I made a mistake. I'm not looking for excuses and I'm not looking for leniency: the weight of what I did is mine, and I carry it with me every morning. My story began long before that crime, in a home that had become a prison before prison itself, but that doesn't erase my choice. I asked for help for years and no one came, but in the end it was me who took that step, and it was me who shattered my family's life.

When I entered my cell, my children were nine and eleven. They took them from me because at that moment I was the danger. Prison, as an institution, is a machine that ignores pain; it's made of bureaucracy and silences that crush everyone, including those who work there. And yet, in that void, I met someone who told me about restorative justice. At first I thought it was a way to clear your conscience, but I was wrong. It's the exact opposite.

Prison asks you to endure a punishment; restorative justice asks you to take responsibility for the damage. It's not about erasing the past — that's impossible — but about stopping running from the pain you caused. I had to look that disaster straight in the eye, without the shield of the bars.

Now that I'm out, the real punishment continues. My children are the victims of all this. With my daughter, it's an exhausting climb, made of tears and small steps to find each other again. With my son, there's still that concrete wall. His silence is the harshest sentence I've ever received, because I know I caused it. He looks at me like a stranger who stole his childhood.

But this is exactly where the restorative process helps me not give up. I'm learning that 'repairing' doesn't mean going back to how things were, but staying in that pain alongside them, if and when they'll allow me to. We're trying to rebuild on the rubble, and that work falls to me. If today there is hope, it's not thanks to a system that locked me up hoping time would fix everything. It's thanks to that desire to make amends that I found inside myself, and to those people who taught me that, even after a crime, you can stop being just an inmate number and go back to being, painstakingly, a human being.