The Walk to Target

Let me tell you about the day going to Target broke me open.

I was at the halfway house in El Monte, California. And one of the small privileges you get there is that you’re allowed to walk to the nearby Target to buy basic hygiene products. Toothpaste. Soap. The unglamorous stuff. By yourself. Alone.

That word — alone — is the whole story. Because I hadn’t been alone, actually alone, out in the real world, in nearly two years.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about prison. It isn’t just the walls or the time. It’s that there is zero privacy. Zero stillness. Ever. You are surrounded by people and correctional officers every hour of every day. Someone is always there. Someone is always watching. There is no door you can close, no quiet room, no moment where the world goes silent and it’s just you and your own head. For a guy like me — mildly introverted, someone who needs a little stillness to feel human — the constant noise and presence of other people was its own kind of punishment. A low, grinding one that never let up.

So there I am, a free-ish man for the first time in a long time, earbuds in, a podcast playing, walking a mile or two down the street toward a Target.

It was hot. That specific California hot where the concrete has soaked up more sun than it can hold and is throwing the heat back up at you, like walking past an oven with the door left open. Normally that kind of heat would annoy the hell out of me.

That day I loved it.

Because I was just another anonymous dude walking down the street. Faceless. Nameless. Completely, wonderfully forgettable. Nobody looking at me. Nobody assigning me anything. Nobody counting me. If you’ve ever lived in a huge city — NYC, somewhere like that — you know the strange comfort of being alone in a sea of tuned-out humanity. Everybody moving past everybody, nobody really seeing anybody. Most of the time people complain about that feeling. That day, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me. I was invisible, and invisible meant free.

Then I walked through the doors of the Target.

I hadn’t made it more than a couple dozen feet inside before it hit me. Out of nowhere. I started to tear up.

I still had my sunglasses on, thank God, because I stood there in the middle of a Target, a grown man, choking up over — what? Hygiene products? Fluorescent lights? An aisle of stuff I didn’t even need? It wasn’t about any of that. It was the sudden, full-body realization that I had come out the other side of the nightmare. That some small piece of normal life had been handed back to me. And I’d been gone from normal for so long that when it finally returned, it felt foreign. I didn’t recognize it. It washed over me like standing in a beam of pure light — everything alive, everything electric.

I know how corny that sounds. I don’t care. That’s exactly how it felt.

You have to understand where I was coming from to get why a trip to Target could do that to me. I’d been through a two-and-a-half-year nightmare that just kept getting worse. Every time I thought it had bottomed out, that it couldn’t possibly get more painful, it found a way. And then, standing in that store, for the first time in a long time — it didn’t. The pain didn’t get worse. It stopped, and something small and good happened instead.

If my life were a novel, that was the turn. The moment in the story where the bad luck finally runs out. Where the guy who’s been getting kicked in the teeth chapter after chapter catches the first tiny break. It wasn’t a big one. It wasn’t a windfall or a rescue or some triumphant comeback moment. It was a walk to Target. But I felt it land, and I knew, standing in that aisle, that the direction had changed.

It’s a strange thing to admit that walking down an aisle in a random Target shook me to my core with gratitude. That the smallest, silliest thing made a grown man tear up. But I’ve come to think that’s not something to be embarrassed about. I think it’s a superpower.

Here’s what I mean.

Now, when I catch myself getting angry, ungrateful, sorry for myself — and I do, I’m human — I go back to that moment. I remember standing in the Target with my sunglasses on, overwhelmed with gratitude over nothing. And it recalibrates me instantly. It reminds me exactly how far down I was, and exactly how little it took to feel rich again.

And it’s not just for the bad-attitude days. That memory is fuel. When I’m running up a trail and I’m gassed — sweat pouring down my face, lungs heaving, legs on fire, every part of me screaming to stop — that’s the moment I reach for it. I pull that Target feeling out of the reserve tank and it gets me up the hill. The gratitude I banked on that hot walk in El Monte still burns years later.

That’s the thing I want you to take from this. We all get handed these moments — the small, stupid, overwhelming ones where something ordinary suddenly feels like a miracle. Most people let them pass. They feel the flicker of gratitude and then move on and forget it by lunch.

Don’t. Grab those moments. Cultivate them. Bank them. Because they don’t just feel good in the instant — they become rocket fuel you can burn later, on the days when everything hurts and you want to quit.

A grown man crying in a Target isn’t weakness. It’s a man who knows exactly what he’s got, because he remembers precisely what it felt like to have nothing.

Keep that. It’ll carry you further than you think.

Next chapter: They Meant It for Evil →