Coming Home

You can withstand just about any shame so long as your tribe stands with you.

Love has no borders, light has no boundaries. Let’s all share more of both.

Letting go of hope is sometimes the most optimistic thing you can do.

When your world is violently upended, you don't just mourn your immediate losses. You also grieve a future that no longer feels possible, the peace that might've been.

When you're six foot nine and wear size 17 men's sneakers, you don't fit. Not in cars. Not in chairs. Not in beds. Not in crowds. And definitely not in a world that mistakes you for what it most fears: a Black man.

My emotion caught me off guard. For months I’d been dealing with my anguish alone

Love has no borders. Light has no boundaries. Let's all share more of both.

Time may not heal, but it does pass - slowly, quickly, with certainty. For me, its passing has brought relief. It's created distance from my ordeal. It's lessened its agony.

Russia stripped me of my humanity.

I take pride in being American, especially after being imprisoned in a country where public dissent can get you killed. Here, freedom of speech is our right. Exercising that right makes me more of an American, not less. Sit, stand, kneel, protest. The beauty of our homeland is that we have a choice.

You know a Black woman only when you know her hair journey.

Prison is more than a place. It's also a mindset.

The name of the game was enduring the charade as a way to minimize the sentence.

Blackness doesn’t make you less, but it does frame your life. When you walk into a room, so does race. Frankly, it shows up before you do. It colors every conversation, shapes how you’re viewed, determines whether you’re even heard. From the day you get here, Blackness hangs over everything, from comments about your hair (‘Can I touch it?’) to mentions that certain Black people are ‘smart’ (’cause it’s assumed we’re idiots). The message comes through loud and clear: You’re not one of us, you’re less.

James Patterson’s 1st Case, about an FBI agent on the run, and the thriller In the Water by Paula Hawkins. Both were page-turners.

The girl I once was now lay in a heap of dreads on the concrete floor. But the true me, the survivor, remained. I’d always thought of myself as someone who could endure almost anything. At a labor camp in Russia in the dead of winter, I found out just how tough I was.

For Putin, my worth was as a pawn. My arrest gave him leverage in his clash with the West. He was well aware of America’s long history of racial tensions, and he knew how to use that to his benefit. As the news sank in that morning, I cried because I’d let down my father. The Griner name was now stained around the globe: dopehead, drug dealer, dumb. I hurt because I knew I’d handed the world a weapon. When you’re Black, your behavior is never just about you. It’s about your entire community. You live with this responsibility to represent the best of us, to prove the haters wrong. Doesn’t matter if you actually want that job; how you act will be seen through that lens. If someone white messes up, most folks just shake their heads. But if a Black person makes the same mistake, it’s like, “See, I told you they were worthless.” I wear my Blackness with pride, just as my parents do. I cried not just because I’d failed Mom and Pops, but also because I felt I’d shamed my people.

Every sport has an off-season, but pro women hoopers often work year-round. We earn about 250 times less than NBA players and have a hard cap on our salaries. In the WNBA that year I made around $220,000. Overseas, I earned a million plus. That pay gap is why I was in Russia in the first place.

It was my responsibility to protect my wife.

got yelled at by Mother of Dragon. “You will learn Russian,” she told me.

We weren’t allowed to stretch out on our beds during the daytime, even if we were sick.

The nurse in the infirmary took my temperature, which was high, and then gave me Theraflu and sent me back to work.

She tried to turn me into her bestie, probably to score points with the warden.

I eventually heard the details in a letter from Lindz.

We’d only been kept together so my cellmates could serve as translators.

Olya’s spying for you all,” I said. “She has my name all through her diary.

I’d be in my early forties and out of shape, would have to find a new way to provide for my wife.

Home is love. Home is rest. Home is stability. Home is freedom and connection, the opposite of whoosh, a big exhale after 293 days locked up.

These days I settle disagreements quickly. I served a lot less time than I feared I would. I plan to make my extra time joyful.

couches, the height of the lamps. Relle was in her bliss choosing what she wanted, and I was in my bliss watching her enjoy it.