My Scars Tell America’s Darkest Truth

Solitary confinement did not kill me, but it buried who I was, leaving scars, trauma, and a promise to fight against this cruelty forever.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Michael Cohen in New York, U.S. April 28, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

They told me, and I believed them, that God doesn't give you more than you can bear. It is a comforting phrase, a balm you whisper to yourself when the nights are long and the light at the end of the tunnel is a stubborn, distant glow. It is the scripture you clutch when your feet are bloodied from the march and your hands ache from the work you never thought you'd be asked to do. But let me be blunt and honest from the start: some burdens are not meant to be borne in silence, and some weights are too heavy to be dignified by platitudes.

I have been carrying a load that at times felt like it would crush the very air from my lungs. I have been told to stand tall, to be strong, to keep fighting the good fight for the First Amendment and for the basic freedoms that define what it means to be an American. That fight is noble. It is necessary. And it is exhausting in ways I never imagined, so exhausting that there have been days when I have whispered to God, “I cannot handle this anymore. Please take me and stop the pain.”

When the specter of injustice is no longer an abstraction, when it is your own life, your own dignity, the memory that follows you into every quiet room, you learn quickly that faith is not only the comfort of scripture but the emergency room of the soul. They took my liberty. They took my time. They took the small, sacred details that stitch a life together: a warm meal on a bad day, the honest exchange on a sidewalk, the sound of a child’s laughter that makes you remember there is something worth fighting for. For fifty-one days, I knew what it felt like to have time itself weaponized against me. For fifty-one days, the clock was no longer a friend; it was the metronome to my undoing.

Solitary confinement is an assault on the human animal. Denied the relief of touch, the reprieve of company, and the ordinary rituals that anchor us—food, a shower that rinses the day off your shoulders, a phone call that says you are still here and someone knows it—these are not luxuries. They are the scaffolding of human dignity. The absence of them is not discipline; it is erasure. It erodes your sense of continuity with yourself until the person you were before becomes a ghost in a cell, and the person who remains is raw, startled, and forever altered.

The PTSD that followed those fifty-one days of solitary confinement is not poetic license. It is a medical reality, a psychological indentation left by a time when my basic human rhythms were denied. There is a peculiar cruelty in being cut off from movement and light and the sound of other human voices. It punctures your narrative of self until you must reassemble it with trembling hands. There are mornings when the mirror does not show the man who walked into that battle; it shows the man who survived it, and survival comes with a bill that must be paid in therapy, in late-night confessions, and in the slow, honest work of reclaiming your life.

And why do I tell you this? Not to seek pity. Far from it. I tell you because the story I carry is not unique. The liberties I was deprived of—quietly, methodically—are the liberties we all must guard. The First Amendment is not merely academic; it is the scaffolding of our republic. When government, corporations, or mobs conspire—overtly or through cowardly acquiescence—to chill speech, punish dissent, or reshape truth to suit profit or power, we cross a line that cannot be crossed without consequence. I spent my life inside the theater of power; I learned its scripts. I learned how quickly rights can erode when the people who profit from silence decide that speaking out is too costly.

So here I am, exhausted, yes, but not yet defeated. There is a stubbornness in me that refuses to be quieted. There is a loyalty to truth that will not be bought. And there is a community — you, who have chosen not to look away. For every night the mind returns to darker corners of my cell, for every tremor that shakes my voice when I recall what was done to me, there is a companion who reads, who listens, who refuses to accept that this is the new normal. You have made this journey tolerable. You have made it meaningful.

So, thank you for being part of this work. Thank you for standing with me as we push daily for normalcy and for peace. Thank you for refusing to let the easy comforts of complacency lull us into accepting the erosion of our rights. If scripture tells us that God will not load us beyond what we can carry, then perhaps the more honest truth is this: sometimes God brings people to our side to help shoulder what we cannot carry alone. You are that help. Your presence, your outrage, your steadfast refusal to be silent, those are the hands on my shoulder that make the burden manageable.

I do not write this as a resignation to fate. I write it as a call to arms of a different kind—the kind that asks for perseverance through endurance, courage in the face of exhaustion, and a relentless commitment to the public good. We do not have to be crushed by what has been done to us; we can be transformed by it into guardians of what remains. My body remembers the cell, my spirit remembers the struggle. But my mind—clearer now than it has been in years—remembers why this matters.

For all of you who have read, shared, and stood with me, know this: the fight for the First Amendment is not mine alone. It is ours. And so long as there is breath in my lungs, I will continue to push for normalcy, for peace, and for the assurance that no one else will have to face what I faced alone.

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