Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires. I have lost friends, some by death ... others through sheer inability to cross the street. - Virginia Woolf

I struggle with sloth. Not the sloth that comes readily to mind such as the sci fi movie weekend sloth when I couldn't move away from the television to go eat because I had melded with the bed. Not the sloth of laziness.

There is an older sense of the word where sloth is the opposite of willfulness. It is passivity of the will, the implications of which go far beyond physical torpor. As the theologian Borg describes it, "Sloth means letting something else author one's existence. It means to uncritically accept somebody else's ideas about how to love one's life." It is an unsatisfying and irresponsible way to live.

However prison, by that I mean the state of being imprisoned, does feed slothfulness. While it is good and useful to follow rules and obey laws, it is not good and useful to live according to the approval of others.

Many people are in prison because they failed to examine their thoughts and actions critically. Many, not all, but the majority either followed an impulse or followed someone else or followed an addiction. We lived in sloth. We allowed ourselves to live out an agenda or script we would not have chosen if we had had the will and courage to take responsibility for ourselves. Unfortunately, the very nature of prison makes it so easy to continue that practice.

For obvious reasons, prison does not encourage independence and free thought. But that doesn't mean it is impossible to lead an independent and free thinking life in here. It merely requires a full-scale battle against sloth.

Because I am a sci fi fan, I imagine this sloth as a giant beast; blubbery and green squashing everything in its path; growing larger and larger taking over my world. Every weapon I fire at it--good intentions, self-discipline, motivational practices, self-help books, group therapy, exercise--just feeds its stupor. "You can try," it licks its chops, "but it makes no difference--you're still trying to please."

I admit it's true; for example, I exercise because I would hate for anyone to think I was undisciplined, fat and lazy. More than this, while I secretly admire those wild women who have the courage of their convictions, thumb their noses at what other people think, and defy convention, I am timid about not conforming to what is expected of me.

Not that defying convention necessarily indicates freethinking, as anyone who has ever been a teenager knows. Frequently, defying convention is merely an alternate convention and involves no independent or critical thinking of its own.

On the other hand, women like Jane Austin and Emily Dickinson gave the appearance of abiding by the strict mores of their day but no one could accuse either of them of being conventional or slothful. They lived with iconoclastic insight. So it is possible to follow the rules without allowing them to author one's life. It is possible to live in cooperation with others without succumbing to their agendas. It is possible to live in prison and keep one's will, individuality, and passion alive; to walk the road less traveled.

Possible, but seldom easy or popular. Other inmates can be as unforgiving as the authorities if you change your behavior or patterns. Even if you step out of the mold philosophically, the response can be brutal. I know women who have been rejected by long-term acquaintances (surely not real friends) because they have decided to do things differently: go to school or stop going to school, exercising or not exercising, altering their hair, changing their job, or because they have one morning at breakfast said, "You know I don't think I believe that anymore."

It's not necessarily that their decisions are correct or incorrect but they have made the courageous and gargantuan effort to think critically and independently about their own lives, their own selves and to take action. They have combated sloth. As Virginia Woolf put it, they have crossed the street." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, June 23, 2005)

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'