"Prison has the connotation of stagnation. We are locked away, out of sight (out of mind) in sterile boxes. This is the vague mental picture many people conjure up of prison life-if they think of us at all.

There may be persons and prison experiences like that, but my experience has not been stagnant and sterile. One of the startling aspects of prison life that most people do not consider is the continual flux of people. Inmates and staff both come and go with tidal regularity.

With staff it can be unnerving. You grow accustomed to their ways. As everywhere, there is policy and then there is how people like to get things done. Not that these necessarily contradict one another, but one is on paper and the other is the human dynamic. A course way of thinking about it would be to say we are rats in a maze. To get to the cheese, we learn the route. Changes in staff change the route. Which is good. It bestirs complacency. We have to be flexible.

Just as people out there have to adapt to changes, so do we. Even more so perhaps, since every aspect of our life is controlled by a policy and the additional dimension of how someone wishes to implement that policy.

For example, last year I had four different counselors. Each one is them had very distinctive requirements. I don't know how well any of them got to know me, but I certainly made the effort to learn them.

By attempting to adapt to the staff who come and go, various options and choices become available to us. We can learn and grow; change; go with the flow; stubbornly insist this is not how it was done last week; evolve a philosophy, a spirituality, a way of making sense of things; we can get angry.

Of course, human beings are rarely linear and rational. We wiggle wobble around--a bit of anger mixed with resignation mixed with spurts of motivation. In other words--two steps forward, one step back. But it is movement. Slow awkward bumbling movement, but movement nonetheless.

As many wise people have pointed out, everything changes. And it is nothing but self-torture to try and hang on to what no longer is. When change comes into my life, I try to focus on the energy the challenge rather than be overwhelmed by the struggle. I try to remember that the butterfly must battle the cocoon in order to fly away.

To remind myself, I keep a journal and every so often reread it.

When a terrible, impossible, frightening change seizes my world, I am startled to discover that is how I felt last year and two years ago, all the way back to the beginning.

Sometimes I have endured these changes one breath at a time: in the moment, I only have to cope with this much.

Most changes, of course, are not of that magnitude .or intensity, they are merely annoyances, minor shifts, requiring small adjustments.

Not that the effect of small adjustments should be minimized. After all, spacecraft travel millions of miles and arrive at their destinations based on many small adjustments. In a similar way, the comings and goings of staff cause me to readjust, to refocus my life, and to revitalize my attitude. I don't always llike it, but change keeps my life moving." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, June 16, 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.'