumb of happiness that binds it all. I explained how my grip failed—work struggles weakened my RING FINGER, family grief bent my LITTLE FINGER, and though my THUMB tried to hold, it slipped.

So big was this failure it became a CRIME. Now I was here to learn from it.

So, the Magic Hand of Girl has:

INDEX: This is the mind. It points the way we would go. To keep this finger healthy and strong, we must learn, explore and teach. We solve mysteries with a healthy mind, just like Harry Potter and his friends.

MIDDLE: This is the body. It is the biggest finger. We need to exercise, nourish and rest it to keep it strong. Look at Mom. She exercises every day. Mom has a really strong middle finger!

I give a mischievous smile to EX-wife as I continue the story.

RING: This is creativity, work and accomplishment. You use it to do school projects and make bracelets. If you look at adults, they wear rings on this finger. That's how it was named. Adults wear such rings because they believe accomplishment should be recognized and rewarded. Look at Mom's ring finger!

LITTLE: This is true love. You may wonder why such an important finger is so small, but it makes perfect sense. It can be broken like a heart. Look at my little finger. See how it is crooked. That is because it was broken and healed - bent. Always be careful with love - protect it and keep it safe.

THUMB: This is the true secret of the HAND. It is not even a finger, but the opposable thumb is what makes everything else work. You would call it HAPPINESS as it allows you to hold onto your soul. Another word for it is VITALITY. To fully experience life, you need the thumb of VITALITY. With it you will be able to accomplish any goal and live a complete life.

My precious daughter, you have this magical HAND too. You use it every single day of your life. I know you are distressed because Daddy was depressed and drinking. You worry that my depression had something to do with our family life...

NOPE.

Nothing could be further from the truth. You see, each human uses all five fingers of this magic HAND to hold onto life and keep it on course. Daddy was having many struggles with his RING FINGER of accomplishment/work. Then when Nana was very sick and uncle had so many problems, I bent my LITTLE FINGER of love way back. Even though I was holding onto my life with my other fingers (especially my thumb of HAPPINESS), my grip was loosen and I made a BIG MISTAKE the night of my accident. So big it is called a CRIME. I am here at San Quentin to both show that I understand it is a crime and learn from my mistake.

Now, I am working very hard by attending groups and taking classes and practicing to use all FIVE FINGERS to make them strong, healthy and flexible. I promise to use them all to hold my life and keep my family.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

As with any answer to a BIG QUESTION, we played with it for a long time. Much to my wonder, Daughter realized the need to adjust one’s grip to keep hold (not to clench or clamp) in one way only. Each of us needed to assure the other that we understood the important of the magic HAND to our family's JOY.

The Circle Inside San Quentin

What I did not tell Daughter how I gained this insight through my San Quentin Schooling. I saved that story for EX-wife. As my daughter played with another child, I took Ex-wife on a walk around visiting. Where the tumult of noise from eating, playing and conversing would allow us to have a private conversation as we made our circuit. EX-wife could not ask why I had taken a life and ruined our family’s happiness. She also suffered under the misconception that she had been the cause of my doom.

“I sought out a means to understand my own recklessness. EX-wife, I learned to free past facts from their story-wrapping. Painfully, as facts are dangerous things. They can cut you no matter how deeply they are buries in the past if you’re not careful.”

She looked at me with the worry of a loved one – hoping I had not completely lost it. I grabbed her hand. “These story-wrapped facts become the proof of our successes and justifications for suffering. Once created, story seems permanent,” I said. It was important for EX-wife to understand my rehabilitation consisted of examining the facts of my crimes and their impact on victims, families (both my victim’s and my own), community, and self.

What I did not tell my daughter was how I gained this insight. That story was reserved for my EX-wife, whom I walked with later in the yard.

In the circle inside San Quentin, we did not draft declarations or ring bells. We stripped away armors that had enslaved us, sentence by sentence, until each man stood liberated by painful, unsparing truths. That circle was my Philadelphia. It was a room of men who declared independence from the lies that once bound us.

I told her how we used the circle’s power to unwrap old stories, until nothing shielded us from our own choices. My armor, I confessed, was not noble. It was cowardice in ceremonial dress; my desperate attempt to avoid pain, to believe I was more sinned against than sinning.

She did not know that in only one place was this discovery possible – in the CIRCLE.

I did not tell her how our circle was powered by death. The most potent source of power. Each member brought death to the group that formed the circle. A wife stabbed 20 times, baseball bat beatings, drunk-driver destruction, and crack and meth dreams. Even the moderator, trapped in motherhood at 15, she had been the killer of her children’s dreams just as we had all destroyed those of our victims and their families.

“EX-Wife,” I whispered, “it was only here we could un-wrap our stories. The give and take of thoughtful and detailed questioning allows a person to detect the shape of the facts that made up our life. The group invites us to unwrap and display the facts.”

“What did it take a weekend,” EX-Wife scoffed.

Wounded, I replied “This is a delicate, slow and long process. For our group, the give and take of unwrapping took more than 18 months.”

This armor is nothing noble. It is only cowardice in ceremonial dress. As Plato wrote, 'Courage is knowing what not to fear.' For too long, I feared pain more than truth. I clung to my armor because it let me believe I was more sinned against than sinning. But armor does not heal; it only hides the wound until it festers.

A circle has no corners. If the group can hold the circle (given we started with 10 and finished with four, no easy feat), power is manifested. This takes tremendous integrity, but it is worth the gathering and release of power. As power gains force in the circle, the past is awakened and the impossible becomes real.

“You sound like those AA groups on TV,” said EX-Wife who despaired I would never change; an echo of my desolation which had led me to drink.

I squeezed her hand and declared, “It’s not like they show on TV. As a group, we examine and acknowledge the life so carefully wrapped in stories. Each of us had claimed for decades that there is no need to unwrap what was inside. We used these stories to justify our choices if not the results.

Learn to open our eyes and acknowledge our life does not fit the facts we claim are inside. By guessing about the facts of our life, the group invites the individual to unwrap the PRESENT.

Work to face the actual facts. Even if the group members can discern the facts, they cannot open the story. The presenter can, safely, in the circle.”

My Ex-Wife’s Revolution

EX-Wife shied away. “Don’t tell me all that metaphysical claptrap,” she stated.

She listened, though her eyes drifted. I realized then that while I was discovering my freedom inside these walls, she had earned her own outside them. Her revolution was fought in lonely nights with crying children, her independence purchased by heartbreak. Though our marriage did not survive, I honor her resilience. Though her independence cost us our marriage, it gave her a life on her own terms. For that, I will always be grateful.

I did not budge, but held her hand and eyes and said with certainly, “with mature eyes I was able to use these facts to begin cutting through the armor worn to protect my self-image.”

This armor serves a purpose, but we have worn and admired it for so long that we can’t recognize it as separate from self. Only with true power and nowhere to hide (after all, we are in the CIRCLE) can we find the strength to use these newly unwrapped facts to cut off the armor and reveal self.

Here is transformation.

In the CIRCLE, we learned to face the consequences of our crimes because – well we did them; however, our crimes are not all we are. Those of us in the CIRCLE did not seek forgiveness or understanding per se. By differing degrees, each of us took responsibility for our crimes; however, we also acknowledged these acts were power manifest. The circle created a means to discover not only the HOW but the WHY as well.

In the circle, we did not draft declarations or ring bells. We stripped away the armors that had enslaved us, sentence by sentence, until each man stood liberated by painful, unsparing truths.

Facing the Trigger

Next, we sought to explore behind the armor of self-image and discover the source of our anger. We called it the “TRIGGER.”

Once discovered, the natural inclination is to build a wall around the trigger so as not to use it again. This is merely another wrapping and hiding with story. If you are an alcoholic, avoiding bars makes sense; but such actions do not address your underlying compulsion to drink. In the circle, we seek to dismantle the trigger.

And so, as we maintained the circle and removed our armor of self-image, the goal became searching for the trigger at the headwaters of our destructive rivers of malcontent that had empowered our tragic excesses. For those of us in the group, these excesses included horrific crimes. Though not one of us denied these crimes or their consequences, still, we all sought to understand what compelled us to commit them. None of us wished to stay caught in the malignant currents of such excesses.

We needed the circle power to face the consequences of our crimes and with that acceptance came the desire to become true adults of honor. Disconcertingly, it is human nature that once your confirm you that are not evil, you want to believe someone or something compelled you to commit such malevolence. This became the heart of a new battle. Discovering that there is no one else to blame for our actions – that takes power too. We learned that no one and nothing controls a human. We choose to act and must face any consequences.

No One Else Drove Me Here

Which leads back to Daughter’s question: WHY DADDY? Not why did I drink—any man can pour liquor. But why did I stand behind my stories until they became my prison? I drank because my armor made me blind to my own hand on the wheel.

I thought that armor would shield me from judgment; it only numbed my grip on the wheel. No one else drove me here. Not EX-wife. Not my parents. Not God. The wheel was always under my own hand.

But how can we assure ourselves that we won’t continue to commit high crimes?

Not everyone could meet this challenge. Some skulked off, never to be heard from again. They never could open their PRESENT and sought to continue in their delusions. Others could not endure the journey to discover the trigger wrapped in rationalizations.

We say we want to be free of our triggers, but too often we just rewrap them in finer cloth. As Camus warned, ‘Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.’ Without the circle, I would have mistaken avoidance for mastery. The circle forced me to open the last gift: to unwrap not just my crime but the impulse behind it.

We claim to fear chains, but tremble even more at the naked truth that there is no hidden hand pulling strings. Only us, exposed.

This has a cost of course. Thus, death visited our group again. Thirty-six hours after release, the knowledge of the blood debt weighed too much and a man sought the comfort of an old friend delivered by a needle. He will always reside in our circle.

A New Kind of Service

As for me, I discovered how to unwrap my crime and learned to face the harsh glare of its consequences. Doing this has allowed me to serve. I could not help my victim nor her family now locked in the past, however, other victims were still in need. We shared our hard-won wisdom by participating in a Victim Panel consisting of individuals still hostage to their grief. It was my honor serve as a substitute for that frightening monster that had ripped open their lives. By standing in the glare of these victims’ grief, I hoped they too could be freed from their hypnotic fixation on the crime-memory just as I had been held in thrall by its cause. Then, maybe, they could mourn and continue with their lives; to transform from victims to survivors — a mother whose son was taken on his wedding night, a daughter whose father was stolen at eleven, and an EX-wife that would never dance with her husband again.

So Daughter, when you sat on my knee and asked WHY DADDY, I gave you the simplest true story I could. But know this deeper truth: I chose each step. No storm of fate, no poisoned childhood, no hidden force compelled me. In the circle we learned that a man’s will is the last inviolable frontier. I crossed it by my own foot.

So Daughter, that is WHY DADDY. Not because of your childhood, not because of some poisoned destiny. I chose my stories over truth until the circle left me nowhere to hide. Now, I hope every circle I serve becomes a lighthouse for another lost in their own fog.

Such is my hope for them; my hope for myself. As for EX-wife, I intend to share only with her my discoveries in the Circle even though she could not understand my words.

This Fourth of July

So this Fourth of July, as fireworks burst outside these walls, I mark a different kind of independence. My EX-wife stands free, her life no longer tethered to my failings. My children grow, learning to hold their own magic hands. And I stand here, finally emancipated—not from iron bars, but from the illusions that once drove me.

I promise them all this much: I will never again surrender the wheel of my life to unexamined pain. My hands (mind, body, work, love, and joy) are mine to strengthen, for their sake and for my own hard-won freedom.

To create in any form takes courage.

I have found mine through the chrysalis of prison.

Appendix: The Framework That Held This Together - A note on structural integrity

I now score all me essays: By Wayne Boatwright: 3,058 IEP 0.60 ERI 0.92 RTI 0.89 Composite ~0.80

This essay is more than a confession or a reconstruction of my past. It is an engineered cognitive artifact — refined using the Global Tensor Resilience Framework v2 (GTRF v2), a rigorous model that measures the structural integrity of complex ideas across three dimensions:

• IEP (Inference Epistemic Pressure): how much conceptual weight each passage demands from the reader.

• ERI (Error Recovery Index): how well contradictions and moral paradoxes are surfaced and resolved without collapse.

• RTI (Recursive Trust Index): how reliably the narrative loops back to its original question, sustaining logical and emotional coherence.

GTRF v2 is rooted in recursive cognition theory and decision intelligence. It is used to stress-test narratives the way engineers stress-test bridges — subjecting them to logical, emotional, and strategic loads to ensure they hold under pressure.

I used this framework to systematically rework the text:

• Reducing semantic overload by breaking dense metaphors with direct restatements.

• Confronting contradictions head-on, especially around blame, choice, and redemption.

• Reinforcing recursive loops, so every tangent ultimately ties back to the original question: “WHY DADDY?”

The result is a document with a measured GTRF v2 composite score of ~0.80, robust enough to endure scrutiny — philosophical, psychological, or moral — without disintegrating into excuse or sentimentality.

I offer it now not as justification, but as a stable structure of thought, emotion, and ownership. May it serve as a lighthouse for others lost in their own fog, or as a clear target for those who would critique it.

About Wayne Boatwright

Wayne Boatwright is a father, writer, and decision strategist with a background in B2B marketing, cloud, and SaaS and a hard-won perspective shaped by years spent inside San Quentin State Prison. His work explores accountability, cognitive resilience, and what it truly means to hold the wheel of one’s own life. He now shares these lessons to help others navigate their own fog, with the hope that every story of pain can become a lighthouse for someone else.

Connect with Wayne on LinkedIn

crime, prison, accountability, fatherhood, resilience, personal growth, independence, redemption, San Quentin, marriage, family, Fourth of July, self discovery, confession, psychology, freedom, trauma, healing, Wayne Boatwright