Make It Your Best Day! A prison story.

My ex-husband is a high school principal, and every single morning—every single morning—he gets on the PA system and closes the announcements with the same phrase:
“Make it your best day.”

If you're a student in his school, grades 7 through 12, you’ve heard it roughly 180 times a year. Over 20 years, that’s something like 3,600 times. It's consistent. It’s uplifting. It’s wholesome.

And let me tell you about the time I said it once in prison.

Spoiler alert: I did not get shanked.

It was a beautiful morning—the kind of crisp, clear morning you can still appreciate even behind a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

I was on the walkway, heading in one direction while a group of girls were heading the other way toward school. You know how it is—small clusters of two or three, chatting quietly, easing into their day with that slow early-morning energy.

I passed them and, channeling the ghost of announcements past, I said it. Loudly. Boldly. Cheerfully.

“Make it your best day!”

Everything went dead quiet. Like movie-scene quiet. Like someone just slapped a nun quiet.

Then I heard it behind me:

“Who the f—?”
“Oh hell no.”
“What did that b!tch just say?”
“No. She didn’t.”
“B!tch, please.”
I just kept walking. Smiling. Because in that one moment—oddly—I did make it my best day. I never looked back so I didn’t see their faces. But I imagined they looked something like this…

And somewhere out there, my ex was unknowingly being spiritually high-fived.

So go ahead.

Say the thing.

Be the weird one.

Make it your best day.

Even if it’s behind bars.

Especially then.

Thank you for reading.