That was one of my jobs. I rode on the back of a trash truck and picked up garbage. And not just anywhere. I picked up trash at the houses of the people who worked there. The guards. The staff. They lived right there on the prison ground property, in their own little homes, and somebody had to come collect their garbage on trash day.

That somebody was me.

Sit with that for a second. The same people who treated me less than human — I was the one wheeling their cans, flipping their lids, hauling their week away.

I need you to understand where my head was at by this point, because the money in the trash can doesn’t mean anything unless you understand the place it found me.

The Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons treat you less than human. They treat you as if you are the worst human being that has ever walked the earth. That you are just a big old pile of human shit. That you would rob from the widows and orphans’ fund and beat up old ladies and kick puppies. You are just the biggest piece of human waste that there’s ever been.

And here’s the part nobody tells you. After enough of it, you start to wonder if they’re right.

You look around. You’re surrounded by a bunch of people who’ve made a lot of mistakes. And you stand there like an observer of your own life and you ask yourself — is this who I really am? Am I a bad guy? Is this what it’s like to be a bad guy? Is this what it feels like to be a bad guy?

It’s deeply confusing. I can’t say that enough. It is deeply, deeply confusing.

Because I didn’t feel like a bad guy on the inside. But everything on the outside was screaming at me that I was. The news articles I knew were false. The so-called friends saying things about me I knew were false. The guards and administrators treating me worse than a stray dog because they had decided, somewhere along the line, that I was terrible. When the whole world tells you who you are, loud enough and long enough, you start to lose your grip on what you actually know to be true.

And then there was the hunger.

People don’t think about this part. The food they serve you in there is not enough to sustain life. I mean that literally. Let’s say you eat every single piece of food they put in front of you. Every scrap. Doesn’t matter if you’re allergic to it, doesn’t matter what it is — you eat all of it. It works out to be roughly 2,000 calories for most grown men.

2,000 calories is not enough. So you end up very, very hungry. All the time.

And here’s what hunger does to a person, the part I never understood until I lived it. When you are very hungry and very desperate, and people already think you’re a big old piece of shit anyway — there starts to be a lack of reason to follow the rules.

All the little rules about outside food, extra food, whatever it is — they go out the window. And the fear of getting caught, of facing consequences? You’re willing to accept that, because you’re already in such a compromised position. You’re so hungry it makes you tired and irritable and you’re not thinking clearly. And already everybody thinks you’re a terrible human being. So you’ve got no expectations of yourself anymore. No reason to be the good guy. Nobody’s watching you be good. Nobody would believe it if they saw it.

So you take a man who, on any normal day of his normal life, would follow every law, every rule, every social norm without even thinking about it. And suddenly he decides — well, that doesn’t apply to me anymore.

Because now I’m hungry. Now I’m desperate. And once you start breaking the rules, it gets easier to break more of them.

That’s the slow descent. That’s how it actually happens. Nobody walks in intending to become a bad guy. You get forced into doing things to survive. And in the surviving, you slide down a path you never meant to be on.

I bartered. I traded for food off the books, things we weren’t supposed to be doing but did anyway because we needed to eat. And I’ll tell you — doing those things doesn’t feel good. You don’t want to do them. You’re only doing them to get enough food to live, and somehow that makes you feel worse, not better. It’s a terrible loop. You start justifying things. And the justifying makes the next thing easier. And the next.

That’s the hole I was standing in the day I flipped open that trash can.

It was just a normal day on the route. Guard’s house. I went to flip open the lid of the can out front, same as a hundred other cans, and there it was.

Money. Right there at the top. Crumpled up.

He’d left it sitting right on top of his garbage. I’m assuming it fell out of his pocket, or he set it down and forgot, who knows. But there it was. Cash. Just sitting there.

And I want to be honest with you about that half a second, because the honesty is the whole point of this story.

I was hungry. I was broke. I was being treated like garbage by the same people whose actual garbage I was hauling. I had spent many months losing my grip on whether I was even a good person anymore. Every single thing about my situation gave me a reason to put that money in my pocket and never say a word. Nobody would have known. Nobody would have ever, ever known.

I took the money and I brought it directly back to my boss.

I handed it to him and I said, hey, this is from so-and-so’s house. He left it. I guess it fell out of his pocket or something.

I’ll never forget the look on my boss’s face. Completely shocked. Stunned. That an inmate — an inmate — would find cash sitting in the trash and bring it back. Like it didn’t compute. Like I’d broken some law of nature.

And here’s the thing. That tiny little moment showed me something about myself.

I wasn’t a bad guy.

I wasn’t a bad person.

It was such a small thing. Almost nothing, really. A few crumpled bills in a trash can. But in that moment, with everything in me and everything around me telling me I was the worst kind of person — I did the right thing when there was zero reason to. No audience. No reward. No angle. Just me and a choice nobody would ever see.

And I realized — there are still some redeeming qualities in here. Buried under all the noise and the shame and the hunger, there’s still something in me that’s good.

After that, I tried. I tried extremely hard, extremely hard, to be as generous as I possibly could. With my time. With my energy. With my resources — and to be fair, my resources were almost nothing. But whatever I had, I tried to give. I tried to help as much as I could with the meager scraps I had.

Because I had figured something out. When you’re at the bottom, and the whole world has decided who you are, you don’t get to argue your way out of it. You can’t out-talk it. Nobody’s listening to your side.

But you can prove it to yourself. Quietly. In the little moments nobody sees.

It’s those little moments. Those little W’s. That’s what turns things.

So let me ask you, wherever you are right now. Whatever you did, whatever they’re saying about you, however far down the hole you feel like you’ve slid.

When the trash can opens and the money’s right there at the top, and nobody is watching, and every reason in the world says take it —

what do you do?

Because that answer? That’s not who they say you are.

That’s who you actually are.

And you can start proving it today.

Next chapter: The Day I Cursed God on a Hill →

The Money in the Trash Can