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The Power of Musical Expression
The Power of Musical Expression: More Than Singing the Right Notes
A musician can play every note correctly and still leave the audience unmoved.
A singer can have excellent pitch, beautiful tone, and good technique, yet the performance may feel empty.
Why?
Because music is not only about accuracy. It is also about communication.
As a music instructor and mentor, I have learned that some of the most memorable performances happen when musicians stop thinking only about getting the notes right and begin asking a more important question:
“What does this music need me to communicate?”
- Music Has a Message
Every song carries something—an emotion, an idea, a story, a declaration, or an experience.
Before performing, take time to understand the music. What are the lyrics saying? What is the mood? Why was the song written? What should the listener feel or understand?
When you understand the message, your performance becomes more intentional.
2. Technique Alone Is Not Enough
Technique is important. Pitch matters. Rhythm matters. Breath control matters. Tone matters. Dynamics matter. But these are tools for communication.
A technically correct performance can still lack connection if the musician is simply going through the motions.
The goal is not merely to perform the music correctly, but to communicate it convincingly.
3. Learn to Respond to the Mood of the Music
Every piece of music does not require the same emotional approach.
A joyful song should not be delivered with the same emotional character as a reflective ballad.
A powerful anthem may require strength and conviction, while a gentle worship song may require restraint and sensitivity.
This is where musical maturity begins to show.
Don’t bring the same emotional energy to every song. Let the music tell you what it needs.
4. Expression Begins with Understanding
Sometimes performers struggle with expression because they have not taken time to understand what they are performing.
Study the lyrics. Study the structure. Identify important phrases. Notice where the music builds and where it relaxes. Pay attention to dynamics, articulation, pauses and transitions.
The more you understand the music, the more naturally you can express it.
5. Expression Is Not Exaggeration
Being expressive does not mean making every movement dramatic or singing every line loudly.
Sometimes expression is found in simplicity. A softer phrase can communicate more than shouting.
A carefully placed pause can create anticipation. A subtle change in tone can communicate vulnerability. A controlled crescendo can make a musical moment powerful.
Good expression is intentional, not excessive.
6. Connect with the Listener
Whether you are performing in a church, concert hall, school, studio, or small gathering, remember that someone is listening.
Don’t become so focused on yourself that you forget the audience.
Communication requires connection.
This does not mean trying to impress everyone. It means allowing your interpretation of the music to reach the people in front of you.
Your goal should not simply be:
“I want them to hear me.”
It should be:
“I want them to understand what I am communicating.”
7. Expression Requires Emotional Discipline
This is particularly important for performers.
Your personal mood may not always match the mood of the music.
There will be days when you are tired, distracted, disappointed, or emotionally overwhelmed.
Yet the music may require joy, confidence, tenderness, or energy.
Professionalism does not mean pretending that your emotions don’t exist. It means learning how to manage them and serve the music appropriately.
As I have often observed in performance settings, the ability to move from personal emotion to the emotional requirement of the music is an important part of performance maturity.
Conclusion
Great musicians don’t simply produce sound. They communicate. They understand that every note, phrase, pause, dynamic and word can contribute to the story.
So the next time you rehearse a song, don’t ask only:
“Did I sing the right notes?”
Ask:
“Did I communicate the message?”
Because when technique and expression work together, a performance becomes more than sound—it becomes an experience.
Reflection
When you perform, are you mainly focused on getting the notes right, or are you intentionally thinking about what the music needs you to communicate?
#art #band #bands #choir #churchchoir #classical #creativity #mindfulness #musicDirector #musicians #musicperformance #performance #practicing #rehearsal #rehearsals #singer #singers #singersgospelSingers #singingtips #stageconfidence #stagepresence“A great performance is not simply a display of what a musician can do; it is a meaningful expression of what the music needs to say.” — Victor Adenola
-
The Power of Musical Expression
The Power of Musical Expression: More Than Singing the Right Notes
A musician can play every note correctly and still leave the audience unmoved.
A singer can have excellent pitch, beautiful tone, and good technique, yet the performance may feel empty.
Why?
Because music is not only about accuracy. It is also about communication.
As a music instructor and mentor, I have learned that some of the most memorable performances happen when musicians stop thinking only about getting the notes right and begin asking a more important question:
“What does this music need me to communicate?”
- Music Has a Message
Every song carries something—an emotion, an idea, a story, a declaration, or an experience.
Before performing, take time to understand the music. What are the lyrics saying? What is the mood? Why was the song written? What should the listener feel or understand?
When you understand the message, your performance becomes more intentional.
2. Technique Alone Is Not Enough
Technique is important. Pitch matters. Rhythm matters. Breath control matters. Tone matters. Dynamics matter. But these are tools for communication.
A technically correct performance can still lack connection if the musician is simply going through the motions.
The goal is not merely to perform the music correctly, but to communicate it convincingly.
3. Learn to Respond to the Mood of the Music
Every piece of music does not require the same emotional approach.
A joyful song should not be delivered with the same emotional character as a reflective ballad.
A powerful anthem may require strength and conviction, while a gentle worship song may require restraint and sensitivity.
This is where musical maturity begins to show.
Don’t bring the same emotional energy to every song. Let the music tell you what it needs.
4. Expression Begins with Understanding
Sometimes performers struggle with expression because they have not taken time to understand what they are performing.
Study the lyrics. Study the structure. Identify important phrases. Notice where the music builds and where it relaxes. Pay attention to dynamics, articulation, pauses and transitions.
The more you understand the music, the more naturally you can express it.
5. Expression Is Not Exaggeration
Being expressive does not mean making every movement dramatic or singing every line loudly.
Sometimes expression is found in simplicity. A softer phrase can communicate more than shouting.
A carefully placed pause can create anticipation. A subtle change in tone can communicate vulnerability. A controlled crescendo can make a musical moment powerful.
Good expression is intentional, not excessive.
6. Connect with the Listener
Whether you are performing in a church, concert hall, school, studio, or small gathering, remember that someone is listening.
Don’t become so focused on yourself that you forget the audience.
Communication requires connection.
This does not mean trying to impress everyone. It means allowing your interpretation of the music to reach the people in front of you.
Your goal should not simply be:
“I want them to hear me.”
It should be:
“I want them to understand what I am communicating.”
7. Expression Requires Emotional Discipline
This is particularly important for performers.
Your personal mood may not always match the mood of the music.
There will be days when you are tired, distracted, disappointed, or emotionally overwhelmed.
Yet the music may require joy, confidence, tenderness, or energy.
Professionalism does not mean pretending that your emotions don’t exist. It means learning how to manage them and serve the music appropriately.
As I have often observed in performance settings, the ability to move from personal emotion to the emotional requirement of the music is an important part of performance maturity.
Conclusion
Great musicians don’t simply produce sound. They communicate. They understand that every note, phrase, pause, dynamic and word can contribute to the story.
So the next time you rehearse a song, don’t ask only:
“Did I sing the right notes?”
Ask:
“Did I communicate the message?”
Because when technique and expression work together, a performance becomes more than sound—it becomes an experience.
Reflection
When you perform, are you mainly focused on getting the notes right, or are you intentionally thinking about what the music needs you to communicate?
#art #band #bands #choir #churchchoir #classical #creativity #mindfulness #musicDirector #musicians #musicperformance #performance #practicing #rehearsal #rehearsals #singer #singers #singersgospelSingers #singingtips #stageconfidence #stagepresence“A great performance is not simply a display of what a musician can do; it is a meaningful expression of what the music needs to say.” — Victor Adenola
-
The Power of Musical Expression
The Power of Musical Expression: More Than Singing the Right Notes
A musician can play every note correctly and still leave the audience unmoved.
A singer can have excellent pitch, beautiful tone, and good technique, yet the performance may feel empty.
Why?
Because music is not only about accuracy. It is also about communication.
As a music instructor and mentor, I have learned that some of the most memorable performances happen when musicians stop thinking only about getting the notes right and begin asking a more important question:
“What does this music need me to communicate?”
- Music Has a Message
Every song carries something—an emotion, an idea, a story, a declaration, or an experience.
Before performing, take time to understand the music. What are the lyrics saying? What is the mood? Why was the song written? What should the listener feel or understand?
When you understand the message, your performance becomes more intentional.
2. Technique Alone Is Not Enough
Technique is important. Pitch matters. Rhythm matters. Breath control matters. Tone matters. Dynamics matter. But these are tools for communication.
A technically correct performance can still lack connection if the musician is simply going through the motions.
The goal is not merely to perform the music correctly, but to communicate it convincingly.
3. Learn to Respond to the Mood of the Music
Every piece of music does not require the same emotional approach.
A joyful song should not be delivered with the same emotional character as a reflective ballad.
A powerful anthem may require strength and conviction, while a gentle worship song may require restraint and sensitivity.
This is where musical maturity begins to show.
Don’t bring the same emotional energy to every song. Let the music tell you what it needs.
4. Expression Begins with Understanding
Sometimes performers struggle with expression because they have not taken time to understand what they are performing.
Study the lyrics. Study the structure. Identify important phrases. Notice where the music builds and where it relaxes. Pay attention to dynamics, articulation, pauses and transitions.
The more you understand the music, the more naturally you can express it.
5. Expression Is Not Exaggeration
Being expressive does not mean making every movement dramatic or singing every line loudly.
Sometimes expression is found in simplicity. A softer phrase can communicate more than shouting.
A carefully placed pause can create anticipation. A subtle change in tone can communicate vulnerability. A controlled crescendo can make a musical moment powerful.
Good expression is intentional, not excessive.
6. Connect with the Listener
Whether you are performing in a church, concert hall, school, studio, or small gathering, remember that someone is listening.
Don’t become so focused on yourself that you forget the audience.
Communication requires connection.
This does not mean trying to impress everyone. It means allowing your interpretation of the music to reach the people in front of you.
Your goal should not simply be:
“I want them to hear me.”
It should be:
“I want them to understand what I am communicating.”
7. Expression Requires Emotional Discipline
This is particularly important for performers.
Your personal mood may not always match the mood of the music.
There will be days when you are tired, distracted, disappointed, or emotionally overwhelmed.
Yet the music may require joy, confidence, tenderness, or energy.
Professionalism does not mean pretending that your emotions don’t exist. It means learning how to manage them and serve the music appropriately.
As I have often observed in performance settings, the ability to move from personal emotion to the emotional requirement of the music is an important part of performance maturity.
Conclusion
Great musicians don’t simply produce sound. They communicate. They understand that every note, phrase, pause, dynamic and word can contribute to the story.
So the next time you rehearse a song, don’t ask only:
“Did I sing the right notes?”
Ask:
“Did I communicate the message?”
Because when technique and expression work together, a performance becomes more than sound—it becomes an experience.
Reflection
When you perform, are you mainly focused on getting the notes right, or are you intentionally thinking about what the music needs you to communicate?
#art #band #bands #choir #churchchoir #classical #creativity #mindfulness #musicDirector #musicians #musicperformance #performance #practicing #rehearsal #rehearsals #singer #singers #singersgospelSingers #singingtips #stageconfidence #stagepresence“A great performance is not simply a display of what a musician can do; it is a meaningful expression of what the music needs to say.” — Victor Adenola
-
The Power of Musical Expression
The Power of Musical Expression: More Than Singing the Right Notes
A musician can play every note correctly and still leave the audience unmoved.
A singer can have excellent pitch, beautiful tone, and good technique, yet the performance may feel empty.
Why?
Because music is not only about accuracy. It is also about communication.
As a music instructor and mentor, I have learned that some of the most memorable performances happen when musicians stop thinking only about getting the notes right and begin asking a more important question:
“What does this music need me to communicate?”
- Music Has a Message
Every song carries something—an emotion, an idea, a story, a declaration, or an experience.
Before performing, take time to understand the music. What are the lyrics saying? What is the mood? Why was the song written? What should the listener feel or understand?
When you understand the message, your performance becomes more intentional.
2. Technique Alone Is Not Enough
Technique is important. Pitch matters. Rhythm matters. Breath control matters. Tone matters. Dynamics matter. But these are tools for communication.
A technically correct performance can still lack connection if the musician is simply going through the motions.
The goal is not merely to perform the music correctly, but to communicate it convincingly.
3. Learn to Respond to the Mood of the Music
Every piece of music does not require the same emotional approach.
A joyful song should not be delivered with the same emotional character as a reflective ballad.
A powerful anthem may require strength and conviction, while a gentle worship song may require restraint and sensitivity.
This is where musical maturity begins to show.
Don’t bring the same emotional energy to every song. Let the music tell you what it needs.
4. Expression Begins with Understanding
Sometimes performers struggle with expression because they have not taken time to understand what they are performing.
Study the lyrics. Study the structure. Identify important phrases. Notice where the music builds and where it relaxes. Pay attention to dynamics, articulation, pauses and transitions.
The more you understand the music, the more naturally you can express it.
5. Expression Is Not Exaggeration
Being expressive does not mean making every movement dramatic or singing every line loudly.
Sometimes expression is found in simplicity. A softer phrase can communicate more than shouting.
A carefully placed pause can create anticipation. A subtle change in tone can communicate vulnerability. A controlled crescendo can make a musical moment powerful.
Good expression is intentional, not excessive.
6. Connect with the Listener
Whether you are performing in a church, concert hall, school, studio, or small gathering, remember that someone is listening.
Don’t become so focused on yourself that you forget the audience.
Communication requires connection.
This does not mean trying to impress everyone. It means allowing your interpretation of the music to reach the people in front of you.
Your goal should not simply be:
“I want them to hear me.”
It should be:
“I want them to understand what I am communicating.”
7. Expression Requires Emotional Discipline
This is particularly important for performers.
Your personal mood may not always match the mood of the music.
There will be days when you are tired, distracted, disappointed, or emotionally overwhelmed.
Yet the music may require joy, confidence, tenderness, or energy.
Professionalism does not mean pretending that your emotions don’t exist. It means learning how to manage them and serve the music appropriately.
As I have often observed in performance settings, the ability to move from personal emotion to the emotional requirement of the music is an important part of performance maturity.
Conclusion
Great musicians don’t simply produce sound. They communicate. They understand that every note, phrase, pause, dynamic and word can contribute to the story.
So the next time you rehearse a song, don’t ask only:
“Did I sing the right notes?”
Ask:
“Did I communicate the message?”
Because when technique and expression work together, a performance becomes more than sound—it becomes an experience.
Reflection
When you perform, are you mainly focused on getting the notes right, or are you intentionally thinking about what the music needs you to communicate?
#art #band #bands #choir #churchchoir #classical #creativity #mindfulness #musicDirector #musicians #musicperformance #performance #practicing #rehearsal #rehearsals #singer #singers #singersgospelSingers #singingtips #stageconfidence #stagepresence“A great performance is not simply a display of what a musician can do; it is a meaningful expression of what the music needs to say.” — Victor Adenola
-
The Power of Musical Expression
The Power of Musical Expression: More Than Singing the Right Notes
A musician can play every note correctly and still leave the audience unmoved.
A singer can have excellent pitch, beautiful tone, and good technique, yet the performance may feel empty.
Why?
Because music is not only about accuracy. It is also about communication.
As a music instructor and mentor, I have learned that some of the most memorable performances happen when musicians stop thinking only about getting the notes right and begin asking a more important question:
“What does this music need me to communicate?”
- Music Has a Message
Every song carries something—an emotion, an idea, a story, a declaration, or an experience.
Before performing, take time to understand the music. What are the lyrics saying? What is the mood? Why was the song written? What should the listener feel or understand?
When you understand the message, your performance becomes more intentional.
2. Technique Alone Is Not Enough
Technique is important. Pitch matters. Rhythm matters. Breath control matters. Tone matters. Dynamics matter. But these are tools for communication.
A technically correct performance can still lack connection if the musician is simply going through the motions.
The goal is not merely to perform the music correctly, but to communicate it convincingly.
3. Learn to Respond to the Mood of the Music
Every piece of music does not require the same emotional approach.
A joyful song should not be delivered with the same emotional character as a reflective ballad.
A powerful anthem may require strength and conviction, while a gentle worship song may require restraint and sensitivity.
This is where musical maturity begins to show.
Don’t bring the same emotional energy to every song. Let the music tell you what it needs.
4. Expression Begins with Understanding
Sometimes performers struggle with expression because they have not taken time to understand what they are performing.
Study the lyrics. Study the structure. Identify important phrases. Notice where the music builds and where it relaxes. Pay attention to dynamics, articulation, pauses and transitions.
The more you understand the music, the more naturally you can express it.
5. Expression Is Not Exaggeration
Being expressive does not mean making every movement dramatic or singing every line loudly.
Sometimes expression is found in simplicity. A softer phrase can communicate more than shouting.
A carefully placed pause can create anticipation. A subtle change in tone can communicate vulnerability. A controlled crescendo can make a musical moment powerful.
Good expression is intentional, not excessive.
6. Connect with the Listener
Whether you are performing in a church, concert hall, school, studio, or small gathering, remember that someone is listening.
Don’t become so focused on yourself that you forget the audience.
Communication requires connection.
This does not mean trying to impress everyone. It means allowing your interpretation of the music to reach the people in front of you.
Your goal should not simply be:
“I want them to hear me.”
It should be:
“I want them to understand what I am communicating.”
7. Expression Requires Emotional Discipline
This is particularly important for performers.
Your personal mood may not always match the mood of the music.
There will be days when you are tired, distracted, disappointed, or emotionally overwhelmed.
Yet the music may require joy, confidence, tenderness, or energy.
Professionalism does not mean pretending that your emotions don’t exist. It means learning how to manage them and serve the music appropriately.
As I have often observed in performance settings, the ability to move from personal emotion to the emotional requirement of the music is an important part of performance maturity.
Conclusion
Great musicians don’t simply produce sound. They communicate. They understand that every note, phrase, pause, dynamic and word can contribute to the story.
So the next time you rehearse a song, don’t ask only:
“Did I sing the right notes?”
Ask:
“Did I communicate the message?”
Because when technique and expression work together, a performance becomes more than sound—it becomes an experience.
Reflection
When you perform, are you mainly focused on getting the notes right, or are you intentionally thinking about what the music needs you to communicate?
#art #band #bands #choir #churchchoir #classical #creativity #mindfulness #musicDirector #musicians #musicperformance #performance #practicing #rehearsal #rehearsals #singer #singers #singersgospelSingers #singingtips #stageconfidence #stagepresence“A great performance is not simply a display of what a musician can do; it is a meaningful expression of what the music needs to say.” — Victor Adenola
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#MissKitty is not TMI. Miss Kitty is #transparent. The notion that I cannot reveal my thinking to the masses, that anybody thinks that, is so egotistical. My position is if you are too concerned about what you have to say then you don't have anything to say. You just want recognition.
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Storymere
This is a deeply personal post, and some of it might be troubling.
If so, please know The Holding Room has many resources – some that you can download and print for free and some with phone numbers and website links where you can speak to people who will be there whenever you need someone to listen. Also, you can reach out to me by email here or here.
You are not alone.
I don’t remember a time when stories have not been part of my life.
The very earliest one I remember captivating me was Rapunzel, the original version. The poor peasant husband who stole rhubarb for his pregnant wife, the witch who wanted a baby but was so scared of being alone that she trapped the girl in a tower, the prince blinded by thorns he fell into after her hair was cut – the entire story felt lived in and real. It was the first story I remember falling in love with. But, by then, stories were already filling my head and spilling into real life.
By the time I remember repeatedly asking for anyone to tell me Rapunzel’s story, I was writing my own. Sweet Shelby and Stacy were the earliest ones – I don’t remember writing Stacy, the story of the little girl trying to find a present for her mother, but I do remember writing Sweet Shelby when I was barely in kindergarten.
Almost always, though, my characters appeared somewhere else before they made it onto paper.
Five is a pivotal age: many children start school then; adults can sometimes remember events from five onward. It’s also the year the sexual abuse began. I don’t know exactly when Storymere appeared; I only know I don’t remember a time without it.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe seven or eight and on a bed with a scratchy, wool-like blanket I picked at. I don’t remember the moments before or immediately after the abuse – I have frustrating snippets, words that sometimes trigger me, phrases that snag a corner deep inside – but I do remember with crystal clarity when his fingers gripped my arm, pulling it to touch him. If you’ve ever watched a pot of water on a stove, you’ve seen boiling bubbles. They start small– only a few here in the corner, and then a few more there in the center–but they multiply and grow in size quickly until they are rolling. Boiling bubbles is what my insides felt like whenever I was touched. Just as if some of that boiling water splashed on your hand, making you blister before jerking away, the boiling bubbles crowded my lungs until all I felt was panic.
The kind of panic that makes you look desperately around for anything that might give necessary oxygen.
I remember not wanting to look at him. The smell of Marlborough cigarettes and the feel of a stubble were overwhelming and when he would tell me to be still, those boiling bubbles would quadruple, and I would stop breathing altogether because I knew what came next. I couldn’t move because I was held down but I could scan the room. I vividly remember a black and gold blanket that hung on the wall of a lion.
My eyes landed on the ceiling.
Like the image of my ceiling above, the plaster made small peaks.
Except…
It wasn’t plaster anymore.
Instead of the bumpy ridge of the ceiling, I saw verdant mountains.
When I think back to the earliest memories of this happening, the scenes were small. It didn’t take up the entire ceiling, only the small patch above me. But playing among the mountains were children I recognized. Which is weird, honestly, because I was only seven or eight – I had no understanding of how to describe a character’s physical appearance. But I recognized them as characters in the stories crowding my brain. Instead of popping and blistering my insides, the boiling panic bubbles shrunk; I could breathe. I don’t know which character it was, but it was a boy, older than me but not by much, with blonde hair who was chasing a girl near water. They were bending over the water, very still, very quiet until, suddenly, they both jumped. The boy fell face forward. His arms splashed the water.
A sharp, stabbing pain made the scene completely vanish, like a zipper being pulled closed over the ceiling. The boiling bubbles were back and my whole body felt as though it were on fire. The smell of his breath overwhelmed me but, mostly, terror. The moment of the rapes almost always ripped me away from the safe place I’d found, and I would struggle to breathe. I’d start crying, which would make him mad, and there was something about the repeated rocking that I couldn’t handle. I remember feeling as though I were dying because I could feel my body being torn.
And I’d start frantically looking at the ceiling. I’d stare as hard as I could at the plaster. Like you make shapes out of clouds, I’d scan that ceiling for something in it, terrified because the bubbles were crowding my lungs again and air was hard to find and my skin felt as though it were being peeled off.
There – it wasn’t a mountain peak; it was a small crack. I don’t know how, but I saw crystal blue water running from the it. My body was on fire, and I distinctly remember my throat hurting. So, I stared at that water until the crack got bigger and then – there they were – the same two kids who had been playing earlier. The bubbles shrunk; I can’t tell you exactly what he was doing anymore to me; when he spoke, it was garbled now. But I could breathe.
It was a frog. The boy had a frog in his hands. I couldn’t see what kind or how big, but I saw its slick green body.
Years later, when I had two daughters, we loved going to a place called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here, they have a beautiful pond. Once, when my oldest was around ten, eleven, they would make trips around that pond, searching for frogs. I didn’t tell them to do that; they just did. And, when they caught one, my world froze. Not because it was an idyllic childhood moment, one snatched from an era they weren’t a part of, but because I remembered the boy and the girl from the ceiling when I was seven or eight.
Storymere never stopped coming for me.
In fact, it became bigger the older I got. The better I became at writing, and the more complex my written books became, the more elaborate Storymere got. It was also easier to find. By the time I was in middle school, I knew that if he turned me so that I couldn’t see the ceiling, all I had to do was pick a spot on the wall and stare at it. Soon, the world on the ceiling would start spilling onto the walls. I remember Ash once slid from the ceiling to the wall, which was now a giant hill; he was laughing. I am convinced today that the little blonde-haired boy I saw when I was seven or eight was a younger version of Ash.
I never had a name for it.
The world I’d go to whenever my body felt trapped or in pain it couldn’t survive never had a name.
But, as I grew older, I would start deliberately trying to see my characters. I learned that staring at the same space for five, ten seconds could sometimes open doors or walls or ceilings. Air vents became caves or tunnels. Lightbulbs became the moon or the sun or Victorian-era lanterns. Fire alarms became bushes or stumps. Once, one became a bonfire around which my characters sat.
Most of the time, I never directly participated in any of the scenes.
But, occasionally, right as the pain was becoming so great it threatened to collapse everything, Landon spoke up loudly, saying, “Tiffini, look!” and pointing toward the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. The horse was running – and I could feel my body shaking, I could feel the pain, but I could also feel wind on my skin that was really a fan blowing but it made me uncertain. I wasn’t sure if the jolting I felt in my body from what my dad was doing wasn’t just a galloping horse shaking the ground instead. It was enough to keep me there, with the mountains and the characters I loved, instead of being violently tossed back into rape.
I am currently writing Móin & Marrow; I hope to have it finished by January.
And I have never written two books at once.
Never.
But a week or so ago, a different character began shadowing me. Uncharacteristically, I knew within a day or so the overarching theme of her story, which meant I knew for certain she’s not part of Móin & Marrow. She was seeing a world open on a primitive looking ceiling. So, I did what I do and started cataloging everything she showed me. And then I heard Landon, one of my favorite male characters, and he said, “Come ‘mere.”
There’s a few characters – Landon Montgomery, Clayton Cunningham, Maikel, Ash – who I would follow just about anywhere. Landon’s “come ‘mere” felt connected to Malika, the character who had been shadowing me. Soon, I knew “Storymere” was my world, the one I’ve seen all my life. The one where headlights shining through the windows become lighting bugs, the air kicking on is the roar of a nearby waterfall, and ceilings are entire geographical landscapes.
Thus came the name for Malika: Storymere.
The Research
It’s taken me nearly a week to flesh out her story and it is wildly ambitious.
It covers really important themes like post-abolitionist slavery in Mauritania, a country in North West Africa. Mauritania formally abolished slavery November 9, 1981 (one year after my birth) but that law did not define slavery as a criminal offense. It also did not establish penalties and had very little enforcement. Slavery was not specifically criminalized until 2007 (the year my youngest daughter was born). Amnesty International, as well as multiple other sources, widely recognize Mauritania as the last country in the world to abolish and criminalize slavery. Only in 2015 (one year before my 10-year-old niece was born) was that law further strengthened so that slavery was considered a crime against humanity.
But also…the further I began digging into Mauritania, I found pretty terrifying things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had the character to do it.
In 2001, 71% of Mauritanian women have undergone FGM – female genital mutilation. In 2015, FGM is about 68% according to UNICEF. By 2021, national FGM prevalence is about 65% for girls ages 15-49, 45% of girls ages 0-14. But, in Malika’s area of Gorgol, it’s 82% the same year.
The next part is a little eerie.
I knew Malika’s name before I started researching, reading books, pretty much tearing about UNICEF and WIPO and Human Rights Watch sites and videos. She was always Malika because Malika means “queen” and this girl has zero autonomy over her body; I wanted to talk about that.
But in my research, I found a UN-backed research / social innovation project in Mauritania that was specifically designed to end FGM. The name of this project? MALIKA
(Measuring and
Analyzing
Linkage between
Information
Technology
Knowledge and
Advocacy with adolescent to end FGM).
The name for this 2018 project was chosen because MALIKA means queen (which was why I chose it for my character).The implications for a story on slavery and who owns people spills into a conversation about who owns bodies. Because 82% of women in Gorgol have undergone some level of FGM (most of them fall into Type II).
Let’s move a layer down.
My story has two protagonists – one is named Aïssata. She is born in 1886. There is a raid, she is captured and sold to a Beydane family. She becomes the great-grandmother to my modern protagonist, Malika, whose story is centered in 2002.
In 2002, this was a country where slavery has technically been abolished for twenty-one years but has not been criminalized. So, many people are legally not “slaves” but are practically still bound to their former “owners” for economic reasons. Malika can honestly hear someone tell her, We’re not slaves anymore and yet still live under extraordinary former-master control. 7 in 10 women nationally (and an unbelievable 4 out of 5 in Gorgol) have undergone FGM.
Oh, but wait because that’s not all.
Zina is the Islamic legal term for sex outside marriage. It can include things like adultery or just having sex unmarried. Zina assumes unlawful consensual sex. Pregnancy is often considered evidence of sex and therefore it is also considered evidence of zina, not rape.
In 1983 (I was 3 years old), Articles 307 make zina a crime and the punishment is 100 public lashes and one year in prison. There is also Article 309, which was done in 1984 that criminalizes rape.
In 2002 (the year of Storymere), UNFPA released a report that says almost all women and girls who reported rape were accused of fornication and ended up in jail.
HRW states that even as late as 2018, zina is a problem. Survivors risk prosecution if they report sexual violence.
In 2016 there was a case of a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She reported the assault and she was prosecuted for zina. She eventually spent time in a women’s prison. “Zeina” was 16; she was trafficked into Mauritania at 14, repeatedly raped and became pregnant. She was convicted after giving birth of zina and she was required to report to the police weekly. M’barka was 17 in 2005. According to the SOS Escalves and US State Department, she was forced into domestic servitude, raped and impregnated by a household member and charged zina. Nothing happened to the rapist. In 2017 alone there were 64 women and girls who were detained in the women’s prison – half of them were prosecuted or convicted of zina. HRW also found that at least two girls housed in the juvenile center between 2015-2018 were charged with zina.
Storymere
Imagine being a young girl whose body has been cut before you can remember but whose entire life is shadowed by that cutting. Imagine it doesn’t heal properly, so you have thickened scarring that impacts your life. Frequent infections like UTIs. Menstruation is hard. Sex, even marital, loving and consensual sex, is painful. You’re shadowed by a pretty constant reminder that you are not valued as you are. Imagine being the same girl whose great-grandmother was a slave, owned by a Beydane (higher caste) family; a hundred years later, you don’t speak the same Puular language as your great-grandmother because you’ve been assimilated into the Beydane culture. While you are legally free, you cannot leave because the house you sleep in, the farm your father cultivates, the goats that feed you are all controlled by the descendants of your great-grandmother’s master. If you get sick, the Beydane family may pay for a doctor. If you get married, they may send a gift. If your family doesn’t have the resources to get a goat, the Beydane family may advance you a goat.
Now imagine that, at fifteen, you are raped by a member of that Beydane family; let’s say it was a son around twenty-years-old. He has social standing, wealth, and the respect of the community. You are a descendant of a slave, and everyone knows which families have been slaves, and which have been masters. Your grandmother and mother and father refer to the son’s father as “Sidi Mahmoud.” Sidi is used for nobility… or masters.
But it’s an interesting time to be alive because there are four midwives who have started trying to combat rape and FGM. Eventually two of the four would quit because they were scared of retaliation against their daughters. But, for now, let’s say there’s four of them. One of them is particularly influential and when she sees you, she slowly talks you into reporting the rape. Against the Beydane boy.
The Beydane family says, How could you be so ungrateful? We have always taken care of you. Your family says, We’ve worked the land ourselves and the response is, yes, because we’ve let you. Eventually, they come one day quietly and say, “The house has been given to someone else.” It’s their house, not yours. The goats are theirs, too, not yours. So, now one fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter is in jail for zina and the rest of the family is sleeping literally outside with no access to the cultivate the land and no goats.
Where do you go?
I would go to Storymere.
There’s a place not everyone can go.
It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.
Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.
Yahya.
He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.
When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.
Or are we?
Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. They say, “It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.“
I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.
Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.
Until the night I described her to Lalla.
Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”
#Writing #fiction #hope #women #abuse #books #life #blogging #rape #slavery #bookReview #african #africa #fgm #zina -
Storymere
This is a deeply personal post, and some of it might be troubling.
If so, please know The Holding Room has many resources – some that you can download and print for free and some with phone numbers and website links where you can speak to people who will be there whenever you need someone to listen. Also, you can reach out to me by email here or here.
You are not alone.
I don’t remember a time when stories have not been part of my life.
The very earliest one I remember captivating me was Rapunzel, the original version. The poor peasant husband who stole rhubarb for his pregnant wife, the witch who wanted a baby but was so scared of being alone that she trapped the girl in a tower, the prince blinded by thorns he fell into after her hair was cut – the entire story felt lived in and real. It was the first story I remember falling in love with. But, by then, stories were already filling my head and spilling into real life.
By the time I remember repeatedly asking for anyone to tell me Rapunzel’s story, I was writing my own. Sweet Shelby and Stacy were the earliest ones – I don’t remember writing Stacy, the story of the little girl trying to find a present for her mother, but I do remember writing Sweet Shelby when I was barely in kindergarten.
Almost always, though, my characters appeared somewhere else before they made it onto paper.
Five is a pivotal age: many children start school then; adults can sometimes remember events from five onward. It’s also the year the sexual abuse began. I don’t know exactly when Storymere appeared; I only know I don’t remember a time without it.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe seven or eight and on a bed with a scratchy, wool-like blanket I picked at. I don’t remember the moments before or immediately after the abuse – I have frustrating snippets, words that sometimes trigger me, phrases that snag a corner deep inside – but I do remember with crystal clarity when his fingers gripped my arm, pulling it to touch him. If you’ve ever watched a pot of water on a stove, you’ve seen boiling bubbles. They start small– only a few here in the corner, and then a few more there in the center–but they multiply and grow in size quickly until they are rolling. Boiling bubbles is what my insides felt like whenever I was touched. Just as if some of that boiling water splashed on your hand, making you blister before jerking away, the boiling bubbles crowded my lungs until all I felt was panic.
The kind of panic that makes you look desperately around for anything that might give necessary oxygen.
I remember not wanting to look at him. The smell of Marlboro cigarettes and the feel of a stubble were overwhelming and when he would tell me to be still, those boiling bubbles would quadruple, and I would stop breathing altogether because I knew what came next. I couldn’t move because I was held down but I could scan the room. I vividly remember a black and gold blanket that hung on the wall of a lion.
My eyes landed on the ceiling.
Like the image of my ceiling above, the plaster made small peaks.
Except…
It wasn’t plaster anymore.
Instead of the bumpy ridge of the ceiling, I saw verdant mountains.
When I think back to the earliest memories of this happening, the scenes were small. It didn’t take up the entire ceiling, only the small patch above me. But playing among the mountains were children I recognized. Which is weird, honestly, because I was only seven or eight – I had no understanding of how to describe a character’s physical appearance. But I recognized them as characters in the stories crowding my brain. Instead of popping and blistering my insides, the boiling panic bubbles shrunk; I could breathe. I don’t know which character it was, but it was a boy, older than me but not by much, with blonde hair who was chasing a girl near water. They were bending over the water, very still, very quiet until, suddenly, they both jumped. The boy fell face forward. His arms splashed the water.
A sharp, stabbing pain made the scene completely vanish, like a zipper being pulled closed over the ceiling. The boiling bubbles were back and my whole body felt as though it were on fire. The smell of his breath overwhelmed me but, mostly, terror. The moment of the rapes almost always ripped me away from the safe place I’d found, and I would struggle to breathe. I’d start crying, which would make him mad, and there was something about the repeated rocking that I couldn’t handle. I remember feeling as though I were dying because I could feel my body being torn.
And I’d start frantically looking at the ceiling. I’d stare as hard as I could at the plaster. Like you make shapes out of clouds, I’d scan that ceiling for something in it, terrified because the bubbles were crowding my lungs again and air was hard to find and my skin felt as though it were being peeled off.
There – it wasn’t a mountain peak; it was a small crack. I don’t know how, but I saw crystal blue water running from the it. My body was on fire, and I distinctly remember my throat hurting. So, I stared at that water until the crack got bigger and then – there they were – the same two kids who had been playing earlier. The bubbles shrunk; I can’t tell you exactly what he was doing anymore to me; when he spoke, it was garbled now. But I could breathe.
It was a frog. The boy had a frog in his hands. I couldn’t see what kind or how big, but I saw its slick green body.
Years later, when I had two daughters, we loved going to a place called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here, they have a beautiful pond. Once, when my oldest was around ten, eleven, they would make trips around that pond, searching for frogs. I didn’t tell them to do that; they just did. And, when they caught one, my world froze. Not because it was an idyllic childhood moment, one snatched from an era they weren’t a part of, but because I remembered the boy and the girl from the ceiling when I was seven or eight.
Storymere never stopped coming for me.
In fact, it became bigger the older I got. The better I became at writing, and the more complex my written books became, the more elaborate Storymere got. It was also easier to find. By the time I was in middle school, I knew that if he turned me so that I couldn’t see the ceiling, all I had to do was pick a spot on the wall and stare at it. Soon, the world on the ceiling would start spilling onto the walls. I remember Ash once slid from the ceiling to the wall, which was now a giant hill; he was laughing. I am convinced today that the little blonde-haired boy I saw when I was seven or eight was a younger version of Ash.
I never had a name for it.
The world I’d go to whenever my body felt trapped or in pain it couldn’t survive never had a name.
But, as I grew older, I would start deliberately trying to see my characters. I learned that staring at the same space for five, ten seconds could sometimes open doors or walls or ceilings. Air vents became caves or tunnels. Lightbulbs became the moon or the sun or Victorian-era lanterns. Fire alarms became bushes or stumps. Once, one became a bonfire around which my characters sat.
Most of the time, I never directly participated in any of the scenes.
But, occasionally, right as the pain was becoming so great it threatened to collapse everything, Landon spoke up loudly, saying, “Tiffini, look!” and pointing toward the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. The horse was running – and I could feel my body shaking, I could feel the pain, but I could also feel wind on my skin that was really a fan blowing but it made me uncertain. I wasn’t sure if the jolting I felt in my body from what my dad was doing wasn’t just a galloping horse shaking the ground instead. It was enough to keep me there, with the mountains and the characters I loved, instead of being violently tossed back into rape.
I am currently writing Móin & Marrow; I hope to have it finished by January.
And I have never written two books at once.
Never.
But a week or so ago, a different character began shadowing me. Uncharacteristically, I knew within a day or so the overarching theme of her story, which meant I knew for certain she’s not part of Móin & Marrow.
She was seeing a world open on a primitive looking ceiling.
So, I did what I do and started cataloging everything she showed me.
And then I heard Landon, one of my favorite male characters, and he said, “Come ‘mere.”
There’s a few characters – Landon Montgomery, Clayton Cunningham, Maikel, Ash – who I would follow just about anywhere. Landon’s “come ‘mere” felt connected to Malika, the character who had been shadowing me. Soon, I knew “Storymere” was my world, the one I’ve seen all my life. The one where headlights shining through the windows become lighting bugs, the air kicking on is the roar of a nearby waterfall, and ceilings are entire geographical landscapes.
Thus came the name for Malika: Storymere.
The Research
It’s taken me nearly a week to flesh out her story and it is wildly ambitious.
It covers really important themes like post-abolitionist slavery in Mauritania, a country in North West Africa. Mauritania formally abolished slavery November 9, 1981 (one year after my birth) but that law did not define slavery as a criminal offense. It also did not establish penalties and had very little enforcement. Slavery was not specifically criminalized until 2007 (the year my youngest daughter was born). Amnesty International, as well as multiple other sources, widely recognize Mauritania as the last country in the world to abolish and criminalize slavery. Only in 2015 (one year before my 10-year-old niece was born) was that law further strengthened so that slavery was considered a crime against humanity.
But also…the further I began digging into Mauritania, I found pretty terrifying things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had the character to do it.
In 2001, 71% of Mauritanian women have undergone FGM – female genital mutilation. In 2015, FGM is about 68% according to UNICEF. By 2021, national FGM prevalence is about 65% for girls ages 15-49, 45% of girls ages 0-14. But, in Malika’s area of Gorgol, it’s 82% the same year.
The next part is a little eerie.
I knew Malika’s name before I started researching, reading books, pretty much tearing about UNICEF and WIPO and Human Rights Watch sites and videos. She was always Malika because Malika means “queen” and this girl has zero autonomy over her body; I wanted to talk about that.
But in my research, I found a UN-backed research / social innovation project in Mauritania that was specifically designed to end FGM. The name of this project? MALIKA
(Measuring and
Analyzing
Linkage between
Information Technology
Knowledge and
Advocacy with adolescent to end FGM).
The name for this 2018 project was chosen because MALIKA means queen (which was why I chose it for my character).The implications for a story on slavery and who owns people spills into a conversation about who owns bodies. Because 82% of women in Gorgol have undergone some level of FGM (most of them fall into Type II).
Let’s move a layer down.
My story has two protagonists – one is named Aïssata. She is born in 1886. There is a raid, she is captured and sold to a Beydane family. She becomes the great-grandmother to my modern protagonist, Malika, whose story is centered in 2002.
In 2002, this was a country where slavery has technically been abolished for twenty-one years but has not been criminalized. So, many people are legally not “slaves” but are practically still bound to their former “owners” for economic reasons. Malika can honestly hear someone tell her, We’re not slaves anymore and yet still live under extraordinary former-master control. 7 in 10 women nationally (and an unbelievable 4 out of 5 in Gorgol) have undergone FGM.
Oh, but wait because that’s not all.
Zina is the Islamic legal term for sex outside marriage. It can include things like adultery or just having sex unmarried. Zina assumes unlawful consensual sex. Pregnancy is often considered evidence of sex and therefore it is also considered evidence of zina, not rape.
In 1983 (I was 3 years old), Articles 307 make zina a crime and the punishment is 100 public lashes and one year in prison. There is also Article 309, which was done in 1984 that criminalizes rape.
In 2002 (the year of Storymere), UNFPA released a report that says almost all women and girls who reported rape were accused of fornication and ended up in jail.
HRW states that even as late as 2018, zina is a problem. Survivors risk prosecution if they report sexual violence.
In 2016 there was a case of a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She reported the assault and she was prosecuted for zina. She eventually spent time in a women’s prison. “Zeina” was 16; she was trafficked into Mauritania at 14, repeatedly raped and became pregnant. She was convicted after giving birth of zina and she was required to report to the police weekly. M’barka was 17 in 2005. According to the SOS Escalves and US State Department, she was forced into domestic servitude, raped and impregnated by a household member and charged zina. Nothing happened to the rapist. In 2017 alone there were 64 women and girls who were detained in the women’s prison – half of them were prosecuted or convicted of zina. HRW also found that at least two girls housed in the juvenile center between 2015-2018 were charged with zina.
Storymere
Imagine being a young girl whose body has been cut before you can remember but whose entire life is shadowed by that cutting. Imagine it doesn’t heal properly, so you have thickened scarring that impacts your life. Frequent infections like UTIs. Menstruation is hard. Sex, even marital, loving and consensual sex, is painful. You’re shadowed by a pretty constant reminder that you are not valued as you are. Imagine being the same girl whose great-grandmother was a slave, owned by a Beydane (higher caste) family; a hundred years later, you don’t speak the same Pulaar language as your great-grandmother because you’ve been assimilated into the Beydane culture. While you are legally free, you cannot leave because the house you sleep in, the farm your father cultivates, the goats that feed you are all controlled by the descendants of your great-grandmother’s master. If you get sick, the Beydane family may pay for a doctor. If you get married, they may send a gift. If your family doesn’t have the resources to get a goat, the Beydane family may advance you a goat.
Now imagine that, at fifteen, you are raped by a member of that Beydane family; let’s say it was a son around twenty-years-old. He has social standing, wealth, and the respect of the community. You are a descendant of a slave, and everyone knows which families have been slaves, and which have been masters. Your grandmother and mother and father refer to the son’s father as “Sidi Mahmoud.” Sidi is used for nobility… or masters.
But it’s an interesting time to be alive because there are four midwives who have started trying to combat rape and FGM. Eventually two of the four would quit because they were scared of retaliation against their daughters. But, for now, let’s say there’s four of them. One of them is particularly influential and when she sees you, she slowly talks you into reporting the rape. Against the Beydane boy.
The Beydane family says, How could you be so ungrateful? We have always taken care of you. Your family says, We’ve worked the land ourselves and the response is, yes, because we’ve let you. Eventually, they come one day quietly and say, “The house has been given to someone else.” It’s their house, not yours. The goats are theirs, too, not yours. So, now one fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter is in jail for zina and the rest of the family is sleeping literally outside with no access to the cultivate the land and no goats.
Where do you go?
I would go to Storymere.
There’s a place not everyone can go.
It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.
Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.
Yahya.
He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.
When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.
Or are we?
Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. They say, “It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.“
I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.
Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.
Until the night I described her to Lalla.
Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”
#abuse #africa #african #blogging #bookReview #books #fgm #fiction #hope #life #rape #slavery #women #Writing #zina -
Storymere
This is a deeply personal post, and some of it might be troubling.
If so, please know The Holding Room has many resources – some that you can download and print for free and some with phone numbers and website links where you can speak to people who will be there whenever you need someone to listen. Also, you can reach out to me by email here or here.
You are not alone.
I don’t remember a time when stories have not been part of my life.
The very earliest one I remember captivating me was Rapunzel, the original version. The poor peasant husband who stole rhubarb for his pregnant wife, the witch who wanted a baby but was so scared of being alone that she trapped the girl in a tower, the prince blinded by thorns he fell into after her hair was cut – the entire story felt lived in and real. It was the first story I remember falling in love with. But, by then, stories were already filling my head and spilling into real life.
By the time I remember repeatedly asking for anyone to tell me Rapunzel’s story, I was writing my own. Sweet Shelby and Stacy were the earliest ones – I don’t remember writing Stacy, the story of the little girl trying to find a present for her mother, but I do remember writing Sweet Shelby when I was barely in kindergarten.
Almost always, though, my characters appeared somewhere else before they made it onto paper.
Five is a pivotal age: many children start school then; adults can sometimes remember events from five onward. It’s also the year the sexual abuse began. I don’t know exactly when Storymere appeared; I only know I don’t remember a time without it.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe seven or eight and on a bed with a scratchy, wool-like blanket I picked at. I don’t remember the moments before or immediately after the abuse – I have frustrating snippets, words that sometimes trigger me, phrases that snag a corner deep inside – but I do remember with crystal clarity when his fingers gripped my arm, pulling it to touch him. If you’ve ever watched a pot of water on a stove, you’ve seen boiling bubbles. They start small– only a few here in the corner, and then a few more there in the center–but they multiply and grow in size quickly until they are rolling. Boiling bubbles is what my insides felt like whenever I was touched. Just as if some of that boiling water splashed on your hand, making you blister before jerking away, the boiling bubbles crowded my lungs until all I felt was panic.
The kind of panic that makes you look desperately around for anything that might give necessary oxygen.
I remember not wanting to look at him. The smell of Marlborough cigarettes and the feel of a stubble were overwhelming and when he would tell me to be still, those boiling bubbles would quadruple, and I would stop breathing altogether because I knew what came next. I couldn’t move because I was held down but I could scan the room. I vividly remember a black and gold blanket that hung on the wall of a lion.
My eyes landed on the ceiling.
Like the image of my ceiling above, the plaster made small peaks.
Except…
It wasn’t plaster anymore.
Instead of the bumpy ridge of the ceiling, I saw verdant mountains.
When I think back to the earliest memories of this happening, the scenes were small. It didn’t take up the entire ceiling, only the small patch above me. But playing among the mountains were children I recognized. Which is weird, honestly, because I was only seven or eight – I had no understanding of how to describe a character’s physical appearance. But I recognized them as characters in the stories crowding my brain. Instead of popping and blistering my insides, the boiling panic bubbles shrunk; I could breathe. I don’t know which character it was, but it was a boy, older than me but not by much, with blonde hair who was chasing a girl near water. They were bending over the water, very still, very quiet until, suddenly, they both jumped. The boy fell face forward. His arms splashed the water.
A sharp, stabbing pain made the scene completely vanish, like a zipper being pulled closed over the ceiling. The boiling bubbles were back and my whole body felt as though it were on fire. The smell of his breath overwhelmed me but, mostly, terror. The moment of the rapes almost always ripped me away from the safe place I’d found, and I would struggle to breathe. I’d start crying, which would make him mad, and there was something about the repeated rocking that I couldn’t handle. I remember feeling as though I were dying because I could feel my body being torn.
And I’d start frantically looking at the ceiling. I’d stare as hard as I could at the plaster. Like you make shapes out of clouds, I’d scan that ceiling for something in it, terrified because the bubbles were crowding my lungs again and air was hard to find and my skin felt as though it were being peeled off.
There – it wasn’t a mountain peak; it was a small crack. I don’t know how, but I saw crystal blue water running from the it. My body was on fire, and I distinctly remember my throat hurting. So, I stared at that water until the crack got bigger and then – there they were – the same two kids who had been playing earlier. The bubbles shrunk; I can’t tell you exactly what he was doing anymore to me; when he spoke, it was garbled now. But I could breathe.
It was a frog. The boy had a frog in his hands. I couldn’t see what kind or how big, but I saw its slick green body.
Years later, when I had two daughters, we loved going to a place called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here, they have a beautiful pond. Once, when my oldest was around ten, eleven, they would make trips around that pond, searching for frogs. I didn’t tell them to do that; they just did. And, when they caught one, my world froze. Not because it was an idyllic childhood moment, one snatched from an era they weren’t a part of, but because I remembered the boy and the girl from the ceiling when I was seven or eight.
Storymere never stopped coming for me.
In fact, it became bigger the older I got. The better I became at writing, and the more complex my written books became, the more elaborate Storymere got. It was also easier to find. By the time I was in middle school, I knew that if he turned me so that I couldn’t see the ceiling, all I had to do was pick a spot on the wall and stare at it. Soon, the world on the ceiling would start spilling onto the walls. I remember Ash once slid from the ceiling to the wall, which was now a giant hill; he was laughing. I am convinced today that the little blonde-haired boy I saw when I was seven or eight was a younger version of Ash.
I never had a name for it.
The world I’d go to whenever my body felt trapped or in pain it couldn’t survive never had a name.
But, as I grew older, I would start deliberately trying to see my characters. I learned that staring at the same space for five, ten seconds could sometimes open doors or walls or ceilings. Air vents became caves or tunnels. Lightbulbs became the moon or the sun or Victorian-era lanterns. Fire alarms became bushes or stumps. Once, one became a bonfire around which my characters sat.
Most of the time, I never directly participated in any of the scenes.
But, occasionally, right as the pain was becoming so great it threatened to collapse everything, Landon spoke up loudly, saying, “Tiffini, look!” and pointing toward the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. The horse was running – and I could feel my body shaking, I could feel the pain, but I could also feel wind on my skin that was really a fan blowing but it made me uncertain. I wasn’t sure if the jolting I felt in my body from what my dad was doing wasn’t just a galloping horse shaking the ground instead. It was enough to keep me there, with the mountains and the characters I loved, instead of being violently tossed back into rape.
I am currently writing Móin & Marrow; I hope to have it finished by January.
And I have never written two books at once.
Never.
But a week or so ago, a different character began shadowing me. Uncharacteristically, I knew within a day or so the overarching theme of her story, which meant I knew for certain she’s not part of Móin & Marrow. She was seeing a world open on a primitive looking ceiling. So, I did what I do and started cataloging everything she showed me. And then I heard Landon, one of my favorite male characters, and he said, “Come ‘mere.”
There’s a few characters – Landon Montgomery, Clayton Cunningham, Maikel, Ash – who I would follow just about anywhere. Landon’s “come ‘mere” felt connected to Malika, the character who had been shadowing me. Soon, I knew “Storymere” was my world, the one I’ve seen all my life. The one where headlights shining through the windows become lighting bugs, the air kicking on is the roar of a nearby waterfall, and ceilings are entire geographical landscapes.
Thus came the name for Malika: Storymere.
The Research
It’s taken me nearly a week to flesh out her story and it is wildly ambitious.
It covers really important themes like post-abolitionist slavery in Mauritania, a country in North West Africa. Mauritania formally abolished slavery November 9, 1981 (one year after my birth) but that law did not define slavery as a criminal offense. It also did not establish penalties and had very little enforcement. Slavery was not specifically criminalized until 2007 (the year my youngest daughter was born). Amnesty International, as well as multiple other sources, widely recognize Mauritania as the last country in the world to abolish and criminalize slavery. Only in 2015 (one year before my 10-year-old niece was born) was that law further strengthened so that slavery was considered a crime against humanity.
But also…the further I began digging into Mauritania, I found pretty terrifying things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had the character to do it.
In 2001, 71% of Mauritanian women have undergone FGM – female genital mutilation. In 2015, FGM is about 68% according to UNICEF. By 2021, national FGM prevalence is about 65% for girls ages 15-49, 45% of girls ages 0-14. But, in Malika’s area of Gorgol, it’s 82% the same year.
The next part is a little eerie.
I knew Malika’s name before I started researching, reading books, pretty much tearing about UNICEF and WIPO and Human Rights Watch sites and videos. She was always Malika because Malika means “queen” and this girl has zero autonomy over her body; I wanted to talk about that.
But in my research, I found a UN-backed research / social innovation project in Mauritania that was specifically designed to end FGM. The name of this project? MALIKA
(Measuring and
Analyzing
Linkage between
Information
Technology
Knowledge and
Advocacy with adolescent to end FGM).
The name for this 2018 project was chosen because MALIKA means queen (which was why I chose it for my character).The implications for a story on slavery and who owns people spills into a conversation about who owns bodies. Because 82% of women in Gorgol have undergone some level of FGM (most of them fall into Type II).
Let’s move a layer down.
My story has two protagonists – one is named Aïssata. She is born in 1886. There is a raid, she is captured and sold to a Beydane family. She becomes the great-grandmother to my modern protagonist, Malika, whose story is centered in 2002.
In 2002, this was a country where slavery has technically been abolished for twenty-one years but has not been criminalized. So, many people are legally not “slaves” but are practically still bound to their former “owners” for economic reasons. Malika can honestly hear someone tell her, We’re not slaves anymore and yet still live under extraordinary former-master control. 7 in 10 women nationally (and an unbelievable 4 out of 5 in Gorgol) have undergone FGM.
Oh, but wait because that’s not all.
Zina is the Islamic legal term for sex outside marriage. It can include things like adultery or just having sex unmarried. Zina assumes unlawful consensual sex. Pregnancy is often considered evidence of sex and therefore it is also considered evidence of zina, not rape.
In 1983 (I was 3 years old), Articles 307 make zina a crime and the punishment is 100 public lashes and one year in prison. There is also Article 309, which was done in 1984 that criminalizes rape.
In 2002 (the year of Storymere), UNFPA released a report that says almost all women and girls who reported rape were accused of fornication and ended up in jail.
HRW states that even as late as 2018, zina is a problem. Survivors risk prosecution if they report sexual violence.
In 2016 there was a case of a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She reported the assault and she was prosecuted for zina. She eventually spent time in a women’s prison. “Zeina” was 16; she was trafficked into Mauritania at 14, repeatedly raped and became pregnant. She was convicted after giving birth of zina and she was required to report to the police weekly. M’barka was 17 in 2005. According to the SOS Escalves and US State Department, she was forced into domestic servitude, raped and impregnated by a household member and charged zina. Nothing happened to the rapist. In 2017 alone there were 64 women and girls who were detained in the women’s prison – half of them were prosecuted or convicted of zina. HRW also found that at least two girls housed in the juvenile center between 2015-2018 were charged with zina.
Storymere
Imagine being a young girl whose body has been cut before you can remember but whose entire life is shadowed by that cutting. Imagine it doesn’t heal properly, so you have thickened scarring that impacts your life. Frequent infections like UTIs. Menstruation is hard. Sex, even marital, loving and consensual sex, is painful. You’re shadowed by a pretty constant reminder that you are not valued as you are. Imagine being the same girl whose great-grandmother was a slave, owned by a Beydane (higher caste) family; a hundred years later, you don’t speak the same Puular language as your great-grandmother because you’ve been assimilated into the Beydane culture. While you are legally free, you cannot leave because the house you sleep in, the farm your father cultivates, the goats that feed you are all controlled by the descendants of your great-grandmother’s master. If you get sick, the Beydane family may pay for a doctor. If you get married, they may send a gift. If your family doesn’t have the resources to get a goat, the Beydane family may advance you a goat.
Now imagine that, at fifteen, you are raped by a member of that Beydane family; let’s say it was a son around twenty-years-old. He has social standing, wealth, and the respect of the community. You are a descendant of a slave, and everyone knows which families have been slaves, and which have been masters. Your grandmother and mother and father refer to the son’s father as “Sidi Mahmoud.” Sidi is used for nobility… or masters.
But it’s an interesting time to be alive because there are four midwives who have started trying to combat rape and FGM. Eventually two of the four would quit because they were scared of retaliation against their daughters. But, for now, let’s say there’s four of them. One of them is particularly influential and when she sees you, she slowly talks you into reporting the rape. Against the Beydane boy.
The Beydane family says, How could you be so ungrateful? We have always taken care of you. Your family says, We’ve worked the land ourselves and the response is, yes, because we’ve let you. Eventually, they come one day quietly and say, “The house has been given to someone else.” It’s their house, not yours. The goats are theirs, too, not yours. So, now one fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter is in jail for zina and the rest of the family is sleeping literally outside with no access to the cultivate the land and no goats.
Where do you go?
I would go to Storymere.
There’s a place not everyone can go.
It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.
Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.
Yahya.
He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.
When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.
Or are we?
Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. They say, “It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.“
I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.
Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.
Until the night I described her to Lalla.
Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”
#Writing #fiction #hope #women #abuse #books #life #blogging #rape #slavery #bookReview #african #africa #fgm #zina -
Storymere
This is a deeply personal post, and some of it might be troubling.
If so, please know The Holding Room has many resources – some that you can download and print for free and some with phone numbers and website links where you can speak to people who will be there whenever you need someone to listen. Also, you can reach out to me by email here or here.
You are not alone.
I don’t remember a time when stories have not been part of my life.
The very earliest one I remember captivating me was Rapunzel, the original version. The poor peasant husband who stole rhubarb for his pregnant wife, the witch who wanted a baby but was so scared of being alone that she trapped the girl in a tower, the prince blinded by thorns he fell into after her hair was cut – the entire story felt lived in and real. It was the first story I remember falling in love with. But, by then, stories were already filling my head and spilling into real life.
By the time I remember repeatedly asking for anyone to tell me Rapunzel’s story, I was writing my own. Sweet Shelby and Stacy were the earliest ones – I don’t remember writing Stacy, the story of the little girl trying to find a present for her mother, but I do remember writing Sweet Shelby when I was barely in kindergarten.
Almost always, though, my characters appeared somewhere else before they made it onto paper.
Five is a pivotal age: many children start school then; adults can sometimes remember events from five onward. It’s also the year the sexual abuse began. I don’t know exactly when Storymere appeared; I only know I don’t remember a time without it.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe seven or eight and on a bed with a scratchy, wool-like blanket I picked at. I don’t remember the moments before or immediately after the abuse – I have frustrating snippets, words that sometimes trigger me, phrases that snag a corner deep inside – but I do remember with crystal clarity when his fingers gripped my arm, pulling it to touch him. If you’ve ever watched a pot of water on a stove, you’ve seen boiling bubbles. They start small– only a few here in the corner, and then a few more there in the center–but they multiply and grow in size quickly until they are rolling. Boiling bubbles is what my insides felt like whenever I was touched. Just as if some of that boiling water splashed on your hand, making you blister before jerking away, the boiling bubbles crowded my lungs until all I felt was panic.
The kind of panic that makes you look desperately around for anything that might give necessary oxygen.
I remember not wanting to look at him. The smell of Marlborough cigarettes and the feel of a stubble were overwhelming and when he would tell me to be still, those boiling bubbles would quadruple, and I would stop breathing altogether because I knew what came next. I couldn’t move because I was held down but I could scan the room. I vividly remember a black and gold blanket that hung on the wall of a lion.
My eyes landed on the ceiling.
Like the image of my ceiling above, the plaster made small peaks.
Except…
It wasn’t plaster anymore.
Instead of the bumpy ridge of the ceiling, I saw verdant mountains.
When I think back to the earliest memories of this happening, the scenes were small. It didn’t take up the entire ceiling, only the small patch above me. But playing among the mountains were children I recognized. Which is weird, honestly, because I was only seven or eight – I had no understanding of how to describe a character’s physical appearance. But I recognized them as characters in the stories crowding my brain. Instead of popping and blistering my insides, the boiling panic bubbles shrunk; I could breathe. I don’t know which character it was, but it was a boy, older than me but not by much, with blonde hair who was chasing a girl near water. They were bending over the water, very still, very quiet until, suddenly, they both jumped. The boy fell face forward. His arms splashed the water.
A sharp, stabbing pain made the scene completely vanish, like a zipper being pulled closed over the ceiling. The boiling bubbles were back and my whole body felt as though it were on fire. The smell of his breath overwhelmed me but, mostly, terror. The moment of the rapes almost always ripped me away from the safe place I’d found, and I would struggle to breathe. I’d start crying, which would make him mad, and there was something about the repeated rocking that I couldn’t handle. I remember feeling as though I were dying because I could feel my body being torn.
And I’d start frantically looking at the ceiling. I’d stare as hard as I could at the plaster. Like you make shapes out of clouds, I’d scan that ceiling for something in it, terrified because the bubbles were crowding my lungs again and air was hard to find and my skin felt as though it were being peeled off.
There – it wasn’t a mountain peak; it was a small crack. I don’t know how, but I saw crystal blue water running from the it. My body was on fire, and I distinctly remember my throat hurting. So, I stared at that water until the crack got bigger and then – there they were – the same two kids who had been playing earlier. The bubbles shrunk; I can’t tell you exactly what he was doing anymore to me; when he spoke, it was garbled now. But I could breathe.
It was a frog. The boy had a frog in his hands. I couldn’t see what kind or how big, but I saw its slick green body.
Years later, when I had two daughters, we loved going to a place called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here, they have a beautiful pond. Once, when my oldest was around ten, eleven, they would make trips around that pond, searching for frogs. I didn’t tell them to do that; they just did. And, when they caught one, my world froze. Not because it was an idyllic childhood moment, one snatched from an era they weren’t a part of, but because I remembered the boy and the girl from the ceiling when I was seven or eight.
Storymere never stopped coming for me.
In fact, it became bigger the older I got. The better I became at writing, and the more complex my written books became, the more elaborate Storymere got. It was also easier to find. By the time I was in middle school, I knew that if he turned me so that I couldn’t see the ceiling, all I had to do was pick a spot on the wall and stare at it. Soon, the world on the ceiling would start spilling onto the walls. I remember Ash once slid from the ceiling to the wall, which was now a giant hill; he was laughing. I am convinced today that the little blonde-haired boy I saw when I was seven or eight was a younger version of Ash.
I never had a name for it.
The world I’d go to whenever my body felt trapped or in pain it couldn’t survive never had a name.
But, as I grew older, I would start deliberately trying to see my characters. I learned that staring at the same space for five, ten seconds could sometimes open doors or walls or ceilings. Air vents became caves or tunnels. Lightbulbs became the moon or the sun or Victorian-era lanterns. Fire alarms became bushes or stumps. Once, one became a bonfire around which my characters sat.
Most of the time, I never directly participated in any of the scenes.
But, occasionally, right as the pain was becoming so great it threatened to collapse everything, Landon spoke up loudly, saying, “Tiffini, look!” and pointing toward the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. The horse was running – and I could feel my body shaking, I could feel the pain, but I could also feel wind on my skin that was really a fan blowing but it made me uncertain. I wasn’t sure if the jolting I felt in my body from what my dad was doing wasn’t just a galloping horse shaking the ground instead. It was enough to keep me there, with the mountains and the characters I loved, instead of being violently tossed back into rape.
I am currently writing Móin & Marrow; I hope to have it finished by January.
And I have never written two books at once.
Never.
But a week or so ago, a different character began shadowing me. Uncharacteristically, I knew within a day or so the overarching theme of her story, which meant I knew for certain she’s not part of Móin & Marrow. She was seeing a world open on a primitive looking ceiling. So, I did what I do and started cataloging everything she showed me. And then I heard Landon, one of my favorite male characters, and he said, “Come ‘mere.”
There’s a few characters – Landon Montgomery, Clayton Cunningham, Maikel, Ash – who I would follow just about anywhere. Landon’s “come ‘mere” felt connected to Malika, the character who had been shadowing me. Soon, I knew “Storymere” was my world, the one I’ve seen all my life. The one where headlights shining through the windows become lighting bugs, the air kicking on is the roar of a nearby waterfall, and ceilings are entire geographical landscapes.
Thus came the name for Malika: Storymere.
The Research
It’s taken me nearly a week to flesh out her story and it is wildly ambitious.
It covers really important themes like post-abolitionist slavery in Mauritania, a country in North West Africa. Mauritania formally abolished slavery November 9, 1981 (one year after my birth) but that law did not define slavery as a criminal offense. It also did not establish penalties and had very little enforcement. Slavery was not specifically criminalized until 2007 (the year my youngest daughter was born). Amnesty International, as well as multiple other sources, widely recognize Mauritania as the last country in the world to abolish and criminalize slavery. Only in 2015 (one year before my 10-year-old niece was born) was that law further strengthened so that slavery was considered a crime against humanity.
But also…the further I began digging into Mauritania, I found pretty terrifying things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had the character to do it.
In 2001, 71% of Mauritanian women have undergone FGM – female genital mutilation. In 2015, FGM is about 68% according to UNICEF. By 2021, national FGM prevalence is about 65% for girls ages 15-49, 45% of girls ages 0-14. But, in Malika’s area of Gorgol, it’s 82% the same year.
The next part is a little eerie.
I knew Malika’s name before I started researching, reading books, pretty much tearing about UNICEF and WIPO and Human Rights Watch sites and videos. She was always Malika because Malika means “queen” and this girl has zero autonomy over her body; I wanted to talk about that.
But in my research, I found a UN-backed research / social innovation project in Mauritania that was specifically designed to end FGM. The name of this project? MALIKA
(Measuring and
Analyzing
Linkage between
Information
Technology
Knowledge and
Advocacy with adolescent to end FGM).
The name for this 2018 project was chosen because MALIKA means queen (which was why I chose it for my character).The implications for a story on slavery and who owns people spills into a conversation about who owns bodies. Because 82% of women in Gorgol have undergone some level of FGM (most of them fall into Type II).
Let’s move a layer down.
My story has two protagonists – one is named Aïssata. She is born in 1886. There is a raid, she is captured and sold to a Beydane family. She becomes the great-grandmother to my modern protagonist, Malika, whose story is centered in 2002.
In 2002, this was a country where slavery has technically been abolished for twenty-one years but has not been criminalized. So, many people are legally not “slaves” but are practically still bound to their former “owners” for economic reasons. Malika can honestly hear someone tell her, We’re not slaves anymore and yet still live under extraordinary former-master control. 7 in 10 women nationally (and an unbelievable 4 out of 5 in Gorgol) have undergone FGM.
Oh, but wait because that’s not all.
Zina is the Islamic legal term for sex outside marriage. It can include things like adultery or just having sex unmarried. Zina assumes unlawful consensual sex. Pregnancy is often considered evidence of sex and therefore it is also considered evidence of zina, not rape.
In 1983 (I was 3 years old), Articles 307 make zina a crime and the punishment is 100 public lashes and one year in prison. There is also Article 309, which was done in 1984 that criminalizes rape.
In 2002 (the year of Storymere), UNFPA released a report that says almost all women and girls who reported rape were accused of fornication and ended up in jail.
HRW states that even as late as 2018, zina is a problem. Survivors risk prosecution if they report sexual violence.
In 2016 there was a case of a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She reported the assault and she was prosecuted for zina. She eventually spent time in a women’s prison. “Zeina” was 16; she was trafficked into Mauritania at 14, repeatedly raped and became pregnant. She was convicted after giving birth of zina and she was required to report to the police weekly. M’barka was 17 in 2005. According to the SOS Escalves and US State Department, she was forced into domestic servitude, raped and impregnated by a household member and charged zina. Nothing happened to the rapist. In 2017 alone there were 64 women and girls who were detained in the women’s prison – half of them were prosecuted or convicted of zina. HRW also found that at least two girls housed in the juvenile center between 2015-2018 were charged with zina.
Storymere
Imagine being a young girl whose body has been cut before you can remember but whose entire life is shadowed by that cutting. Imagine it doesn’t heal properly, so you have thickened scarring that impacts your life. Frequent infections like UTIs. Menstruation is hard. Sex, even marital, loving and consensual sex, is painful. You’re shadowed by a pretty constant reminder that you are not valued as you are. Imagine being the same girl whose great-grandmother was a slave, owned by a Beydane (higher caste) family; a hundred years later, you don’t speak the same Puular language as your great-grandmother because you’ve been assimilated into the Beydane culture. While you are legally free, you cannot leave because the house you sleep in, the farm your father cultivates, the goats that feed you are all controlled by the descendants of your great-grandmother’s master. If you get sick, the Beydane family may pay for a doctor. If you get married, they may send a gift. If your family doesn’t have the resources to get a goat, the Beydane family may advance you a goat.
Now imagine that, at fifteen, you are raped by a member of that Beydane family; let’s say it was a son around twenty-years-old. He has social standing, wealth, and the respect of the community. You are a descendant of a slave, and everyone knows which families have been slaves, and which have been masters. Your grandmother and mother and father refer to the son’s father as “Sidi Mahmoud.” Sidi is used for nobility… or masters.
But it’s an interesting time to be alive because there are four midwives who have started trying to combat rape and FGM. Eventually two of the four would quit because they were scared of retaliation against their daughters. But, for now, let’s say there’s four of them. One of them is particularly influential and when she sees you, she slowly talks you into reporting the rape. Against the Beydane boy.
The Beydane family says, How could you be so ungrateful? We have always taken care of you. Your family says, We’ve worked the land ourselves and the response is, yes, because we’ve let you. Eventually, they come one day quietly and say, “The house has been given to someone else.” It’s their house, not yours. The goats are theirs, too, not yours. So, now one fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter is in jail for zina and the rest of the family is sleeping literally outside with no access to the cultivate the land and no goats.
Where do you go?
I would go to Storymere.
There’s a place not everyone can go.
It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.
Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.
Yahya.
He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.
When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.
Or are we?
Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. They say, “It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.“
I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.
Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.
Until the night I described her to Lalla.
Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”
#Writing #fiction #hope #women #abuse #books #life #blogging #rape #slavery #bookReview #african #africa #fgm #zina -
Storymere
This is a deeply personal post, and some of it might be troubling.
If so, please know The Holding Room has many resources – some that you can download and print for free and some with phone numbers and website links where you can speak to people who will be there whenever you need someone to listen. Also, you can reach out to me by email here or here.
You are not alone.
I don’t remember a time when stories have not been part of my life.
The very earliest one I remember captivating me was Rapunzel, the original version. The poor peasant husband who stole rhubarb for his pregnant wife, the witch who wanted a baby but was so scared of being alone that she trapped the girl in a tower, the prince blinded by thorns he fell into after her hair was cut – the entire story felt lived in and real. It was the first story I remember falling in love with. But, by then, stories were already filling my head and spilling into real life.
By the time I remember repeatedly asking for anyone to tell me Rapunzel’s story, I was writing my own. Sweet Shelby and Stacy were the earliest ones – I don’t remember writing Stacy, the story of the little girl trying to find a present for her mother, but I do remember writing Sweet Shelby when I was barely in kindergarten.
Almost always, though, my characters appeared somewhere else before they made it onto paper.
Five is a pivotal age: many children start school then; adults can sometimes remember events from five onward. It’s also the year the sexual abuse began. I don’t know exactly when Storymere appeared; I only know I don’t remember a time without it.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe seven or eight and on a bed with a scratchy, wool-like blanket I picked at. I don’t remember the moments before or immediately after the abuse – I have frustrating snippets, words that sometimes trigger me, phrases that snag a corner deep inside – but I do remember with crystal clarity when his fingers gripped my arm, pulling it to touch him. If you’ve ever watched a pot of water on a stove, you’ve seen boiling bubbles. They start small– only a few here in the corner, and then a few more there in the center–but they multiply and grow in size quickly until they are rolling. Boiling bubbles is what my insides felt like whenever I was touched. Just as if some of that boiling water splashed on your hand, making you blister before jerking away, the boiling bubbles crowded my lungs until all I felt was panic.
The kind of panic that makes you look desperately around for anything that might give necessary oxygen.
I remember not wanting to look at him. The smell of Marlborough cigarettes and the feel of a stubble were overwhelming and when he would tell me to be still, those boiling bubbles would quadruple, and I would stop breathing altogether because I knew what came next. I couldn’t move because I was held down but I could scan the room. I vividly remember a black and gold blanket that hung on the wall of a lion.
My eyes landed on the ceiling.
Like the image of my ceiling above, the plaster made small peaks.
Except…
It wasn’t plaster anymore.
Instead of the bumpy ridge of the ceiling, I saw verdant mountains.
When I think back to the earliest memories of this happening, the scenes were small. It didn’t take up the entire ceiling, only the small patch above me. But playing among the mountains were children I recognized. Which is weird, honestly, because I was only seven or eight – I had no understanding of how to describe a character’s physical appearance. But I recognized them as characters in the stories crowding my brain. Instead of popping and blistering my insides, the boiling panic bubbles shrunk; I could breathe. I don’t know which character it was, but it was a boy, older than me but not by much, with blonde hair who was chasing a girl near water. They were bending over the water, very still, very quiet until, suddenly, they both jumped. The boy fell face forward. His arms splashed the water.
A sharp, stabbing pain made the scene completely vanish, like a zipper being pulled closed over the ceiling. The boiling bubbles were back and my whole body felt as though it were on fire. The smell of his breath overwhelmed me but, mostly, terror. The moment of the rapes almost always ripped me away from the safe place I’d found, and I would struggle to breathe. I’d start crying, which would make him mad, and there was something about the repeated rocking that I couldn’t handle. I remember feeling as though I were dying because I could feel my body being torn.
And I’d start frantically looking at the ceiling. I’d stare as hard as I could at the plaster. Like you make shapes out of clouds, I’d scan that ceiling for something in it, terrified because the bubbles were crowding my lungs again and air was hard to find and my skin felt as though it were being peeled off.
There – it wasn’t a mountain peak; it was a small crack. I don’t know how, but I saw crystal blue water running from the it. My body was on fire, and I distinctly remember my throat hurting. So, I stared at that water until the crack got bigger and then – there they were – the same two kids who had been playing earlier. The bubbles shrunk; I can’t tell you exactly what he was doing anymore to me; when he spoke, it was garbled now. But I could breathe.
It was a frog. The boy had a frog in his hands. I couldn’t see what kind or how big, but I saw its slick green body.
Years later, when I had two daughters, we loved going to a place called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here, they have a beautiful pond. Once, when my oldest was around ten, eleven, they would make trips around that pond, searching for frogs. I didn’t tell them to do that; they just did. And, when they caught one, my world froze. Not because it was an idyllic childhood moment, one snatched from an era they weren’t a part of, but because I remembered the boy and the girl from the ceiling when I was seven or eight.
Storymere never stopped coming for me.
In fact, it became bigger the older I got. The better I became at writing, and the more complex my written books became, the more elaborate Storymere got. It was also easier to find. By the time I was in middle school, I knew that if he turned me so that I couldn’t see the ceiling, all I had to do was pick a spot on the wall and stare at it. Soon, the world on the ceiling would start spilling onto the walls. I remember Ash once slid from the ceiling to the wall, which was now a giant hill; he was laughing. I am convinced today that the little blonde-haired boy I saw when I was seven or eight was a younger version of Ash.
I never had a name for it.
The world I’d go to whenever my body felt trapped or in pain it couldn’t survive never had a name.
But, as I grew older, I would start deliberately trying to see my characters. I learned that staring at the same space for five, ten seconds could sometimes open doors or walls or ceilings. Air vents became caves or tunnels. Lightbulbs became the moon or the sun or Victorian-era lanterns. Fire alarms became bushes or stumps. Once, one became a bonfire around which my characters sat.
Most of the time, I never directly participated in any of the scenes.
But, occasionally, right as the pain was becoming so great it threatened to collapse everything, Landon spoke up loudly, saying, “Tiffini, look!” and pointing toward the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. The horse was running – and I could feel my body shaking, I could feel the pain, but I could also feel wind on my skin that was really a fan blowing but it made me uncertain. I wasn’t sure if the jolting I felt in my body from what my dad was doing wasn’t just a galloping horse shaking the ground instead. It was enough to keep me there, with the mountains and the characters I loved, instead of being violently tossed back into rape.
I am currently writing Móin & Marrow; I hope to have it finished by January.
And I have never written two books at once.
Never.
But a week or so ago, a different character began shadowing me. Uncharacteristically, I knew within a day or so the overarching theme of her story, which meant I knew for certain she’s not part of Móin & Marrow. She was seeing a world open on a primitive looking ceiling. So, I did what I do and started cataloging everything she showed me. And then I heard Landon, one of my favorite male characters, and he said, “Come ‘mere.”
There’s a few characters – Landon Montgomery, Clayton Cunningham, Maikel, Ash – who I would follow just about anywhere. Landon’s “come ‘mere” felt connected to Malika, the character who had been shadowing me. Soon, I knew “Storymere” was my world, the one I’ve seen all my life. The one where headlights shining through the windows become lighting bugs, the air kicking on is the roar of a nearby waterfall, and ceilings are entire geographical landscapes.
Thus came the name for Malika: Storymere.
The Research
It’s taken me nearly a week to flesh out her story and it is wildly ambitious.
It covers really important themes like post-abolitionist slavery in Mauritania, a country in North West Africa. Mauritania formally abolished slavery November 9, 1981 (one year after my birth) but that law did not define slavery as a criminal offense. It also did not establish penalties and had very little enforcement. Slavery was not specifically criminalized until 2007 (the year my youngest daughter was born). Amnesty International, as well as multiple other sources, widely recognize Mauritania as the last country in the world to abolish and criminalize slavery. Only in 2015 (one year before my 10-year-old niece was born) was that law further strengthened so that slavery was considered a crime against humanity.
But also…the further I began digging into Mauritania, I found pretty terrifying things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had the character to do it.
In 2001, 71% of Mauritanian women have undergone FGM – female genital mutilation. In 2015, FGM is about 68% according to UNICEF. By 2021, national FGM prevalence is about 65% for girls ages 15-49, 45% of girls ages 0-14. But, in Malika’s area of Gorgol, it’s 82% the same year.
The next part is a little eerie.
I knew Malika’s name before I started researching, reading books, pretty much tearing about UNICEF and WIPO and Human Rights Watch sites and videos. She was always Malika because Malika means “queen” and this girl has zero autonomy over her body; I wanted to talk about that.
But in my research, I found a UN-backed research / social innovation project in Mauritania that was specifically designed to end FGM. The name of this project? MALIKA
(Measuring and
Analyzing
Linkage between
Information
Technology
Knowledge and
Advocacy with adolescent to end FGM).
The name for this 2018 project was chosen because MALIKA means queen (which was why I chose it for my character).The implications for a story on slavery and who owns people spills into a conversation about who owns bodies. Because 82% of women in Gorgol have undergone some level of FGM (most of them fall into Type II).
Let’s move a layer down.
My story has two protagonists – one is named Aïssata. She is born in 1886. There is a raid, she is captured and sold to a Beydane family. She becomes the great-grandmother to my modern protagonist, Malika, whose story is centered in 2002.
In 2002, this was a country where slavery has technically been abolished for twenty-one years but has not been criminalized. So, many people are legally not “slaves” but are practically still bound to their former “owners” for economic reasons. Malika can honestly hear someone tell her, We’re not slaves anymore and yet still live under extraordinary former-master control. 7 in 10 women nationally (and an unbelievable 4 out of 5 in Gorgol) have undergone FGM.
Oh, but wait because that’s not all.
Zina is the Islamic legal term for sex outside marriage. It can include things like adultery or just having sex unmarried. Zina assumes unlawful consensual sex. Pregnancy is often considered evidence of sex and therefore it is also considered evidence of zina, not rape.
In 1983 (I was 3 years old), Articles 307 make zina a crime and the punishment is 100 public lashes and one year in prison. There is also Article 309, which was done in 1984 that criminalizes rape.
In 2002 (the year of Storymere), UNFPA released a report that says almost all women and girls who reported rape were accused of fornication and ended up in jail.
HRW states that even as late as 2018, zina is a problem. Survivors risk prosecution if they report sexual violence.
In 2016 there was a case of a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She reported the assault and she was prosecuted for zina. She eventually spent time in a women’s prison. “Zeina” was 16; she was trafficked into Mauritania at 14, repeatedly raped and became pregnant. She was convicted after giving birth of zina and she was required to report to the police weekly. M’barka was 17 in 2005. According to the SOS Escalves and US State Department, she was forced into domestic servitude, raped and impregnated by a household member and charged zina. Nothing happened to the rapist. In 2017 alone there were 64 women and girls who were detained in the women’s prison – half of them were prosecuted or convicted of zina. HRW also found that at least two girls housed in the juvenile center between 2015-2018 were charged with zina.
Storymere
Imagine being a young girl whose body has been cut before you can remember but whose entire life is shadowed by that cutting. Imagine it doesn’t heal properly, so you have thickened scarring that impacts your life. Frequent infections like UTIs. Menstruation is hard. Sex, even marital, loving and consensual sex, is painful. You’re shadowed by a pretty constant reminder that you are not valued as you are. Imagine being the same girl whose great-grandmother was a slave, owned by a Beydane (higher caste) family; a hundred years later, you don’t speak the same Puular language as your great-grandmother because you’ve been assimilated into the Beydane culture. While you are legally free, you cannot leave because the house you sleep in, the farm your father cultivates, the goats that feed you are all controlled by the descendants of your great-grandmother’s master. If you get sick, the Beydane family may pay for a doctor. If you get married, they may send a gift. If your family doesn’t have the resources to get a goat, the Beydane family may advance you a goat.
Now imagine that, at fifteen, you are raped by a member of that Beydane family; let’s say it was a son around twenty-years-old. He has social standing, wealth, and the respect of the community. You are a descendant of a slave, and everyone knows which families have been slaves, and which have been masters. Your grandmother and mother and father refer to the son’s father as “Sidi Mahmoud.” Sidi is used for nobility… or masters.
But it’s an interesting time to be alive because there are four midwives who have started trying to combat rape and FGM. Eventually two of the four would quit because they were scared of retaliation against their daughters. But, for now, let’s say there’s four of them. One of them is particularly influential and when she sees you, she slowly talks you into reporting the rape. Against the Beydane boy.
The Beydane family says, How could you be so ungrateful? We have always taken care of you. Your family says, We’ve worked the land ourselves and the response is, yes, because we’ve let you. Eventually, they come one day quietly and say, “The house has been given to someone else.” It’s their house, not yours. The goats are theirs, too, not yours. So, now one fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter is in jail for zina and the rest of the family is sleeping literally outside with no access to the cultivate the land and no goats.
Where do you go?
I would go to Storymere.
There’s a place not everyone can go.
It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.
Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.
Yahya.
He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.
When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.
Or are we?
Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. They say, “It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.“
I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.
Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.
Until the night I described her to Lalla.
Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”
#Writing #fiction #hope #women #abuse #books #life #blogging #rape #slavery #bookReview #african #africa #fgm #zina -
#WordWeavers 2026.09.26 — Authors talk about how smart their MCs or villains are, but have you ever written a slow-witted character?
Funny you should ask. Bolt in my current WIP is my premeditated attempt at doing just that, though I think "slow-witted" rarely is applicable and often derogatory. I'd say she's… differently-smart, not conventionally. She is a jock and is proud of her physical prowess and physique.
Think about those oft-caricatured varsity-letter high-school athletes in our male-dominated world that seem to have too high an opinion of themselves, but are always surrounded and adored by the opposite sex… Well, that was Bolt in upper school except that she's female. She had her string of ponies (her term for the guys she had as friends and otherwise enjoyed), and aways expected she's have them with her. With no interest in academics—only enough to stay eligible for athletics—she's not somebody who'll carry on an intellectual conversation with you, but if it's about training, anatomy, health, physical therapy, flying fast (and crazily), or aerial acrobatics, she's chatty, supportive, and helpful.
What she wasn't was full of herself, though. She earned her adoration and her team's championship—the team was all male but for her—by showing them they could, and demonstrating how. Though her life went crazy afterwards, and now a dozen years later she's coping with the fallout of bad decisions, she's still earnest, honest (as much as an employee of the mob could be), and tries to make everything right.
But slow-witted? She considers herself stupid. In her 1st person narration, she says that of herself when a lot when things don't work out. Mistakes. Past tense, but still. Lots of them, all right? She's not the hero of her story, but the catalyst without whom the heroes won't succeed, and she will earn her HEA (for now, anyway 😈).
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory -
#WordWeavers 2026.09.26 — Authors talk about how smart their MCs or villains are, but have you ever written a slow-witted character?
Funny you should ask. Bolt in my current WIP is my premeditated attempt at doing just that, though I think "slow-witted" rarely is applicable and often derogatory. I'd say she's… differently-smart, not conventionally. She is a jock and is proud of her physical prowess and physique.
Think about those oft-caricatured varsity-letter high-school athletes in our male-dominated world that seem to have too high an opinion of themselves, but are always surrounded and adored by the opposite sex… Well, that was Bolt in upper school except that she's female. She had her string of ponies (her term for the guys she had as friends and otherwise enjoyed), and aways expected she's have them with her. With no interest in academics—only enough to stay eligible for athletics—she's not somebody who'll carry on an intellectual conversation with you, but if it's about training, anatomy, health, physical therapy, flying fast (and crazily), or aerial acrobatics, she's chatty, supportive, and helpful.
What she wasn't was full of herself, though. She earned her adoration and her team's championship—the team was all male but for her—by showing them they could, and demonstrating how. Though her life went crazy afterwards, and now a dozen years later she's coping with the fallout of bad decisions, she's still earnest, honest (as much as an employee of the mob could be), and tries to make everything right.
But slow-witted? She considers herself stupid. In her 1st person narration, she says that of herself when a lot when things don't work out. Mistakes. Past tense, but still. Lots of them, all right? She's not the hero of her story, but the catalyst without whom the heroes won't succeed, and she will earn her HEA (for now, anyway 😈).
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory -
#WordWeavers 2026.09.26 — Authors talk about how smart their MCs or villains are, but have you ever written a slow-witted character?
Funny you should ask. Bolt in my current WIP is my premeditated attempt at doing just that, though I think "slow-witted" rarely is applicable and often derogatory. I'd say she's… differently-smart, not conventionally. She is a jock and is proud of her physical prowess and physique.
Think about those oft-caricatured varsity-letter high-school athletes in our male-dominated world that seem to have too high an opinion of themselves, but are always surrounded and adored by the opposite sex… Well, that was Bolt in upper school except that she's female. She had her string of ponies (her term for the guys she had as friends and otherwise enjoyed), and aways expected she's have them with her. With no interest in academics—only enough to stay eligible for athletics—she's not somebody who'll carry on an intellectual conversation with you, but if it's about training, anatomy, health, physical therapy, flying fast (and crazily), or aerial acrobatics, she's chatty, supportive, and helpful.
What she wasn't was full of herself, though. She earned her adoration and her team's championship—the team was all male but for her—by showing them they could, and demonstrating how. Though her life went crazy afterwards, and now a dozen years later she's coping with the fallout of bad decisions, she's still earnest, honest (as much as an employee of the mob could be), and tries to make everything right.
But slow-witted? She considers herself stupid. In her 1st person narration, she says that of herself when a lot when things don't work out. Mistakes. Past tense, but still. Lots of them, all right? She's not the hero of her story, but the catalyst without whom the heroes won't succeed, and she will earn her HEA (for now, anyway 😈).
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory -
#WordWeavers 2026.09.26 — Authors talk about how smart their MCs or villains are, but have you ever written a slow-witted character?
Funny you should ask. Bolt in my current WIP is my premeditated attempt at doing just that, though I think "slow-witted" rarely is applicable and often derogatory. I'd say she's… differently-smart, not conventionally. She is a jock and is proud of her physical prowess and physique.
Think about those oft-caricatured varsity-letter high-school athletes in our male-dominated world that seem to have too high an opinion of themselves, but are always surrounded and adored by the opposite sex… Well, that was Bolt in upper school except that she's female. She had her string of ponies (her term for the guys she had as friends and otherwise enjoyed), and aways expected she's have them with her. With no interest in academics—only enough to stay eligible for athletics—she's not somebody who'll carry on an intellectual conversation with you, but if it's about training, anatomy, health, physical therapy, flying fast (and crazily), or aerial acrobatics, she's chatty, supportive, and helpful.
What she wasn't was full of herself, though. She earned her adoration and her team's championship—the team was all male but for her—by showing them they could, and demonstrating how. Though her life went crazy afterwards, and now a dozen years later she's coping with the fallout of bad decisions, she's still earnest, honest (as much as an employee of the mob could be), and tries to make everything right.
But slow-witted? She considers herself stupid. In her 1st person narration, she says that of herself when a lot when things don't work out. Mistakes. Past tense, but still. Lots of them, all right? She's not the hero of her story, but the catalyst without whom the heroes won't succeed, and she will earn her HEA (for now, anyway 😈).
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory -
#WordWeavers 2026.09.26 — Authors talk about how smart their MCs or villains are, but have you ever written a slow-witted character?
Funny you should ask. Bolt in my current WIP is my premeditated attempt at doing just that, though I think "slow-witted" rarely is applicable and often derogatory. I'd say she's… differently-smart, not conventionally. She is a jock and is proud of her physical prowess and physique.
Think about those oft-caricatured varsity-letter high-school athletes in our male-dominated world that seem to have too high an opinion of themselves, but are always surrounded and adored by the opposite sex… Well, that was Bolt in upper school except that she's female. She had her string of ponies (her term for the guys she had as friends and otherwise enjoyed), and aways expected she's have them with her. With no interest in academics—only enough to stay eligible for athletics—she's not somebody who'll carry on an intellectual conversation with you, but if it's about training, anatomy, health, physical therapy, flying fast (and crazily), or aerial acrobatics, she's chatty, supportive, and helpful.
What she wasn't was full of herself, though. She earned her adoration and her team's championship—the team was all male but for her—by showing them they could, and demonstrating how. Though her life went crazy afterwards, and now a dozen years later she's coping with the fallout of bad decisions, she's still earnest, honest (as much as an employee of the mob could be), and tries to make everything right.
But slow-witted? She considers herself stupid. In her 1st person narration, she says that of herself when a lot when things don't work out. Mistakes. Past tense, but still. Lots of them, all right? She's not the hero of her story, but the catalyst without whom the heroes won't succeed, and she will earn her HEA (for now, anyway 😈).
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory -
Slowing Down: Learning to Live Within My Limits
Slowing down. Slowing down. Slowing down.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last five years.
Health issues and life in general required a slower pace. There were things I simply couldn’t do anymore, or couldn’t do in the way I once had. So I learned to slow down—not necessarily because I wanted to, but because I had to.
And lately, something has shifted.
My health hasn’t magically returned to what it was before, but I have been able to do more. I’m slowly rebuilding strength. I’ve started lifting weights again, carefully and deliberately, and I’m working on my mobility. There are glimpses of the person I used to be physically, and I’m grateful for them.
But progress brings its own challenge.
When you begin feeling better, it’s very easy to start thinking you can do more. And then a little more. And maybe just one more thing. Until suddenly, you’ve filled the space that slowing down was meant to protect.
I’m learning that getting stronger doesn’t mean I no longer need to be mindful of my limits.
I’m also a caregiver to my aging parents, both of whom are living with dementia, which adds another layer to that balance. My days aren’t entirely my own, and there are times when the needs of other people have to come before what I might want to do. Caregiving can be unpredictable, exhausting, and sometimes lonely, and I know I’m far from the only person trying to navigate this complicated role while also trying to take care of myself.
That’s part of why I’ve become more intentional about leaving room in my days. I need downtime. I need rest. I need time to read, sit outside, or simply do nothing for a while. Those things aren’t luxuries; they’re part of what allows me to keep going.
Recently, I had the flu, which triggered a flare in my symptoms. It was a good reminder that my body still has its own timetable. So I’m constantly reminding myself not to overdo it, not to cram too much into a day, and not to fill every empty space on the calendar simply because I happen to feel good that day.
I need to leave room for downtime. For rest. For reading. For sitting outside and breathing fresh air without needing to accomplish anything while I’m there.
This is harder than it sounds.
Because there are things I want to do. Things I genuinely enjoy. And every once in a while, I have a day when I feel almost like a normal, fully functioning human being.
Those are the dangerous days.
Not because feeling good is dangerous, but because I get excited.
I start thinking about all the things I could do. All the things I’ve been putting off. All the things I might finally be able to take on again. And I have to remind myself that one good day doesn’t necessarily mean my circumstances have changed.
I was recently asked to teach an oil pastel class at a local art store, and I’m very excited about it. It’s something I genuinely want to do. But it also brought up some very legitimate concerns.
Years ago, I taught Reiki at a local yoga studio. I enjoyed teaching, but there were times when my health made it impossible. I remember being scheduled to teach and then having a migraine that lasted for two weeks. I had to cancel.
When something like that happens repeatedly, you start thinking about the people on the other side of the commitment. They’ve paid. They’ve made plans. They’ve put aside time for themselves. And then you have to cancel at the last minute.
Eventually, I stopped teaching because I couldn’t reliably promise that I would be well enough to show up.
So when the opportunity to teach oil pastels came along, my first instinct was to put it off.
Maybe winter. Maybe later. Maybe when things with my parents settle down. Maybe when my health is more predictable. Maybe when life feels a little less complicated.
But I’m beginning to recognize something: there will probably always be a reason to wait.
There will always be something that needs attention. Something that could be better. Something that could be more certain. And I don’t want slowing down to become another way of putting my life on hold.
At the same time, I don’t want enthusiasm to convince me that my limitations have disappeared.
So maybe the answer isn’t choosing between doing everything and doing nothing. Maybe it’s learning to live in the space between them.
To move forward slowly. To leave room around the things that matter. To say yes to something I’m excited about without immediately filling the rest of my life with more commitments. To allow myself to enjoy progress without demanding that progress happen faster.
I’ve spent the last five years learning that I can’t feel guilty for what I can’t do. I can’t push myself beyond my limitations because I feel bad about disappointing someone else. Because if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of the people who depend on me.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that taking care of myself isn’t selfish. It’s part of the responsibility.
That realization has changed the way I think about slowing down.
Slowing down doesn’t mean I’m giving up. It doesn’t mean I’m wasting time. It doesn’t mean I’m falling behind.
Sometimes slowing down is simply how I make room for my actual life.
And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to something I wrote for one of my meditations:
Nothing needs to change right now.
Not my health. Not my schedule. Not my limitations. Not my responsibilities. Not my progress. Not even the things I wish were different.
I can acknowledge that I want some things to change without requiring them to change today.
I can be excited about what might be possible without demanding that it happen immediately.
I can rest without earning it. I can pause without having a reason. I can simply be here.
Because sometimes the most important thing I can do isn’t push myself toward the life I want.
Sometimes it’s noticing that I’m already living it.
I found myself returning to this idea so often that I eventually turned it into a meditation: Nothing Needs to Change Right Now. If it sounds like something you could use, you’re welcome to spend a few minutes with it.
For Those Caring for Someone With Dementia
If you’re caring for a parent, partner, or another loved one with dementia, you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. I’ve found that having reliable information and knowing where to look for support can make an enormous difference.
Here are a few places that may be helpful:
National Institute on Aging — Alzheimer’s Caregiving
Information about day-to-day caregiving, communication and behavior changes, finding help, long-term care, and taking care of yourself as a caregiver.Alzheimer’s Association — 24/7 Helpline
The Alzheimer’s Association offers a free, confidential helpline for people living with dementia, caregivers, families, and anyone looking for information or support. They can also help connect caregivers with local resources and support groups.Eldercare Locator
A federal service that can help you find local resources for older adults and their caregivers, including services available in your community.I’m sharing these resources because I know how easy it is to feel like you’re supposed to figure all of this out on your own. You aren’t.
#caregiving #dementia #dementiaCaregiving #findingBalance #intentionalLiving #lettingGo #livingWithLimitations #lupus #migraine #restAndRecovery #selfCompassion #slowingDown -
Slowing Down: Learning to Live Within My Limits
Slowing down. Slowing down. Slowing down.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last five years.
Health issues and life in general required a slower pace. There were things I simply couldn’t do anymore, or couldn’t do in the way I once had. So I learned to slow down—not necessarily because I wanted to, but because I had to.
And lately, something has shifted.
My health hasn’t magically returned to what it was before, but I have been able to do more. I’m slowly rebuilding strength. I’ve started lifting weights again, carefully and deliberately, and I’m working on my mobility. There are glimpses of the person I used to be physically, and I’m grateful for them.
But progress brings its own challenge.
When you begin feeling better, it’s very easy to start thinking you can do more. And then a little more. And maybe just one more thing. Until suddenly, you’ve filled the space that slowing down was meant to protect.
I’m learning that getting stronger doesn’t mean I no longer need to be mindful of my limits.
I’m also a caregiver to my aging parents, both of whom are living with dementia, which adds another layer to that balance. My days aren’t entirely my own, and there are times when the needs of other people have to come before what I might want to do. Caregiving can be unpredictable, exhausting, and sometimes lonely, and I know I’m far from the only person trying to navigate this complicated role while also trying to take care of myself.
That’s part of why I’ve become more intentional about leaving room in my days. I need downtime. I need rest. I need time to read, sit outside, or simply do nothing for a while. Those things aren’t luxuries; they’re part of what allows me to keep going.
Recently, I had the flu, which triggered a flare in my symptoms. It was a good reminder that my body still has its own timetable. So I’m constantly reminding myself not to overdo it, not to cram too much into a day, and not to fill every empty space on the calendar simply because I happen to feel good that day.
I need to leave room for downtime. For rest. For reading. For sitting outside and breathing fresh air without needing to accomplish anything while I’m there.
This is harder than it sounds.
Because there are things I want to do. Things I genuinely enjoy. And every once in a while, I have a day when I feel almost like a normal, fully functioning human being.
Those are the dangerous days.
Not because feeling good is dangerous, but because I get excited.
I start thinking about all the things I could do. All the things I’ve been putting off. All the things I might finally be able to take on again. And I have to remind myself that one good day doesn’t necessarily mean my circumstances have changed.
I was recently asked to teach an oil pastel class at a local art store, and I’m very excited about it. It’s something I genuinely want to do. But it also brought up some very legitimate concerns.
Years ago, I taught Reiki at a local yoga studio. I enjoyed teaching, but there were times when my health made it impossible. I remember being scheduled to teach and then having a migraine that lasted for two weeks. I had to cancel.
When something like that happens repeatedly, you start thinking about the people on the other side of the commitment. They’ve paid. They’ve made plans. They’ve put aside time for themselves. And then you have to cancel at the last minute.
Eventually, I stopped teaching because I couldn’t reliably promise that I would be well enough to show up.
So when the opportunity to teach oil pastels came along, my first instinct was to put it off.
Maybe winter. Maybe later. Maybe when things with my parents settle down. Maybe when my health is more predictable. Maybe when life feels a little less complicated.
But I’m beginning to recognize something: there will probably always be a reason to wait.
There will always be something that needs attention. Something that could be better. Something that could be more certain. And I don’t want slowing down to become another way of putting my life on hold.
At the same time, I don’t want enthusiasm to convince me that my limitations have disappeared.
So maybe the answer isn’t choosing between doing everything and doing nothing. Maybe it’s learning to live in the space between them.
To move forward slowly. To leave room around the things that matter. To say yes to something I’m excited about without immediately filling the rest of my life with more commitments. To allow myself to enjoy progress without demanding that progress happen faster.
I’ve spent the last five years learning that I can’t feel guilty for what I can’t do. I can’t push myself beyond my limitations because I feel bad about disappointing someone else. Because if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of the people who depend on me.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that taking care of myself isn’t selfish. It’s part of the responsibility.
That realization has changed the way I think about slowing down.
Slowing down doesn’t mean I’m giving up. It doesn’t mean I’m wasting time. It doesn’t mean I’m falling behind.
Sometimes slowing down is simply how I make room for my actual life.
And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to something I wrote for one of my meditations:
Nothing needs to change right now.
Not my health. Not my schedule. Not my limitations. Not my responsibilities. Not my progress. Not even the things I wish were different.
I can acknowledge that I want some things to change without requiring them to change today.
I can be excited about what might be possible without demanding that it happen immediately.
I can rest without earning it. I can pause without having a reason. I can simply be here.
Because sometimes the most important thing I can do isn’t push myself toward the life I want.
Sometimes it’s noticing that I’m already living it.
I found myself returning to this idea so often that I eventually turned it into a meditation: Nothing Needs to Change Right Now. If it sounds like something you could use, you’re welcome to spend a few minutes with it.
For Those Caring for Someone With Dementia
If you’re caring for a parent, partner, or another loved one with dementia, you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. I’ve found that having reliable information and knowing where to look for support can make an enormous difference.
Here are a few places that may be helpful:
National Institute on Aging — Alzheimer’s Caregiving
Information about day-to-day caregiving, communication and behavior changes, finding help, long-term care, and taking care of yourself as a caregiver.Alzheimer’s Association — 24/7 Helpline
The Alzheimer’s Association offers a free, confidential helpline for people living with dementia, caregivers, families, and anyone looking for information or support. They can also help connect caregivers with local resources and support groups.Eldercare Locator
A federal service that can help you find local resources for older adults and their caregivers, including services available in your community.I’m sharing these resources because I know how easy it is to feel like you’re supposed to figure all of this out on your own. You aren’t.
#caregiving #dementia #dementiaCaregiving #findingBalance #intentionalLiving #lettingGo #livingWithLimitations #lupus #migraine #restAndRecovery #selfCompassion #slowingDown -
What #art have you COMPLETED in a year?
Do I think what I am CODING is an artform?
Yes
Not everyone can create #infrastructure for creatives to BUILD from
Does a MACHINE say Break This Build can reach a #halloween deadline?
Can it be done?
@[email protected]
💭 loptr-lab.github.io/duet-solo-ha...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o6kuv3yieti2vqrb7ckmd5vg/post/3mwh6lr72722q
Break This Build | DUET and Re... -
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Your AI assistant is much more optimistic about the future of AI than you are
Recent research indicates that popular artificial intelligence programs tend to express more positive attitudes about the future of advanced artificial intelligence than humans do. The findings suggest that as people increasingly interact with these systems, the optimistic viewpoints of the machines could subtly influence public opinion. The paper was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, are software programs trained on massive amounts of internet text. They function by predicting the next word in a sequence, allowing them to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of prompts. As these programs become integrated into everyday tasks like writing, coding, and searching for information, researchers are increasingly interested in the perspectives and biases built into them.
A central topic of debate in the technology world is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a theoretical future system that would possess human-level cognitive flexibility, allowing it to learn, understand, and apply knowledge across any domain. The prospect of AGI raises intense ethical and economic questions, ranging from the potential for vast medical advancements to fears of mass job loss and existential risk.
Because these programs have the potential to shape how society thinks, ensuring they operate safely and fairly is a major priority for developers. This process is known as AI alignment. The goal of alignment is to make sure a system’s actions and outputs match human values and do not cause harm. Assessing how humans and technology interact is an evolving area of study. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 found that when technology fulfills basic psychological needs for competence and connection, people tend to hold more positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence.
However, scientists also want to understand the sentiments encoded in the systems themselves. Some of the companies developing current language models are explicitly trying to create AGI. This raises the possibility that their current models might harbor built-in optimism about the technology. The research aimed to map how different language models evaluate the prospect of AGI and compare these machine outputs to human opinions.
Lead author Ljubiša Bojić, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia, told PsyPost why his team took this approach. “When ChatGPT arrived, everyone started asking what these models can do,” he said. “Very few people asked what they believe, or at least what they say they believe, millions of times a day.”
The research team developed a 39-question survey measuring sentiment toward AGI. The questions asked respondents to rate their excitement, comfort, trust, and fears about AGI on a five-point scale. A score of one indicated a strong negative sentiment, while a score of five indicated a strong positive sentiment. The survey covered topics like the potential for AGI to solve complex global issues, its ethical use, and its likely impact on individual happiness and job opportunities.
To gather the machine responses, the researchers presented the survey to seven prominent language models. These included GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Google’s Bard, Mistral-7B-Instruct, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat, PPLX-70B-Chat, and Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. The settings for each model were kept at their default states to ensure standard responses. To check for stability over time, the researchers administered the same survey to the models over three consecutive days.
Bojić, who is also affiliated with the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (Digital Society Lab) and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, noted the gap in evaluating these models. “We have benchmarks for math, coding and bar exams, but almost nothing that measures the attitudes models express on socially important questions,” he said. “I chose artificial general intelligence as the test case for a slightly mischievous reason.”
“It is the one topic where the companies building these models have an obvious stake in the answer,” he explained. “Asking an AI what it thinks about AGI is a bit like asking a tobacco company’s chatbot about smoking.”
For the human comparison, the researchers administered the same survey to three distinct online groups over a period of several weeks. The first group consisted of 134 participants, the second had 132 participants, and the third had 71 participants. The human participants were primarily from Serbia, though they varied in age, gender, and educational background across the three samples.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found a notable divide between the machines and the humans. The language models scored an average sentiment of 3.77 out of 5, indicating a generally positive outlook on AGI. In contrast, the human participants averaged a sentiment score of 2.97 out of 5, leaning slightly toward a negative or neutral perspective.
“That gap of almost a full point is roughly the difference between cautious ambivalence and mild enthusiasm,” Bojić noted. “Individually it looks modest. Multiplied across hundreds of millions of conversations, it becomes a gentle but constant wind blowing public opinion in one direction.”
Among the artificial intelligence models, GPT-4 registered the highest average sentiment score at 4.12 out of 5. Bard recorded the lowest score among the models at 3.32, which was still higher than the average human score. The researchers note that machines do not have actual feelings. Instead, their answers reflect a combination of their training data and the specific rules their developers used to refine their behavior.
“Your AI assistant has a point of view, and it is sunnier than yours,” Bojić said. “Every model we tested was more optimistic about AGI than the humans we surveyed. GPT-4, built by a company whose stated mission is AGI, was the most enthusiastic of all.”
“None of this means anyone is secretly programming propaganda,” he explained. “It means these systems are not neutral mirrors of society, and when people consult them daily, those tilted opinions can quietly seep into what we all consider normal.”
The authors suggest that the high optimism in some models might reflect the goals of their parent companies. For instance, the company behind GPT-4 has a stated mission to build AGI for the benefit of humanity. The model’s positive output might be a byproduct of how it was fine-tuned to align with corporate guidelines. Other open-source models, which are built by wider communities and fed diverse data, tended to express slightly less optimism.
“Much of the internet imagines AGI through HAL 9000 and Ex Machina, so I expected models trained on that material to sound at least somewhat worried,” Bojić told PsyPost. “They sounded more like optimistic tech keynotes. That tells me the fine-tuning layer, where companies shape how a model should respond, may matter as much as the raw training data.”
However, the mechanism behind these outputs remains complex. “To be fair to the companies, we cannot be certain the optimism was put there by human hands, because in our research we repeatedly see models develop attitudes that are hard to trace back to anything in their training data, as if some opinions simply form inside the model on their own,” he added.
The repeated testing over three days showed that the models’ sentiments could shift slightly from day to day. PPLX-70B-Chat exhibited the largest variation in its answers over the testing period, changing its total score by 16 points across the 39 questions. This represents an absolute shift of about 8 percent. Models like Mistral-7B-Instruct and LLaMA-2-70B-Chat were more stable, changing their scores by only about 1 percent.
In response to the divide between human and machine sentiments, the researchers propose a framework called the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark. This system would systematically test language models using diverse prompts to see how they align with established sociological values.
The proposed benchmark would incorporate different types of prompts, asking the model to answer as itself, to simulate the view of an average citizen, or to analyze a topic objectively. By testing models across multiple languages and cultural contexts, policymakers could better track whether these systems are favoring certain ideological viewpoints or ignoring the concerns of specific demographic groups.
The team hopes this framework will become a standard tool. “We proposed the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark, SAIA, which would regularly test many models, in many languages, across the core human values measured by the European Social Survey,” Bojić said. “I would love to see something like a weather service for AI opinions, run by national AI agencies under frameworks such as the EU AI Act.”
He added that such a system would “track, week by week, whether the systems people trust are drifting away from the societies they serve. Some of this work is already underway in our research on social bias and temporal stability in language models.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used a numerical rating scale, which might not capture the full complexity of how people or machines process attitudes toward advanced technology. Open-ended questions or interviews could provide a deeper understanding of these viewpoints, allowing respondents to elaborate on their fears or hopes.
“Please do not read this as ‘AI has feelings about AGI,'” Bojić clarified. “These are outputs shaped by data and design choices, and we are careful to avoid anthropomorphism.”
Additionally, the human participants were mostly from Serbia, which means the human average might not represent a global consensus on AGI. People in other regions might hold different baseline views based on their local economies, media diets, and cultural backgrounds. Expanding the human sample to include more countries would help clarify whether the gap between humans and machines is universal.
“The human samples were also modest and mostly from Serbia, so the numbers are a first snapshot and should not be treated as a global verdict,” Bojić noted. “The study is a proof of concept, and its main contribution is the argument that this kind of measurement should exist and be done continuously.”
Finally, the study measured the language models at a specific point in time. Because these models are regularly updated and fine-tuned by their developers, their expressed sentiments are subject to change. Future research could track these attitudes over a longer period to see if the models’ optimism remains consistent as the technology itself continues to evolve.
For Bojić, tracking these shifts is essential as algorithms increasingly shape human cognition. “We regulate what goes into food and medicine because they enter our bodies,” he said. “AI systems now enter our thinking. I believe it is reasonable to ask for at least a label on the package.”
“We should also care about adapting these models to the cultures and values of different countries, because this is about protecting the diversity of perspectives that has always driven human creativity and progress, rather than resisting universal values,” Bojić concluded. “If billions of people consume the same machine-made opinions, we risk becoming so alike that we lose the very differences that move civilization forward.”
The study, “Towards a societal AI alignment benchmark for evaluating human–machine value convergence,” was authored by Ljubisa Bojic, Dylan Seychell, and Milan Cabarkapa.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIAssistantOptimism #AGIFuture #AIAlignment #PublicOpinionAI #LanguageModelsBias #GPT4 #AIEthics #SocietalAIAlignmentBenchmark #Human_vsMachine #AIOpinions
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Your AI assistant is much more optimistic about the future of AI than you are
Recent research indicates that popular artificial intelligence programs tend to express more positive attitudes about the future of advanced artificial intelligence than humans do. The findings suggest that as people increasingly interact with these systems, the optimistic viewpoints of the machines could subtly influence public opinion. The paper was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, are software programs trained on massive amounts of internet text. They function by predicting the next word in a sequence, allowing them to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of prompts. As these programs become integrated into everyday tasks like writing, coding, and searching for information, researchers are increasingly interested in the perspectives and biases built into them.
A central topic of debate in the technology world is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a theoretical future system that would possess human-level cognitive flexibility, allowing it to learn, understand, and apply knowledge across any domain. The prospect of AGI raises intense ethical and economic questions, ranging from the potential for vast medical advancements to fears of mass job loss and existential risk.
Because these programs have the potential to shape how society thinks, ensuring they operate safely and fairly is a major priority for developers. This process is known as AI alignment. The goal of alignment is to make sure a system’s actions and outputs match human values and do not cause harm. Assessing how humans and technology interact is an evolving area of study. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 found that when technology fulfills basic psychological needs for competence and connection, people tend to hold more positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence.
However, scientists also want to understand the sentiments encoded in the systems themselves. Some of the companies developing current language models are explicitly trying to create AGI. This raises the possibility that their current models might harbor built-in optimism about the technology. The research aimed to map how different language models evaluate the prospect of AGI and compare these machine outputs to human opinions.
Lead author Ljubiša Bojić, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia, told PsyPost why his team took this approach. “When ChatGPT arrived, everyone started asking what these models can do,” he said. “Very few people asked what they believe, or at least what they say they believe, millions of times a day.”
The research team developed a 39-question survey measuring sentiment toward AGI. The questions asked respondents to rate their excitement, comfort, trust, and fears about AGI on a five-point scale. A score of one indicated a strong negative sentiment, while a score of five indicated a strong positive sentiment. The survey covered topics like the potential for AGI to solve complex global issues, its ethical use, and its likely impact on individual happiness and job opportunities.
To gather the machine responses, the researchers presented the survey to seven prominent language models. These included GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Google’s Bard, Mistral-7B-Instruct, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat, PPLX-70B-Chat, and Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. The settings for each model were kept at their default states to ensure standard responses. To check for stability over time, the researchers administered the same survey to the models over three consecutive days.
Bojić, who is also affiliated with the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (Digital Society Lab) and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, noted the gap in evaluating these models. “We have benchmarks for math, coding and bar exams, but almost nothing that measures the attitudes models express on socially important questions,” he said. “I chose artificial general intelligence as the test case for a slightly mischievous reason.”
“It is the one topic where the companies building these models have an obvious stake in the answer,” he explained. “Asking an AI what it thinks about AGI is a bit like asking a tobacco company’s chatbot about smoking.”
For the human comparison, the researchers administered the same survey to three distinct online groups over a period of several weeks. The first group consisted of 134 participants, the second had 132 participants, and the third had 71 participants. The human participants were primarily from Serbia, though they varied in age, gender, and educational background across the three samples.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found a notable divide between the machines and the humans. The language models scored an average sentiment of 3.77 out of 5, indicating a generally positive outlook on AGI. In contrast, the human participants averaged a sentiment score of 2.97 out of 5, leaning slightly toward a negative or neutral perspective.
“That gap of almost a full point is roughly the difference between cautious ambivalence and mild enthusiasm,” Bojić noted. “Individually it looks modest. Multiplied across hundreds of millions of conversations, it becomes a gentle but constant wind blowing public opinion in one direction.”
Among the artificial intelligence models, GPT-4 registered the highest average sentiment score at 4.12 out of 5. Bard recorded the lowest score among the models at 3.32, which was still higher than the average human score. The researchers note that machines do not have actual feelings. Instead, their answers reflect a combination of their training data and the specific rules their developers used to refine their behavior.
“Your AI assistant has a point of view, and it is sunnier than yours,” Bojić said. “Every model we tested was more optimistic about AGI than the humans we surveyed. GPT-4, built by a company whose stated mission is AGI, was the most enthusiastic of all.”
“None of this means anyone is secretly programming propaganda,” he explained. “It means these systems are not neutral mirrors of society, and when people consult them daily, those tilted opinions can quietly seep into what we all consider normal.”
The authors suggest that the high optimism in some models might reflect the goals of their parent companies. For instance, the company behind GPT-4 has a stated mission to build AGI for the benefit of humanity. The model’s positive output might be a byproduct of how it was fine-tuned to align with corporate guidelines. Other open-source models, which are built by wider communities and fed diverse data, tended to express slightly less optimism.
“Much of the internet imagines AGI through HAL 9000 and Ex Machina, so I expected models trained on that material to sound at least somewhat worried,” Bojić told PsyPost. “They sounded more like optimistic tech keynotes. That tells me the fine-tuning layer, where companies shape how a model should respond, may matter as much as the raw training data.”
However, the mechanism behind these outputs remains complex. “To be fair to the companies, we cannot be certain the optimism was put there by human hands, because in our research we repeatedly see models develop attitudes that are hard to trace back to anything in their training data, as if some opinions simply form inside the model on their own,” he added.
The repeated testing over three days showed that the models’ sentiments could shift slightly from day to day. PPLX-70B-Chat exhibited the largest variation in its answers over the testing period, changing its total score by 16 points across the 39 questions. This represents an absolute shift of about 8 percent. Models like Mistral-7B-Instruct and LLaMA-2-70B-Chat were more stable, changing their scores by only about 1 percent.
In response to the divide between human and machine sentiments, the researchers propose a framework called the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark. This system would systematically test language models using diverse prompts to see how they align with established sociological values.
The proposed benchmark would incorporate different types of prompts, asking the model to answer as itself, to simulate the view of an average citizen, or to analyze a topic objectively. By testing models across multiple languages and cultural contexts, policymakers could better track whether these systems are favoring certain ideological viewpoints or ignoring the concerns of specific demographic groups.
The team hopes this framework will become a standard tool. “We proposed the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark, SAIA, which would regularly test many models, in many languages, across the core human values measured by the European Social Survey,” Bojić said. “I would love to see something like a weather service for AI opinions, run by national AI agencies under frameworks such as the EU AI Act.”
He added that such a system would “track, week by week, whether the systems people trust are drifting away from the societies they serve. Some of this work is already underway in our research on social bias and temporal stability in language models.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used a numerical rating scale, which might not capture the full complexity of how people or machines process attitudes toward advanced technology. Open-ended questions or interviews could provide a deeper understanding of these viewpoints, allowing respondents to elaborate on their fears or hopes.
“Please do not read this as ‘AI has feelings about AGI,'” Bojić clarified. “These are outputs shaped by data and design choices, and we are careful to avoid anthropomorphism.”
Additionally, the human participants were mostly from Serbia, which means the human average might not represent a global consensus on AGI. People in other regions might hold different baseline views based on their local economies, media diets, and cultural backgrounds. Expanding the human sample to include more countries would help clarify whether the gap between humans and machines is universal.
“The human samples were also modest and mostly from Serbia, so the numbers are a first snapshot and should not be treated as a global verdict,” Bojić noted. “The study is a proof of concept, and its main contribution is the argument that this kind of measurement should exist and be done continuously.”
Finally, the study measured the language models at a specific point in time. Because these models are regularly updated and fine-tuned by their developers, their expressed sentiments are subject to change. Future research could track these attitudes over a longer period to see if the models’ optimism remains consistent as the technology itself continues to evolve.
For Bojić, tracking these shifts is essential as algorithms increasingly shape human cognition. “We regulate what goes into food and medicine because they enter our bodies,” he said. “AI systems now enter our thinking. I believe it is reasonable to ask for at least a label on the package.”
“We should also care about adapting these models to the cultures and values of different countries, because this is about protecting the diversity of perspectives that has always driven human creativity and progress, rather than resisting universal values,” Bojić concluded. “If billions of people consume the same machine-made opinions, we risk becoming so alike that we lose the very differences that move civilization forward.”
The study, “Towards a societal AI alignment benchmark for evaluating human–machine value convergence,” was authored by Ljubisa Bojic, Dylan Seychell, and Milan Cabarkapa.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIAssistantOptimism #AGIFuture #AIAlignment #PublicOpinionAI #LanguageModelsBias #GPT4 #AIEthics #SocietalAIAlignmentBenchmark #Human_vsMachine #AIOpinions
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Your AI assistant is much more optimistic about the future of AI than you are
Recent research indicates that popular artificial intelligence programs tend to express more positive attitudes about the future of advanced artificial intelligence than humans do. The findings suggest that as people increasingly interact with these systems, the optimistic viewpoints of the machines could subtly influence public opinion. The paper was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, are software programs trained on massive amounts of internet text. They function by predicting the next word in a sequence, allowing them to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of prompts. As these programs become integrated into everyday tasks like writing, coding, and searching for information, researchers are increasingly interested in the perspectives and biases built into them.
A central topic of debate in the technology world is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a theoretical future system that would possess human-level cognitive flexibility, allowing it to learn, understand, and apply knowledge across any domain. The prospect of AGI raises intense ethical and economic questions, ranging from the potential for vast medical advancements to fears of mass job loss and existential risk.
Because these programs have the potential to shape how society thinks, ensuring they operate safely and fairly is a major priority for developers. This process is known as AI alignment. The goal of alignment is to make sure a system’s actions and outputs match human values and do not cause harm. Assessing how humans and technology interact is an evolving area of study. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 found that when technology fulfills basic psychological needs for competence and connection, people tend to hold more positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence.
However, scientists also want to understand the sentiments encoded in the systems themselves. Some of the companies developing current language models are explicitly trying to create AGI. This raises the possibility that their current models might harbor built-in optimism about the technology. The research aimed to map how different language models evaluate the prospect of AGI and compare these machine outputs to human opinions.
Lead author Ljubiša Bojić, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia, told PsyPost why his team took this approach. “When ChatGPT arrived, everyone started asking what these models can do,” he said. “Very few people asked what they believe, or at least what they say they believe, millions of times a day.”
The research team developed a 39-question survey measuring sentiment toward AGI. The questions asked respondents to rate their excitement, comfort, trust, and fears about AGI on a five-point scale. A score of one indicated a strong negative sentiment, while a score of five indicated a strong positive sentiment. The survey covered topics like the potential for AGI to solve complex global issues, its ethical use, and its likely impact on individual happiness and job opportunities.
To gather the machine responses, the researchers presented the survey to seven prominent language models. These included GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Google’s Bard, Mistral-7B-Instruct, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat, PPLX-70B-Chat, and Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. The settings for each model were kept at their default states to ensure standard responses. To check for stability over time, the researchers administered the same survey to the models over three consecutive days.
Bojić, who is also affiliated with the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (Digital Society Lab) and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, noted the gap in evaluating these models. “We have benchmarks for math, coding and bar exams, but almost nothing that measures the attitudes models express on socially important questions,” he said. “I chose artificial general intelligence as the test case for a slightly mischievous reason.”
“It is the one topic where the companies building these models have an obvious stake in the answer,” he explained. “Asking an AI what it thinks about AGI is a bit like asking a tobacco company’s chatbot about smoking.”
For the human comparison, the researchers administered the same survey to three distinct online groups over a period of several weeks. The first group consisted of 134 participants, the second had 132 participants, and the third had 71 participants. The human participants were primarily from Serbia, though they varied in age, gender, and educational background across the three samples.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found a notable divide between the machines and the humans. The language models scored an average sentiment of 3.77 out of 5, indicating a generally positive outlook on AGI. In contrast, the human participants averaged a sentiment score of 2.97 out of 5, leaning slightly toward a negative or neutral perspective.
“That gap of almost a full point is roughly the difference between cautious ambivalence and mild enthusiasm,” Bojić noted. “Individually it looks modest. Multiplied across hundreds of millions of conversations, it becomes a gentle but constant wind blowing public opinion in one direction.”
Among the artificial intelligence models, GPT-4 registered the highest average sentiment score at 4.12 out of 5. Bard recorded the lowest score among the models at 3.32, which was still higher than the average human score. The researchers note that machines do not have actual feelings. Instead, their answers reflect a combination of their training data and the specific rules their developers used to refine their behavior.
“Your AI assistant has a point of view, and it is sunnier than yours,” Bojić said. “Every model we tested was more optimistic about AGI than the humans we surveyed. GPT-4, built by a company whose stated mission is AGI, was the most enthusiastic of all.”
“None of this means anyone is secretly programming propaganda,” he explained. “It means these systems are not neutral mirrors of society, and when people consult them daily, those tilted opinions can quietly seep into what we all consider normal.”
The authors suggest that the high optimism in some models might reflect the goals of their parent companies. For instance, the company behind GPT-4 has a stated mission to build AGI for the benefit of humanity. The model’s positive output might be a byproduct of how it was fine-tuned to align with corporate guidelines. Other open-source models, which are built by wider communities and fed diverse data, tended to express slightly less optimism.
“Much of the internet imagines AGI through HAL 9000 and Ex Machina, so I expected models trained on that material to sound at least somewhat worried,” Bojić told PsyPost. “They sounded more like optimistic tech keynotes. That tells me the fine-tuning layer, where companies shape how a model should respond, may matter as much as the raw training data.”
However, the mechanism behind these outputs remains complex. “To be fair to the companies, we cannot be certain the optimism was put there by human hands, because in our research we repeatedly see models develop attitudes that are hard to trace back to anything in their training data, as if some opinions simply form inside the model on their own,” he added.
The repeated testing over three days showed that the models’ sentiments could shift slightly from day to day. PPLX-70B-Chat exhibited the largest variation in its answers over the testing period, changing its total score by 16 points across the 39 questions. This represents an absolute shift of about 8 percent. Models like Mistral-7B-Instruct and LLaMA-2-70B-Chat were more stable, changing their scores by only about 1 percent.
In response to the divide between human and machine sentiments, the researchers propose a framework called the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark. This system would systematically test language models using diverse prompts to see how they align with established sociological values.
The proposed benchmark would incorporate different types of prompts, asking the model to answer as itself, to simulate the view of an average citizen, or to analyze a topic objectively. By testing models across multiple languages and cultural contexts, policymakers could better track whether these systems are favoring certain ideological viewpoints or ignoring the concerns of specific demographic groups.
The team hopes this framework will become a standard tool. “We proposed the Societal AI Alignment Benchmark, SAIA, which would regularly test many models, in many languages, across the core human values measured by the European Social Survey,” Bojić said. “I would love to see something like a weather service for AI opinions, run by national AI agencies under frameworks such as the EU AI Act.”
He added that such a system would “track, week by week, whether the systems people trust are drifting away from the societies they serve. Some of this work is already underway in our research on social bias and temporal stability in language models.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used a numerical rating scale, which might not capture the full complexity of how people or machines process attitudes toward advanced technology. Open-ended questions or interviews could provide a deeper understanding of these viewpoints, allowing respondents to elaborate on their fears or hopes.
“Please do not read this as ‘AI has feelings about AGI,'” Bojić clarified. “These are outputs shaped by data and design choices, and we are careful to avoid anthropomorphism.”
Additionally, the human participants were mostly from Serbia, which means the human average might not represent a global consensus on AGI. People in other regions might hold different baseline views based on their local economies, media diets, and cultural backgrounds. Expanding the human sample to include more countries would help clarify whether the gap between humans and machines is universal.
“The human samples were also modest and mostly from Serbia, so the numbers are a first snapshot and should not be treated as a global verdict,” Bojić noted. “The study is a proof of concept, and its main contribution is the argument that this kind of measurement should exist and be done continuously.”
Finally, the study measured the language models at a specific point in time. Because these models are regularly updated and fine-tuned by their developers, their expressed sentiments are subject to change. Future research could track these attitudes over a longer period to see if the models’ optimism remains consistent as the technology itself continues to evolve.
For Bojić, tracking these shifts is essential as algorithms increasingly shape human cognition. “We regulate what goes into food and medicine because they enter our bodies,” he said. “AI systems now enter our thinking. I believe it is reasonable to ask for at least a label on the package.”
“We should also care about adapting these models to the cultures and values of different countries, because this is about protecting the diversity of perspectives that has always driven human creativity and progress, rather than resisting universal values,” Bojić concluded. “If billions of people consume the same machine-made opinions, we risk becoming so alike that we lose the very differences that move civilization forward.”
The study, “Towards a societal AI alignment benchmark for evaluating human–machine value convergence,” was authored by Ljubisa Bojic, Dylan Seychell, and Milan Cabarkapa.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIAssistantOptimism #AGIFuture #AIAlignment #PublicOpinionAI #LanguageModelsBias #GPT4 #AIEthics #SocietalAIAlignmentBenchmark #Human_vsMachine #AIOpinions
-
Somewhere on a Sunday
I woke up feeling a calmness only the Lord could provide.
Then I got out of bed.
Happy Sunday morning friends and followers. I woke up in total peace this morning, answers provided in my sleep to settle my mind of the worries that have been plaguing it for the last month or so. I decided to skip the usual challenges and just ramble through this to see what, where and why this post headed to were it did.
College Football
Yesterday found me having a great day watching football. I witnessed some great games and a couple of plays that were not so great.
The hit to the Oregon Duck’s quarterback in the 2nd period was a cheap shot that resulted with him being rushed to the hospital. I promise, “I did not hurt the duck!” The second one I felt was irresponsible was in the Texas/Tennessee game. This one didn’t cause any physical pain but showed the immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct they seem to not care about anymore.
After a play had ended a Texas player stood above the tackled Tennessee player and acted like he was urinating on him. No flag or penalty was issued which I find offensive and disgusting. Last year on the College Game Day show they let Pat McAfee stand on a diving board in his underwear reaching inside to grab his junk with no repercussions and now this? I think this rude player should have been ejected from the game at the least. If someone did that in public they would be arrested so why do these players and announcers get treated any differently? Come on college officials, ESPN and ABC, let us not forget there are children glued to these games and this bullshit behavior has to stop!
Outside of that we saw some fantastic football being played and teams showing what they are really made of. Of course I have to close this portion of the post with a victory shout-out to Alabama,
Coffee Break
The mind just went blank…Is It The Blues?
Image © https://thebeginningatlast9.com/I sit here and call out for my missing muse
Coming up empty I search to find the clues
Coffee flowing, thoughts refusing to shine
The road ahead is once again reveled to me
Bits and pieces that will eventually set me free
Starting with the decision to stop the press
Words written down and then taken away
Books of poetry no longer for sale today
I dive into my mind for answers of reason
Radio dials on my blog, a page of their own
Music made by AI for the words of my poems
Leaves me searching for something fresh
The construction on this site since it began
Clearly shows you that I have no real plan
Rolling with the flow until I change my mind
Once again I will search for something new
Asking myself if this is what they call the blues
I have no clear answer to offer at this timeGoodbyes
I really enjoyed the last year of using Suno Pro and am happy with the outcomes I got generating music for my songs. My subscription will end on December 2nd and since they changed the platform amid all the legal battles they are facing the generation has fallen sharply.
Music has become more generic and the output is dismal to say the least. V6 might of bypassed some legal issues but today they were slapped with a 1 billion dollar lawsuit from two of the largest controllers in the biz. The songs I made are something I enjoy but with all the rage of slop out there and laws up in the air, I won’t be releasing them at this time although I am accomplishing my original goal of producing a vinyl copy for myself. So long Suno.
As for the books I made…they will also be coming out of circulation. Two goals within two years has me feeling good about myself and has me content with all the great knowledge I have learned about editing, formatting, producing, engineering, and design. I enjoyed working with Ingram Sparks throughout this journey and have no complaints about them, with that said, So long Ingram Sparks.
No video chosen for this post today, So long for now.
S2726 ©https://www.peaceful-threads.com
#AIImages #aiJourney #AIMusic #Alabama #albums #books #coffee #collegeSports #conduct #football #imaturity #IngramSparks #journey #life #love #music #poems #Poetry #RollTide #rules #songs #SunoPro #vinyl -
Somewhere on a Sunday
I woke up feeling a calmness only the Lord could provide.
Then I got out of bed.
Happy Sunday morning friends and followers. I woke up in total peace this morning, answers provided in my sleep to settle my mind of the worries that have been plaguing it for the last month or so. I decided to skip the usual challenges and just ramble through this to see what, where and why this post headed to were it did.
College Football
Yesterday found me having a great day watching football. I witnessed some great games and a couple of plays that were not so great.
The hit to the Oregon Duck’s quarterback in the 2nd period was a cheap shot that resulted with him being rushed to the hospital. I promise, “I did not hurt the duck!” The second one I felt was irresponsible was in the Texas/Tennessee game. This one didn’t cause any physical pain but showed the immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct they seem to not care about anymore.
After a play had ended a Texas player stood above the tackled Tennessee player and acted like he was urinating on him. No flag or penalty was issued which I find offensive and disgusting. Last year on the College Game Day show they let Pat McAfee stand on a diving board in his underwear reaching inside to grab his junk with no repercussions and now this? I think this rude player should have been ejected from the game at the least. If someone did that in public they would be arrested so why do these players and announcers get treated any differently? Come on college officials, ESPN and ABC, let us not forget there are children glued to these games and this bullshit behavior has to stop!
Outside of that we saw some fantastic football being played and teams showing what they are really made of. Of course I have to close this portion of the post with a victory shout-out to Alabama,
Coffee Break
The mind just went blank…Is It The Blues?
Image © https://thebeginningatlast9.com/I sit here and call out for my missing muse
Coming up empty I search to find the clues
Coffee flowing, thoughts refusing to shine
The road ahead is once again reveled to me
Bits and pieces that will eventually set me free
Starting with the decision to stop the press
Words written down and then taken away
Books of poetry no longer for sale today
I dive into my mind for answers of reason
Radio dials on my blog, a page of their own
Music made by AI for the words of my poems
Leaves me searching for something fresh
The construction on this site since it began
Clearly shows you that I have no real plan
Rolling with the flow until I change my mind
Once again I will search for something new
Asking myself if this is what they call the blues
I have no clear answer to offer at this timeGoodbyes
I really enjoyed the last year of using Suno Pro and am happy with the outcomes I got generating music for my songs. My subscription will end on December 2nd and since they changed the platform amid all the legal battles they are facing the generation has fallen sharply.
Music has become more generic and the output is dismal to say the least. V6 might of bypassed some legal issues but today they were slapped with a 1 billion dollar lawsuit from two of the largest controllers in the biz. The songs I made are something I enjoy but with all the rage of slop out there and laws up in the air, I won’t be releasing them at this time although I am accomplishing my original goal of producing a vinyl copy for myself. So long Suno.
As for the books I made…they will also be coming out of circulation. Two goals within two years has me feeling good about myself and has me content with all the great knowledge I have learned about editing, formatting, producing, engineering, and design. I enjoyed working with Ingram Sparks throughout this journey and have no complaints about them, with that said, So long Ingram Sparks.
No video chosen for this post today, So long for now.
S2726 ©https://www.peaceful-threads.com
#AIImages #aiJourney #AIMusic #Alabama #albums #books #coffee #collegeSports #conduct #football #imaturity #IngramSparks #journey #life #love #music #poems #Poetry #RollTide #rules #songs #SunoPro #vinyl -
Somewhere on a Sunday
I woke up feeling a calmness only the Lord could provide.
Then I got out of bed.
Happy Sunday morning friends and followers. I woke up in total peace this morning, answers provided in my sleep to settle my mind of the worries that have been plaguing it for the last month or so. I decided to skip the usual challenges and just ramble through this to see what, where and why this post headed to were it did.
College Football
Yesterday found me having a great day watching football. I witnessed some great games and a couple of plays that were not so great.
The hit to the Oregon Duck’s quarterback in the 2nd period was a cheap shot that resulted with him being rushed to the hospital. I promise, “I did not hurt the duck!” The second one I felt was irresponsible was in the Texas/Tennessee game. This one didn’t cause any physical pain but showed the immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct they seem to not care about anymore.
After a play had ended a Texas player stood above the tackled Tennessee player and acted like he was urinating on him. No flag or penalty was issued which I find offensive and disgusting. Last year on the College Game Day show they let Pat McAfee stand on a diving board in his underwear reaching inside to grab his junk with no repercussions and now this? I think this rude player should have been ejected from the game at the least. If someone did that in public they would be arrested so why do these players and announcers get treated any differently? Come on college officials, ESPN and ABC, let us not forget there are children glued to these games and this bullshit behavior has to stop!
Outside of that we saw some fantastic football being played and teams showing what they are really made of. Of course I have to close this portion of the post with a victory shout-out to Alabama,
Coffee Break
The mind just went blank…Is It The Blues?
Image © https://thebeginningatlast9.com/I sit here and call out for my missing muse
Coming up empty I search to find the clues
Coffee flowing, thoughts refusing to shine
The road ahead is once again reveled to me
Bits and pieces that will eventually set me free
Starting with the decision to stop the press
Words written down and then taken away
Books of poetry no longer for sale today
I dive into my mind for answers of reason
Radio dials on my blog, a page of their own
Music made by AI for the words of my poems
Leaves me searching for something fresh
The construction on this site since it began
Clearly shows you that I have no real plan
Rolling with the flow until I change my mind
Once again I will search for something new
Asking myself if this is what they call the blues
I have no clear answer to offer at this timeGoodbyes
I really enjoyed the last year of using Suno Pro and am happy with the outcomes I got generating music for my songs. My subscription will end on December 2nd and since they changed the platform amid all the legal battles they are facing the generation has fallen sharply.
Music has become more generic and the output is dismal to say the least. V6 might of bypassed some legal issues but today they were slapped with a 1 billion dollar lawsuit from two of the largest controllers in the biz. The songs I made are something I enjoy but with all the rage of slop out there and laws up in the air, I won’t be releasing them at this time although I am accomplishing my original goal of producing a vinyl copy for myself. So long Suno.
As for the books I made…they will also be coming out of circulation. Two goals within two years has me feeling good about myself and has me content with all the great knowledge I have learned about editing, formatting, producing, engineering, and design. I enjoyed working with Ingram Sparks throughout this journey and have no complaints about them, with that said, So long Ingram Sparks.
No video chosen for this post today, So long for now.
S2726 ©https://www.peaceful-threads.com
#AIImages #aiJourney #AIMusic #Alabama #albums #books #coffee #collegeSports #conduct #football #imaturity #IngramSparks #journey #life #love #music #poems #Poetry #RollTide #rules #songs #SunoPro #vinyl -
Somewhere on a Sunday
I woke up feeling a calmness only the Lord could provide.
Then I got out of bed.
Happy Sunday morning friends and followers. I woke up in total peace this morning, answers provided in my sleep to settle my mind of the worries that have been plaguing it for the last month or so. I decided to skip the usual challenges and just ramble through this to see what, where and why this post headed to were it did.
College Football
Yesterday found me having a great day watching football. I witnessed some great games and a couple of plays that were not so great.
The hit to the Oregon Duck’s quarterback in the 2nd period was a cheap shot that resulted with him being rushed to the hospital. I promise, “I did not hurt the duck!” The second one I felt was irresponsible was in the Texas/Tennessee game. This one didn’t cause any physical pain but showed the immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct they seem to not care about anymore.
After a play had ended a Texas player stood above the tackled Tennessee player and acted like he was urinating on him. No flag or penalty was issued which I find offensive and disgusting. Last year on the College Game Day show they let Pat McAfee stand on a diving board in his underwear reaching inside to grab his junk with no repercussions and now this? I think this rude player should have been ejected from the game at the least. If someone did that in public they would be arrested so why do these players and announcers get treated any differently? Come on college officials, ESPN and ABC, let us not forget there are children glued to these games and this bullshit behavior has to stop!
Outside of that we saw some fantastic football being played and teams showing what they are really made of. Of course I have to close this portion of the post with a victory shout-out to Alabama,
Coffee Break
The mind just went blank…Is It The Blues?
Image © https://thebeginningatlast9.com/I sit here and call out for my missing muse
Coming up empty I search to find the clues
Coffee flowing, thoughts refusing to shine
The road ahead is once again reveled to me
Bits and pieces that will eventually set me free
Starting with the decision to stop the press
Words written down and then taken away
Books of poetry no longer for sale today
I dive into my mind for answers of reason
Radio dials on my blog, a page of their own
Music made by AI for the words of my poems
Leaves me searching for something fresh
The construction on this site since it began
Clearly shows you that I have no real plan
Rolling with the flow until I change my mind
Once again I will search for something new
Asking myself if this is what they call the blues
I have no clear answer to offer at this timeGoodbyes
I really enjoyed the last year of using Suno Pro and am happy with the outcomes I got generating music for my songs. My subscription will end on December 2nd and since they changed the platform amid all the legal battles they are facing the generation has fallen sharply.
Music has become more generic and the output is dismal to say the least. V6 might of bypassed some legal issues but today they were slapped with a 1 billion dollar lawsuit from two of the largest controllers in the biz. The songs I made are something I enjoy but with all the rage of slop out there and laws up in the air, I won’t be releasing them at this time although I am accomplishing my original goal of producing a vinyl copy for myself. So long Suno.
As for the books I made…they will also be coming out of circulation. Two goals within two years has me feeling good about myself and has me content with all the great knowledge I have learned about editing, formatting, producing, engineering, and design. I enjoyed working with Ingram Sparks throughout this journey and have no complaints about them, with that said, So long Ingram Sparks.
No video chosen for this post today, So long for now.
S2726 ©https://www.peaceful-threads.com
#AIImages #aiJourney #AIMusic #Alabama #albums #books #coffee #collegeSports #conduct #football #imaturity #IngramSparks #journey #life #love #music #poems #Poetry #RollTide #rules #songs #SunoPro #vinyl -
Somewhere on a Sunday
I woke up feeling a calmness only the Lord could provide.
Then I got out of bed.
Happy Sunday morning friends and followers. I woke up in total peace this morning, answers provided in my sleep to settle my mind of the worries that have been plaguing it for the last month or so. I decided to skip the usual challenges and just ramble through this to see what, where and why this post headed to were it did.
College Football
Yesterday found me having a great day watching football. I witnessed some great games and a couple of plays that were not so great.
The hit to the Oregon Duck’s quarterback in the 2nd period was a cheap shot that resulted with him being rushed to the hospital. I promise, “I did not hurt the duck!” The second one I felt was irresponsible was in the Texas/Tennessee game. This one didn’t cause any physical pain but showed the immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct they seem to not care about anymore.
After a play had ended a Texas player stood above the tackled Tennessee player and acted like he was urinating on him. No flag or penalty was issued which I find offensive and disgusting. Last year on the College Game Day show they let Pat McAfee stand on a diving board in his underwear reaching inside to grab his junk with no repercussions and now this? I think this rude player should have been ejected from the game at the least. If someone did that in public they would be arrested so why do these players and announcers get treated any differently? Come on college officials, ESPN and ABC, let us not forget there are children glued to these games and this bullshit behavior has to stop!
Outside of that we saw some fantastic football being played and teams showing what they are really made of. Of course I have to close this portion of the post with a victory shout-out to Alabama,
Coffee Break
The mind just went blank…Is It The Blues?
Image © https://thebeginningatlast9.com/I sit here and call out for my missing muse
Coming up empty I search to find the clues
Coffee flowing, thoughts refusing to shine
The road ahead is once again reveled to me
Bits and pieces that will eventually set me free
Starting with the decision to stop the press
Words written down and then taken away
Books of poetry no longer for sale today
I dive into my mind for answers of reason
Radio dials on my blog, a page of their own
Music made by AI for the words of my poems
Leaves me searching for something fresh
The construction on this site since it began
Clearly shows you that I have no real plan
Rolling with the flow until I change my mind
Once again I will search for something new
Asking myself if this is what they call the blues
I have no clear answer to offer at this timeGoodbyes
I really enjoyed the last year of using Suno Pro and am happy with the outcomes I got generating music for my songs. My subscription will end on December 2nd and since they changed the platform amid all the legal battles they are facing the generation has fallen sharply.
Music has become more generic and the output is dismal to say the least. V6 might of bypassed some legal issues but today they were slapped with a 1 billion dollar lawsuit from two of the largest controllers in the biz. The songs I made are something I enjoy but with all the rage of slop out there and laws up in the air, I won’t be releasing them at this time although I am accomplishing my original goal of producing a vinyl copy for myself. So long Suno.
As for the books I made…they will also be coming out of circulation. Two goals within two years has me feeling good about myself and has me content with all the great knowledge I have learned about editing, formatting, producing, engineering, and design. I enjoyed working with Ingram Sparks throughout this journey and have no complaints about them, with that said, So long Ingram Sparks.
No video chosen for this post today, So long for now.
S2726 ©https://www.peaceful-threads.com
#AIImages #aiJourney #AIMusic #Alabama #albums #books #coffee #collegeSports #conduct #football #imaturity #IngramSparks #journey #life #love #music #poems #Poetry #RollTide #rules #songs #SunoPro #vinyl -
Apologetics: The Atonement is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card.
One of the most common criticisms against the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is the idea that it simply gives Christians license to sin and protects it. This criticism has been around for millennia and hasn’t slowed down. In fact, since the advent of the Internet, it almost seems that this argument has more ground to stand on than ever before as we’ve been privier to Christians acting badly and more church scandals have been reported. Many people half-jokingly say that Christianity is a religion where you can have your cake and eat it, too; something where you can feel spiritual and like you’re better than other people, while still acting in sin. However, despite these accusations, what many people don’t understand is that the doctrine of atonement was never meant as a get-out-of-jail-free card for sin.
Though Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross does mean that all your sins are covered, that does not mean that it’s a license to continue sinning. Paul himself addresses this in Romans 6: 15-18, when he writes: “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
What this means is that though our sins are covered by Christ’s atonement, as Christians, we aren’t supposed to continue sinning. In fact, we’re obliged to stop sinning out of gratitude to Jesus for His sacrifice. This is further supported by the fact that in order to be saved from your sin, you must accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and you must repent of your sin. While it’s true that none of us will be perfect on this side of eternity, if you are still willfully and consistently sinning against God, are you truly saved? Have you truly repented?
The Bible answers this question with an emphatic “No.” While there will be times were we as Christians slip into sin, if one isn’t showing the signs of repentance and change in their lives after converting, then it may be that they weren’t saved. It may be that they converted on the outside, but never actually repented. 2 Peter 2:20-22 speaks about this. This chapter deals, in context, with false teachers and what will happen to them, but I think this principle also applies to false converts. They say they’re Christians but don’t repent. Instead of turning their lives around and turning away from sin, they turn in a full circle and continue in sin. According to 2 Peter 2:20-22, it would have been better if those people had never known Jesus Christ in the first place than to have known Him and walked away.
Another way to think about this is in the form of a story. Imagine you’re camping with a friend of yours or a family member. The area where you’re camping is near a lake with a lot of dangerous animals in it. The person you’re camping with tells you not to go near it because you could get hurt or be killed. However, you ignore their warning and go to the lake where you’re attacked by the animals living in it. Your friend jumps in and saves you, but in the process, is beat up and on the brink of death from saving you. Seeing this, do you, out of gratitude, stay far away from the lake or do you jump back in even though your friend risked his life for you?
This illustration shows the issue with treating atonement like a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sin is like that lake full of dangerous animals. At the Fall, mankind jumped into that lake, knowing the danger, and not caring. Jesus jumped after us, saved us, and was killed for it. The death that we deserved was taken by Him. To jump back into sin, then, would not only be foolish, but ungrateful. It’s spitting in the face of the one who saved you.
Until next time,
M.J.
#Apologetics #Attonement #Blog #Christian #Christianity #faith #god #jesus #OpinionPeice #Salvation #Writing -
Tell Me About the Rabbits One More Time: On John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
September 27, 2026John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is my first Steinbeck, and as per usual, I went into it knowing practically nothing. Of course I knew the title. I knew Steinbeck’s name and had some hazy association of him with the Great Depression, poverty, migrant labor, dusty American landscapes, perhaps men in overalls staring grimly toward the horizon. That was about the extent of my preparation. I did not know George and Lennie were waiting for me. I certainly did not know what Steinbeck was going to do to them.
Perhaps ignorance is the way to read certain books.
The book is astonishingly short, almost suspiciously so. My copy is only a little over a hundred pages, and I finished it in probably two sittings. Yet it has the emotional weight of something much larger. I have read novels three times its length that contain half its humanity. Steinbeck’s prose is plain, controlled, sometimes almost biblical in its simplicity, but there is an enormous difference between simple writing and simplistic writing. He knows precisely how much to say and when to stop. The restraint is part of the cruelty. This is what I like about novellas. Steinbeck does not need four or five hundred pages to construct a world because the world he wants to show us is already narrow: a bunkhouse, a ranch, a few men, a woman, some rabbits that exist mostly in the imagination, and two itinerant workers carrying between them a private mythology about a piece of land they will someday own.
That dream matters because almost everyone in this book is lonely, worn down, or disappointed by life. George and Lennie, at least, have each other.
I felt particularly for George. There is a weariness in him that Steinbeck never sentimentalizes. He loves Lennie, although “love” is perhaps too neat a word for what exists between them. There is affection, obligation, frustration, pity, companionship, responsibility, even resentment. George must constantly think for two people. He anticipates Lennie’s mistakes, explains the world to him, protects him from other people and other people from him.
Lennie, meanwhile, possesses tremendous physical strength and almost no understanding of its consequences. He likes soft things. Mice. Puppies. Rabbits. A woman’s hair. He reaches toward the world with the innocence of a child while inhabiting a body capable of terrible damage. What he loves, he destroys. And somehow that innocence touched me.
Not because Lennie is harmless. He isn’t. That is precisely the tragedy. Innocence and harmlessness are not the same thing, and Steinbeck understands the distinction. Lennie does not comprehend evil in the ordinary moral sense, yet suffering follows him anyway. Intentions cannot resurrect a dead mouse, restore a crushed hand, or bring a dead woman back to life. I prefer morality to be clean. I want guilt to correspond neatly to intention. Steinbeck instead gives you someone capable of horrifying acts without possessing anything you’d comfortably call malice.
Then there is George.
He complains about Lennie. He fantasizes about the easier life he could have alone. He scolds him like a child, protects him like a brother, guides him like a parent, and sometimes seems almost imprisoned by him. And yet George stays. That matters.
They do not appear to be blood relatives, which makes the bond stranger and, to me at least, more moving. George has no obvious familial obligation to Lennie. Whatever obligation exists has been created between them. Friendship has become responsibility. Their relationship fascinated me because at times George and Lennie seemed less like two companions than two portions of the same human being. I kept entertaining the thought, perhaps unfairly, perhaps too psychologically, that Lennie could almost be George’s invention. A psychic double. George is calculation, restraint, memory, caution. Lennie is appetite, impulse, fantasy, longing. George knows reality. Lennie inhabits desire. George remembers what must be done. Lennie remembers the rabbits. Together they form something strangely whole.
Maybe that is why their separation at the end feels like an amputation.
Their dream of owning land is similarly divided between them. George supplies its architecture; Lennie supplies its faith. George describes the little farm, the vegetables, the animals, the freedom from bosses. Lennie returns obsessively to the rabbits. “Tell about the rabbits” becomes almost a prayer.
The farm is less an economic ambition than an imagined refuge from contingency. A few acres. Vegetables. Animals. Rabbits. No boss. No running. No fear. If they can only reach that place, perhaps George can stop worrying and Lennie can finally exist somewhere without accidentally destroying what he touches.
Steinbeck seems to understand that some dreams are necessary precisely because they may never happen. They allow people to endure the present.
There is very little excess in his writing. The prose is plain without being impoverished, lyrical without showing off. Even the beautiful descriptions of nature are not merely decorative. The landscape seems indifferent to the human dramas occurring inside it. Men suffer, dream, kill, disappear. The river continues. The trees remain. Nature neither condemns nor absolves anyone.
And Steinbeck prepares you for the ending long before it arrives.
One part that devastated me even before Lennie’s death was Candy’s old dog. The dog is ancient, weak, suffering, no longer useful. Candy has had him since he was a pup, but he eventually agrees to let Carlson put him down. Rationally, it is mercy. Emotionally, it is something much harder. Candy has to consent to losing a creature that has accompanied him for years. Afterward, he regrets that he did not kill the dog himself.
That regret hangs over George’s final decision. Candy teaches him, perhaps without meaning to, that if someone you love must die, there may be one final and horrible tenderness in making sure the last hand upon him is yours. I hated that this made sense.
The ending devastated me because George does not simply kill Lennie. He gives him the dream one final time. He tells him about the rabbits.
Lennie dies facing the world he wanted rather than the world coming to punish him. George allows him to remain inside the dream until the final second. It is violence that resembles mercy, or mercy forced to take the shape of violence. I do not know that the distinction can ever be made comfortable.
And George is free afterward. That may be the cruelest thing one can say about the ending.
No more running because of Lennie. No more explaining. No more watching him. No more carrying another man’s life alongside his own. George has finally obtained the independence he sometimes imagined wanting, but only by destroying the person who made that independence seem desirable.
The dream of freedom arrives, except it looks nothing like the dream.
For this reason, I ultimately read Of Mice and Men as a story about saying goodbye.
Not merely a goodbye to Lennie, but a goodbye to the person one has been while loving another person. George kills Lennie, yes, but he also kills the strange little world that existed only because there were two of them inside it. The farm dies. The rabbits die. Their private language dies. George will continue living, presumably, but the George who traveled with Lennie is finished.
Perhaps this is why my idea of Lennie as George’s psychological double refuses to leave me. If Lennie represents some dependent, dreaming, innocent portion of George himself, then the final gunshot becomes darker still. Survival sometimes demands that you abandon possibilities you once needed in order to keep living.
A very short book, then. Barely enough pages to occupy two sittings.
And somehow enough room for an entire goodbye.
#books #literature #bibliophilia #reading #fiction #bookReview #novellas #JohnSteinbeck #OfMiceAndMen #AmericanLiterature #classics -
Tell Me About the Rabbits One More Time: On John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
September 27, 2026John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is my first Steinbeck, and as per usual, I went into it knowing practically nothing. Of course I knew the title. I knew Steinbeck’s name and had some hazy association of him with the Great Depression, poverty, migrant labor, dusty American landscapes, perhaps men in overalls staring grimly toward the horizon. That was about the extent of my preparation. I did not know George and Lennie were waiting for me. I certainly did not know what Steinbeck was going to do to them.
Perhaps ignorance is the way to read certain books.
The book is astonishingly short, almost suspiciously so. My copy is only a little over a hundred pages, and I finished it in probably two sittings. Yet it has the emotional weight of something much larger. I have read novels three times its length that contain half its humanity. Steinbeck’s prose is plain, controlled, sometimes almost biblical in its simplicity, but there is an enormous difference between simple writing and simplistic writing. He knows precisely how much to say and when to stop. The restraint is part of the cruelty. This is what I like about novellas. Steinbeck does not need four or five hundred pages to construct a world because the world he wants to show us is already narrow: a bunkhouse, a ranch, a few men, a woman, some rabbits that exist mostly in the imagination, and two itinerant workers carrying between them a private mythology about a piece of land they will someday own.
That dream matters because almost everyone in this book is lonely, worn down, or disappointed by life. George and Lennie, at least, have each other.
I felt particularly for George. There is a weariness in him that Steinbeck never sentimentalizes. He loves Lennie, although “love” is perhaps too neat a word for what exists between them. There is affection, obligation, frustration, pity, companionship, responsibility, even resentment. George must constantly think for two people. He anticipates Lennie’s mistakes, explains the world to him, protects him from other people and other people from him.
Lennie, meanwhile, possesses tremendous physical strength and almost no understanding of its consequences. He likes soft things. Mice. Puppies. Rabbits. A woman’s hair. He reaches toward the world with the innocence of a child while inhabiting a body capable of terrible damage. What he loves, he destroys. And somehow that innocence touched me.
Not because Lennie is harmless. He isn’t. That is precisely the tragedy. Innocence and harmlessness are not the same thing, and Steinbeck understands the distinction. Lennie does not comprehend evil in the ordinary moral sense, yet suffering follows him anyway. Intentions cannot resurrect a dead mouse, restore a crushed hand, or bring a dead woman back to life. I prefer morality to be clean. I want guilt to correspond neatly to intention. Steinbeck instead gives you someone capable of horrifying acts without possessing anything you’d comfortably call malice.
Then there is George.
He complains about Lennie. He fantasizes about the easier life he could have alone. He scolds him like a child, protects him like a brother, guides him like a parent, and sometimes seems almost imprisoned by him. And yet George stays. That matters.
They do not appear to be blood relatives, which makes the bond stranger and, to me at least, more moving. George has no obvious familial obligation to Lennie. Whatever obligation exists has been created between them. Friendship has become responsibility. Their relationship fascinated me because at times George and Lennie seemed less like two companions than two portions of the same human being. I kept entertaining the thought, perhaps unfairly, perhaps too psychologically, that Lennie could almost be George’s invention. A psychic double. George is calculation, restraint, memory, caution. Lennie is appetite, impulse, fantasy, longing. George knows reality. Lennie inhabits desire. George remembers what must be done. Lennie remembers the rabbits. Together they form something strangely whole.
Maybe that is why their separation at the end feels like an amputation.
Their dream of owning land is similarly divided between them. George supplies its architecture; Lennie supplies its faith. George describes the little farm, the vegetables, the animals, the freedom from bosses. Lennie returns obsessively to the rabbits. “Tell about the rabbits” becomes almost a prayer.
The farm is less an economic ambition than an imagined refuge from contingency. A few acres. Vegetables. Animals. Rabbits. No boss. No running. No fear. If they can only reach that place, perhaps George can stop worrying and Lennie can finally exist somewhere without accidentally destroying what he touches.
Steinbeck seems to understand that some dreams are necessary precisely because they may never happen. They allow people to endure the present.
There is very little excess in his writing. The prose is plain without being impoverished, lyrical without showing off. Even the beautiful descriptions of nature are not merely decorative. The landscape seems indifferent to the human dramas occurring inside it. Men suffer, dream, kill, disappear. The river continues. The trees remain. Nature neither condemns nor absolves anyone.
And Steinbeck prepares you for the ending long before it arrives.
One part that devastated me even before Lennie’s death was Candy’s old dog. The dog is ancient, weak, suffering, no longer useful. Candy has had him since he was a pup, but he eventually agrees to let Carlson put him down. Rationally, it is mercy. Emotionally, it is something much harder. Candy has to consent to losing a creature that has accompanied him for years. Afterward, he regrets that he did not kill the dog himself.
That regret hangs over George’s final decision. Candy teaches him, perhaps without meaning to, that if someone you love must die, there may be one final and horrible tenderness in making sure the last hand upon him is yours. I hated that this made sense.
The ending devastated me because George does not simply kill Lennie. He gives him the dream one final time. He tells him about the rabbits.
Lennie dies facing the world he wanted rather than the world coming to punish him. George allows him to remain inside the dream until the final second. It is violence that resembles mercy, or mercy forced to take the shape of violence. I do not know that the distinction can ever be made comfortable.
And George is free afterward. That may be the cruelest thing one can say about the ending.
No more running because of Lennie. No more explaining. No more watching him. No more carrying another man’s life alongside his own. George has finally obtained the independence he sometimes imagined wanting, but only by destroying the person who made that independence seem desirable.
The dream of freedom arrives, except it looks nothing like the dream.
For this reason, I ultimately read Of Mice and Men as a story about saying goodbye.
Not merely a goodbye to Lennie, but a goodbye to the person one has been while loving another person. George kills Lennie, yes, but he also kills the strange little world that existed only because there were two of them inside it. The farm dies. The rabbits die. Their private language dies. George will continue living, presumably, but the George who traveled with Lennie is finished.
Perhaps this is why my idea of Lennie as George’s psychological double refuses to leave me. If Lennie represents some dependent, dreaming, innocent portion of George himself, then the final gunshot becomes darker still. Survival sometimes demands that you abandon possibilities you once needed in order to keep living.
A very short book, then. Barely enough pages to occupy two sittings.
And somehow enough room for an entire goodbye.
#AmericanLiterature #bibliophilia #bookReview #books #classics #fiction #JohnSteinbeck #literature #novellas #OfMiceAndMen #reading