Nicholas's Story
Copyright© 2025 by writer 406
Chapter 22
The success of the book and the Pulitzer Prize changed very little about Nicholas’s life. He returned to his studies, to his handyman business, to his daily routines of observation and reflection.
But in the months following the Pulitzer, there came a subtle shift in his thinking. His impulsive confession of his history to the ladies at breakfast in New York, along with the process of everyday writing, had opened a door to self-reflection about responsibility, about consequences, about debts owed and amends unmade.
It occurred to him that he owed Butch an amends. Even though Butch had been an asshole, he had not been evil. Just another damaged kid in juvenile detention, acting out the only way he knew how. Nicholas had responded with disproportionate violence, putting him in the hospital with serious injuries. And next, indirectly, he had contributed to the circumstances that led to Butch’s suicide.
True, Nicholas hadn’t asked to be put in solitary. He hadn’t asked for Butch to be placed in the same cell after he was released. But the sequence of events connected them irrevocably—Nicholas’s violence, Butch’s hospitalization, Nicholas’s transformation through solitary confinement, Butch’s inability to endure the same conditions, his death.
He started writing, trying as best he could to deal with this realization, to acknowledge a debt that could never be fully repaid. The writing became his second book.
Nicholas titled it “Crime and Unusual Punishment: Stoic Lessons from Solitary.” Unlike the first book, which had emerged gradually from years of observation and reflection, this one had a clear purpose from the beginning—to bear witness to his experience in solitary confinement with unflinching honesty, to examine its psychological and philosophical implications on himself, and finally to consider questions of justice.
Nicholas began by systematically digging up memories he had buried. He returned to the black composition book — the raw documentation of his time in solitary. He supplemented these primary sources with research on the psychological effects of isolation, the history of solitary confinement as punishment, and the philosophical questions about punishment.
The heart of the book was Nicholas’s own experience. First, the descent into madness during the month of the dark. Next, the desperate need for connection that had led him to befriend a couple of bugs and the disproportionate grief over their deaths.
He carefully outlined his grief over Polly’s death and the suicidal thoughts afterward, trying to come to terms with a need for belonging while being incapable of feeling anything but dead inside.
He wrote about the hallucinations that constantly blurred the line between waking and sleeping, the way time itself warped and stretched in the absence of normal markers.
Bits of poetry and odd stories emerged from his memories to be paired with things Nicholas had written months afterwards, fragments of consciousness that defied any kind of narrative structure but captured the visceral essentials about the experience. Surreal dialogs with Molly and Polly. Conversations with his dead mother. Detailed plans for suicide followed by philosophical arguments against it. Rage-filled fantasies of violence followed by weeping meditations on forgiveness.
It was gut-wrenching work. All his hard work training himself to see the outside world clearly, he now turned inward, examining not just what he had thought or done but what he had felt. Then writing it down for all to see.
Dr. Winters became an unexpected ally in the process. When Nicholas shared some of the emerging manuscript with her, she offered insights from trauma studies that helped him contextualize his experiences.
“What you’re describing here,” she said, pointing to a passage about the dissociation Nicholas had experienced during his worst periods in solitary, “are well-documented responses to extreme isolation. It’s not weakness—it’s a physiological reaction caused by your brain trying to cope with the environment.”
Her perspective helped Nicholas see his experience as both personal and part of a larger pattern of human response to extreme conditions. This realization became a central theme of the book—how philosophical frameworks like Stoicism could provide tools for survival in extreme circumstances, but not without cost. How resilience could coexist with damage and wisdom with unhealed wounds.
The writing process differed from the first book in every way. Where “The Excellence of Ordinary Things” had been measured, observational, focused outward, this book was raw, introspective and sometimes fragmented. He didn’t try present clean philosophical conclusions, but showed the messy process of finding meaning in torment.
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