These Are My Shoes: Jason and Ben
Ben
When Ben heard about Mile in My Shoes, he was sold.
“So you volunteer and what you do while you’re volunteering is go for a run? I was like, I’M IN! This is what I’ve been looking for!” He had started running a couple years prior and it had become a sort of therapy for him, but when he started, he hated it.
“The first time I ran, I think I ran three blocks and I thought I was going to have a heart attack, like I almost threw up,” he said. He was two years sober at the time and said he felt good about his mind, heart and spirit and thought it was time to get his body in shape too. “I was running a half mile looking for shortcuts to get back home faster because it sucked so bad. But I would always feel good after. I always felt the reward of the run after the run.”
Ben had gotten sober for his kids.
He had 50% custody and said he would never drink when they were with him. “But I would be pacing the floor like a caged beast when it was time for them to get picked up. As soon as they left it was on,” he said. “At that point it wasn’t something’s gotta change, it was everything’s gotta change.” He went into outpatient treatment and has been sober since 2006, but that wasn’t the first time he tried. “With addicts, they talk about rock bottom, I kind of hit rock bottom and bounced one time.”
Ben is lucky he didn’t die.
After high school, Ben struggled. “I got really into drugs and doing a lot of dope. I was living in a dope house at one point. It wasn’t just the drugs, I was doing reckless crazy shit, running around, toting guns.. It’s amazing that I survived.”
He said it was his girlfriend who finally stepped in. “She just grabbed me one day and was like, do you even care if you live or die? And I didn’t know. I went to answer her and I was like… I… I… really don’t know.”
Ben had started down this path in high school.
It was the third trimester of his senior year and he was just trying to skate by. “I did a really good job of playing my privilege,” he said. “I was relatively intelligent, I never showed up to class but I always aced tests and I was able to bullshit my way through.”
A 4.0 student freshman year, Ben had slipped to taking remedial English class. That is, he would have taken it had he bothered showing up to class at all. “I was barely coming to school, I was selling drugs, doing drugs, getting into fights.”
He said he was finally caught red handed and suspended. In a meeting with the school authorities, his dad and him, Ben remembered being told he wasn’t welcome back. “Bottom line, this has always stuck with me, I am a bad influence on the population of South High School.”
They recommended that Ben be expelled from all Minneapolis Public Schools. “My dad said, ‘if that’s what you recommend.’ And that was it. I was out.”
But that didn’t change his behavior. In fact nothing really changed until his girlfriend asked that pointed question. “Do you even care if you live or die?”
“I went home and stared at myself in the mirror for I don’t know how long. I remember staring at myself in the mirror and seeing myself physically - I was a mess, a mess. Seeing how empty my eyes were… I was gone. But I came up with, yeah, yup, yeah, I want to live, I do.”
Ben said at that moment he stopped doing drugs. He said he quit, just like that he was done. He got a job telemarketing and said choosing to live felt good. But he only quit doing drugs.
“Weed and alcohol was just like, whatever. I had been to this dark abyss place where I’m literally barely alive walking around. So going to work hungover, it seemed like I was always able to justify it.” By this time in his life, he had gotten a degree and become a computer nerd. He said he started to advance at work.
His daughters turned 5 and 7 and Ben finally asked for help to get sober. In the process he got involved with the recovery community and learned the power and importance of connection. He also learned to love running. When he heard about Mile in my Shoes, he said he just knew.
“I was like, THIS is the fucking THING for me. Then when I went to the orientation and found out that there were halfway houses and not only that but one in the Southside, I was like, I’m home.”
“The only reason I am not a resident instead of a mentor is because I got lucky,” Ben said, “I did so many things that could have gotten me so many strikes and all it would have taken was one time to institutionalize me and get me wrapped up in the system.”
Ben found a purpose running with the VOA Southside team.
“On the surface it’s just a running group. Oh, you’re just going to go for a run, that’s nice,” he said, adding that it really isn’t the point. ”Running is kinda whatever. We’re actually just here to be here. And that’s where the magic happens.” He said he loves to celebrate the wins and to watch people surprise themselves, but the togetherness is his thing.
“The lack of separation, the lack of identity, the lack of categorization, the way we just are all together for whatever it is. We’re just all there. Everybody is just showing up for each other,” he said. “Able to show up for people is what I want to be when I grow up. MiMS gives me the place to be the person I want to be.”
The fall of 2019, a resident member named Jason showed up to MiMS for his first run. He told Ben that he was determined to make a change. Ben could see Jason wanting that change but also saw something inside holding him back.
Jason
Jason didn’t trust anyone.
“All I could think about was, what do you want from me? What?” he said, remembering how he felt showing up to his first few runs with Mile in My Shoes. He knew he needed to do something different in his life but his experience had taught him to be leery, and he was. “Nobody ever does this because they actually give a shit. Nobody ever just says, we don’t care what you did, what we care about is your path and recovery forward and how you can get there.”
In those first days, Jason didn’t feel like he’d ever fit or belong at MiMS. For his whole life, Jason didn’t feel like he fit or belonged anywhere. His distrust of others began early.
“I grew up with a single mom trying to make ends meet. She wasn’t there, she really didn’t seem like she cared so I just did me,” he said.
As a kid he’d spend his afternoons alone, entertaining himself by stealing coins off his mom’s dresser to go buy pizza and play video games. When she found out, he said she got upset and reported him to the police. He was sent to a juvenile detention center for three months. He was 10. It changed his life.
“It was right then and there that I realized that my mom and I were never, never gonna click. There was nothing there,” Jason said. “I was just trying to entertain myself and because you’re never home and never want to do anything with me…” The frustration of his 10-year-old self towards his mother still caught his voice.
“It’s what happened at the group home. I realize that I’ve always blamed my mother because I was raped when I was 10 by a 17-year-old boy that was there,” he said. “I blamed her for 30 years. And it always came out sideways.”
He spent his adolescence and teenage years in and out trouble being sent to detention centers, group homes, rehab facilities and residential programs for boys. Then four days into his senior year of high school, his life changed again when he said a teacher belittled and embarrassed him in class.
“I punched my teacher in the mouth and walked out and told my counselor I quit,” he said. At 17-years-old he went home, packed a bag, got on a bus and left for Florida. He remembered thinking, “I’m a kid, I should definitely not be out in the open world at that age but I had no fear. I really just flew by the seat of my pants.”
Jason said his life after that was a series of odd jobs, failed marriages and affairs. He got his GED and completed a couple technical college degrees, but never escaped his past. “I had never talked about it, I didn’t want to talk about it, it didn’t happen to me, I’m good,” he said, “and then prison happened and I went, I QUIT, I GIVE UP, I’M GOOD, but it was too late because when they hit you, they hit you hard.”
He went to prison for twelve years. He said he was on guard every moment he was on the inside. He stayed on guard to protect himself against people’s reactions and judgements when he got outside.
Four days after his release, he found himself in the basement of VOA Southside hearing a pitch for Mile in My shoes for the first time. Just a few days after that, he was standing in a parking lot in the dark, wearing a pair of running shoes.
“I can remember the first time somebody wanted to come over and give me a hug. I was like, WHOA, nuh uh,” Jason said, remembering one of his first morning runs with Mile in My Shoes. “I hadn’t had human interaction that involved a hug for about 12 years.”
He remembers thinking about his childhood, how he felt separate from people his whole life. He said prison cemented that distrust and disconnection but he wanted to change.
“I knew that, especially at my age, unless I wanted to call prison my retirement home, I HAD to step out of the box. I had to find something. I had to take a chance. I had to learn to trust. I had to do something different,” he said.
He had never really run before running with MiMS. He found empowerment and reflection in running, but he realized a couple months in that running wasn’t really what Mile in My Shoes was about. “There are so many bigger things to this program that you don’t see, that you don’t get until you let your heart have the chance to just try it.”
“Having a place where you just belong because you do. That’s what I found with this place.” He said he had never felt that he had belonged anywhere before. “When I found it and could see that community, that nobody cared about history, they cared about today. And I was like, oh my god.”
But he almost never had this revelation. About 2 months in, Jason thought he had to quit MiMS. He felt threatened and attacked and had the courage to talk to a VOA Southside run mentor named Ben.
“When I told him what I was going through and my emotional state and how I didn’t feel like I was going to fit it or belong - he’s just like, dude, I’m telling you you got nothing to worry about, you need to just come out and run, just stick with it.” Jason said, “so I did.”
Jason + Ben
“The way that you engaged me when I first came, you were like, this is exactly what I need to do. You were determined to make a change,” Ben said to Jason, remembering the first time they met in the basement of the VOA. Ben had just made a pitch to new residents about Mile in My Shoes. Jason was four days out of prison.
“Yeah, I just knew I needed something different,” Jason said.
At this point, Ben had been mentoring with Mile in My Shoes for three years. He had seen people show up, accomplish their goals and surprise themselves and he loved being a part of it. He also knew that he could be there to create space and support people, but he couldn’t do the work for them. “MiMS will be there but if you don’t show up, if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t matter,” Ben said.
Jason had been showing up to run with MiMS for a few weeks when one small interaction became a big opportunity for growth.
The group had finished their run and everyone was in a circle answering the “Question of the Day”, one of the trademarks of every MiMS run. After a Run Mentor in the circle gave her answer, Jason made a quippy comment. Another Mentor standing next to him elbowed him as if to say, “funny joke, good one”. Only that’s not how Jason took it.
“When he did that I was like, Oh hell no. I was ready to whoop his ass,” Jason said. “I thought he was checking me, like, back off with your little comment. I saw him as a threat instantaneously. Prison programming. Instant. Because that’s exactly how you have to be on the inside. If you don’t you won’t survive it.”
This kind of conditioning is something Ben related to. He hadn’t come out of prison, but he had become sober. “People coming out of prison, I just see that as recovery,” Ben said. “You’re recovering from ... not even what you did to get to prison, but from prison.” In both cases he saw knee-jerk reactions and behaviors as something to challenge and overcome. He knew that, over time, a person had to learn how to trust themselves again.
At the time, Jason really didn’t trust anyone. But in the few weeks he had been running with MiMS, he had built up just enough confidence in Ben to tell him that he didn’t think he could return.
“You didn’t even know how to come back to the room, to let it go,” Ben said to Jason.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Jason said.
What they did do is talk. Jason explained what had happened and how he interpreted it. Ben heard him and helped him see that his gut reaction was for self preservation and he needed that in prison but in this instance, it caused him to interpret a sign of camaraderie as a threat. Ben suggested to Jason that if he didn’t work to dismantle his conditioning, he would never really move forward.
“I felt so embarrassed,” Jason said. “I got slapped in the face with the reality of how ridiculously over-reactive I was to something that was nothing. I think that’s really when it hit me. You’ve really got to reflect on this. Come on man.”
“This was a huge turning point for Jason,” said Ben who watched Jason’s energy shift during this fateful conversation. “This took concerted, conscious, internal work and it took vulnerability to actually even have the conversation. That’s a huge step."
From this moment on, Jason said he started to let down his guard. “I screwed up, and then I talked with him and yet he’s still here? Wait, he didn’t just walk out on me like everyone else in my life has always done?”
He didn’t quit.
“After that, Jason was more Jason,” Ben said. “I think it’s because he felt accepted. Like I don’t have to prove that I belong here. That’s the message. Nobody does, you don’t have to prove that you belong, you just show up. You just come. We’re here.”
Jason had never been a runner before MiMS, and soon found empowerment in running. His proudest achievement is finishing the City of Lakes Half Marathon in under two hours, though he said he really shows up for the community and connection. “Having a place where you just belong because you do. That’s what I found with this place.”
His next goal is to be a Mile in My Shoes Run Mentor.
“I can’t wait to be the Ben for somebody else, like he was for me.”
