Category: Identity

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11069 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-29 17:27:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-29 17:27:36 [post_content] =>

Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine.

It started with a pain that felt—and sounded—like a crack of thunder at the base of my skull.

I had been prescribed a medication by my cardiologist that was meant to raise my blood pressure, which it did; so much that when I went to bed that night, I experienced a dangerous bout of supine hypertension, or raised blood pressure from lying down. Unaware of what had happened, I took my migraine medication as normal and went to sleep, not knowing that staying horizontal was the worst thing I could have done.

The next morning, I found myself unable to speak. I felt weak in my body, and even sitting up in bed took enormous effort. I lift weights regularly, but just bringing my hand to my head felt heavier than any deadlift. I have had migraines for almost 30 years, so I assumed I was just having one that was presenting differently. Over the days and weeks that followed, however, I felt progressively worse. I don’t remember the details well, but in my health diary, I diligently tracked every detail: My body was numb, my right side hurt, and I spent more time lying down than not. I also continued struggling to speak or even think. When I saw my headache nurse a month later, she was shocked by the state I was in. I was shaking and sobbing, trying to convey to her just how sick I felt. But while I have always had some difficulty with translating my thoughts into speech, all of a sudden, I found that my thoughts weren’t there, either. They were no longer trapped in my brain—I just didn’t have anything to say.

It took a few weeks for me to realize that the medication was to blame, and when I did, I stopped it cold turkey. Still, it took many months to recover. I wasn’t able to work or write unless the tasks were very straightforward and required no creative input, but even then, everything took me far longer than it once had. More than that, I suddenly couldn’t enjoy the things that had always made life worth living—reading, listening to music, watching movies. If an activity required any degree of focus or interpretation, it felt impossible.

After weeks of struggling to get out of bed or talk, I went to the doctor and asked for an MRI, which showed a white patch indicating brain damage. I took the results to my neurologist, who I regularly see for migraines and related disorders. He suggested that, based on the MRI and my symptoms, I may have had a transient ischemic attack (TIA), or “mini-stroke.”

In the months that followed, with aspirin and support from my medical team, I worked hard to be able to do the things I had previously loved, but still found no joy in them. Things that were once intuitive and essential felt insurmountable, like writing about how I felt or what I was experiencing. Reading—something that had provided escape and pleasure for my entire life—was newly boring. Relating things to others, even things I was ostensibly interested in, felt torturous; every conversation was excruciating.

My recovery has now taken years, but I am finally at a point where I feel almost as strong as I once did and as confident as I used to in expressing myself. Coincidentally, it is over these last three years that I have seen many people around me, even those I respect, struggle with the same things I found so difficult when I was re-learning how to think for myself.

Rather than being struck down by a neurological event, however, the main reason they have struggled with these things is because they have outsourced their faculties to AI.

There may be some application of so-called Artificial Intelligence, sometime, that benefits the lives of everyday people. Yet it is currently being forced into every area of art, marketing, and education, none of which have seemed to benefit. The Atlantic recently reported that film students (I studied film for both my BA and MA) now struggle to sit through entire movies. Many schools don’t believe that students can, or should, be assigned to read full novels. Many office workers increasingly use AI for every little task, while professional writers admit to using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate text instead of actually writing it themselves. (Not just ones you haven’t heard of, either: Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk recently gushed about the benefits of AI, too.)

Advocates for LLMs promote them on the basis that they make everything easier, friction-free. But art is not supposed to be friction-free, nor the same as something anyone else could have produced with access to the right program. This is part of why it was so painful to lose my own ability to write after my TIA. Writing is how I make sense of the world, of my own thoughts, of what has happened to me. It is that combination of my own experiences, perspective and cultural input that makes my work unique. You might not like my work, or relate to it, and that’s OK: Nobody will ever write or create or interpret from the exact same place as another person. That is what makes writing worth reading, and what makes it worth the time and effort, not a randomly generated string of words. Learning and education, too, should be somewhat challenging, because the challenge is a significant part of what makes it so rewarding—something I would soon experience firsthand throughout my recovery.

At some point during the slow crawl through this period, I realized that the skills I’d lost might not come back to me without intervention and tremendous effort. I started to read books and articles again, very slowly, despite struggling to retain any information. I wrote just for the sake of it, even though it wasn’t as easy, rewarding, or even readable as it had once been. I started playing the piano, hoping that learning something new would spark something in me. I focused on studying Spanish. None of these things came easily, but they felt essential if I was to return to the person I had once been. Without my memory, without the capacity to be curious about the world, I was not myself. To come back to her, I had to force myself to do those things, no matter how difficult.

Maybe there were easier routes to normalcy, or at least a facsimile of it. Early in my recovery, if I had turned to AI, maybe I could have given the impression to my editors and friends that I was working at full capacity. But even when I was struggling most—even before I fully understood what had happened to me—it never occurred to me to use it. If anything, my experience made me double down on my aversion to LLMs, particularly in my line of work.

I personally boycott AI for a few reasons; the environmental impact is one. As an author, the wholesale theft of artists’ creative output is another, and something I find abhorrent. The end result of AI-generated text and images pretty much always sucks, and as a person who likes to look at and read things that don’t suck, that’s important. But I’m also old-fashioned: I write by hand, I paint, I take film photos, I listen to vinyl. I like things that are made by people, things that I can touch. I also think art matters, even when it’s imperfect or when it isn’t something I personally enjoy, because it was made by a person transmogrifying their experience into something that we can all share. “Art” made by a machine, then, is not art.

What I find most worrying, though, as a person who shares the world with so many heavy LLM users, is the impact on their brains’ ability to function—especially as someone who temporarily lost a degree of mine. In 2025, a study by MIT found that people who used ChatGPT to “write” showed less brain activity in neural networks associated with cognitive processing. The study divided 54 18- to 39-year-olds into three groups, and asked each to write SAT-level essays using ChatGPT, Google, or nothing. Using an EEG, the researchers found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at “neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.” This isn’t really surprising news—after all, the LLM users in the study didn’t actually use their brains for the study. What is far more alarming is that their level of effort degraded over the course of several months, and they got lazier with each essay.

If you stop doing something because it’s hard, you will eventually lose the ability to do it entirely. Maybe turning to ChatGPT as a one-off for a late assignment won’t affect you, but the science shows that turning to it time and time again will. Think of other technological leaps, like the shift from writing by hand to typing on a typewriter or computer. Studies have found that handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. While I type for work, I have kept a handwritten diary since 2004, because I don’t want to lose that skill. In almost every area, doing things the hard way enables you to think and engage with ideas more deeply. Reading an article or a book yourself and determining its point will help you to remember the information in a more meaningful way than looking at a summary on Google.

There are many writers who are not luddites like me. There are writers, filmmakers, and artists who once produced great works without AI, who now vouch for the technology. But as someone who, overnight, lost some of their capacity to think and write, I cannot comprehend why a person would choose to give that faculty over to a machine.

Your thoughts are all you have. Your experiences, your unique way of seeing the world, your tastes. These are hard-won, often over decades of exploration. You may have to read hundreds of books or watch hundreds of movies that you don’t even like to arrive at what you do. If you’re a writer or artist, you might have to spend years being bad at the thing you love before one day, you aren’t so bad anymore. That work is worth doing.

When I was in the midst of my recovery, I was accepted into an artists’ residency in the dry, water-starved mountains of southern Spain, in an area currently blighted by wildfires. I was to spend two weeks in a house that was so isolated it took 15 minutes just to drive off the property on a dirt path. It took even longer to reach anything that resembled a store. This meant I was trapped, for two weeks, with no excuse to do anything but write. I was still very unwell, struggling to get out of bed and get myself together. But I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass.

There were several people in my residency—a poet, three other longform writers, and a photographer—in addition to the two people running it, who were both visual artists. I found writing very difficult over this period, but I managed to start working on some pieces that I was close to proud of. Each day, I would spend hours chained to my laptop just to produce something, even if it was something that would be edited or scrapped wholesale tomorrow.

It was on this trip that I gained new respect for the craft of writing—the fact that it is hard and takes so much time is part of its value. That struggle is how we figure out what we mean, what we think, what we really believe. I became more cognizant than ever of the importance of processing thoughts, words, and emotions myself. Prompting an LLM to produce text, meanwhile, does not require any effort, insight, or cognition whatsoever.

Writers and journalists who rely on AI often say that they only use it for this or that: only research, only editing, only outlining, not the actual writing. But it is all the writing. The time I spend swimming and working over an idea in my head is also writing, even if there isn’t a laptop in sight. When I am lazily cuddling my dog on the couch and suddenly realize how I’m going to write the next part of a story, I am writing. When I am in the bath and remember the exact right word for a feeling, I am writing. The fact that writing—that any form of art—requires so much of us is a part of what makes it so valuable. The fact that it is by a person, with their own experiences of the world, makes it even more so.

There are parallels to be drawn between the loss of cognitive capability that I experienced and had to work hard to regain and the degradation that cognitive offloading can cause in people who are overly reliant on LLMs. The good news is that being a loyal ChatGPT user doesn’t give you brain damage—at least, as far as we now know. If you want to, there is nothing medically stopping you from regaining the skills you may have lost. If you once knew how to do something that you’ve since spent months handing over to LLMs, it is likely that when you try to do that work alone again, you will struggle without the support of the machine you’ve come to rely on. What worries me more is the people who have never learned to do the work themselves at all, such as students and young people, who may never develop the skills necessary to do anything on their own. Teachers and professors are fighting to change this, and to get students to think for themselves, even tricking them with hidden AI prompts in exercise briefs, but it’s not enough. People have to want to do things themselves, and we have to foster a culture that supports and encourages this.

Those months I spent not being able to read, write, speak, or otherwise communicate the way I had always been able to were frightening and isolating. It took a long time to claw myself back, and it could just take another neurological episode to set me back months, or worse, again. I don’t take those regained skills for granted anymore, because I learned firsthand how much is lost when we can no longer form our own opinions or share our perspective with the world. Finally, I can take great pleasure in reading, in watching movies, in talking and writing about what I think and feel again. Being able to do something yourself, even and especially when it’s difficult, is rewarding. Seeing a paragraph or a painting, however imperfect, and knowing that it came from inside you feels good, even if it’s not where you’d like to be right now. It’s never too late to keep trying—no matter how difficult it is to get to where you hope to be.

[post_title] => In Defense of Difficulty [post_excerpt] => Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => personal-essay-artificial-intelligence-llms-brain-damage-transient-ischemic-attack-chatgpt-opinion-op-ed-recovery [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11069 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026

In Defense of Difficulty

by Marianne Eloise

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11034 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-18 16:02:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-18 16:02:00 [post_content] =>

A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023.

I used to imagine myself as a nurse dressed in white, moving between patients' beds, one link in the chain of their healing. I always believed that nursing was a humanitarian message before it was a job. I believed—and still believe—that nurses are angels of mercy who fight battles and wars every single day, in every shift they work. But then came October 2023.

At the beginning of the war, I decided to return to the emergency department of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the center of Gaza City where I’d previously done my internship. Its specialized units received patients from across the entire Gaza Strip, and its emergency department, also the largest in Gaza, was divided into three zones: green for minor, yellow for moderate, and red for critical cases.

To take the job, I had to leave my father and four of my siblings at our family home in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. Two days later, they too were forced to leave, and another two days after that, our house was bombed. In the weeks that followed, I lost many friends and colleagues. Each day, I felt like I was losing a part of my own life.

Maybe it was the encroaching death, or separation, or longing—but "Gentle Faress," as my mother always called me, soon became hard. At the emergency department, I carried torn limbs with my bare hands, the hospital’s supply of gloves rapidly dwindling as medical supplies weren’t allowed to reach the hospital. I put my fingers inside deep wounds to stop their bleeding. And I developed the nerve to inform a family that their son or daughter had died by telling them, "Take them to the morgue so there is room for someone else.”

On the third of November at 7 o'clock in the morning, I got ready to start another typical 24-hour shift. I had just woken from a two-hour nap—sleep that felt more like a half-waking—on one of the metal chairs in the staff changing room, with two of my colleagues by my side. I went out searching for any spot with a phone signal so I could call my mother and tell her I was still alive, and to make sure everyone in my family was still alive, too. I would have to lie to her as usual, telling her that I was eating well, that I was still strong, and that we were safe and under international protection because we were medical staff. But none of it was true.

Outside, a now typical scene met me: what appeared to be thousands of displaced people were spread across the ground in the stairwells and corridors of the hospital, sleeping on the bare floor without the slightest bit of privacy or comfort. Children were crying, maybe from hunger or cold, or simply in their search for any feeling of safety. I looked into people's faces, which tell tales, and saw deep exhaustion and tears held back. Maybe they’d lost their house, their family. Maybe they’d lost everything, and only they themselves had survived.

Finally, I spotted a few people standing by the hospital gate, holding up their phones. After a few steps, I heard a loud whistling and then a violent explosion nearby. Israeli warplanes were bombing a water truck and the people queuing to fill their empty gallon bottles near the hospital’s entrance.

For a split second, in the commotion, I truly believed I had died, that I would never see my family again; that if my phone rang, no one would be able to answer it.

When sound returned to my ears, I could hear the screaming and crying of children and women around me. Wake up. Hurry. Get up, my dear. Don't die. Like slaps across my face, these words brought my awareness back, and I ran back into the hospital as fast as I could.

In the emergency department, my role was to insert intravenous cannulas so a doctor could assess the patients and try to compensate for blood loss with fluids. But because the intensive care unit was already filled with severe injuries and had no space left, we began receiving ICU patients in the ER, as well. Understaffed and given the overwhelming need, this meant choosing those who we believed had the greatest chance of survival. I felt the pain of having to decide who lives and who dies as I moved from one injured person to another, my mind unable to absorb what my hands were doing. The sounds of screaming and crying, and the smell of blood and burned bodies, filled the hospital.

While I was running with an oxygen bottle in my hand, suddenly, a woman rushed toward me, seizing my hand tightly and kissing it. "Please help my son—he's breathing, please, he's alive, I'm sure of it, I have no one else, and if I lose him I will have lost everything in my life,” she pleaded. He was lying on the ground, blood pooling around him like a lake. I knew he was already gone, but I was caught between two fires: the fire of the mother and her grief, and the fire of the many other injured people who still needed care. My conscience insisted I do something for the woman as she looked at me with eyes full of hope and anguish. But I did not know how to tell her that her son could not be saved, so I whispered to the doctor that we needed to perform CPR. It seemed almost impossible given how little time we had, yet the doctor agreed. Afterwards, we told the mother that her son had not survived. Then we moved on to finish our work with the other patients, leaving her behind.

"He was going to be married soon, and happiness was about to visit us,” she wailed. “I was going to sing for him at his wedding. The most precious thing I had has died.” To this day, whenever I hear another story of loss in the news, I still picture that woman’s face, and her hand reaching for her son’s.

I wanted to call my own mother to tell her that I was alive. I kept seeing her image and her shadow, as if she were walking beside me, to reassure me. But after meeting that woman, after seeing her tears, I began to fear that one day, my own mother might be in her place.

Family members carried dozens of bodies out of the intensive care unit to the morgue, and those who’d suffered injuries were transferred to the inpatient wards for follow-up. Our department looked like an actual battlefield, with blood everywhere, and IV lines, syringes, and used equipment scattered about. Around 12 p.m., once we’d finished assisting the morning’s cases, I walked outside once again to try to call my mother. My hands trembled as I held my phone and heard her tender voice answering hello. But despite all my longing for her, I hung up. I tried another time, and when I heard her voice, I burst into tears and hung up again. I couldn’t understand why.

Maybe it was all simply too much for me to bear. The Israeli military had destroyed the infrastructure around the hospital. They had destroyed the water lines and the solar panels we used to generate electricity, which shut down the operating rooms, the ventilators, and the sterilization equipment. How could I watch thousands of people die, without any fault of their own, while we just ran from one injured person to the next without any medical resources or equipment? The military had blocked the medicine, painkillers, and sedatives sent by international organizations from reaching the hospital. There was no food. I kept a box of dates in my locker, and I ate one a day.

The hours passed and the situation grew relatively calm. We could only hear the sound of reconnaissance aircraft flying low, like the buzzing of mosquitoes in your ear, but much louder, and the gunfire from the warships at sea. They sounded increasingly close—a bad omen. Most of the bombing and the massacres took place in the middle of the night. This made it harder for ambulance and rescue crews to pull people out from under the rubble, and harder for medical staff to help the injured.

My colleagues and I sat in the emergency department at 1 a.m., talking about what we would wish for if we made it out alive. A radio station broadcast from the West Bank, and we tuned in hoping to hear some good news about a ceasefire, or anything at all. But all the news mentioned were the threats to storm Al-Shifa Hospital and the Israeli military plan to occupy the Strip.

We heard the sounds of bursts and fire belts striking the area near the coast that separates the north and south of Gaza City. After several minutes, some ambulances arrived after having been blocked by the advancing Israeli tanks. I assisted the dozens of injured people coming in, most of whom had burns or lacerated wounds across their entire bodies. I asked one of them where he’d come from. When he mentioned the neighborhood where my own family was, I lost my mind.

I ran among the injured and the martyrs, among the disfigured and the unidentified, searching for anyone from my family. I tried calling them but couldn’t get through, and I tried to go with the ambulances to see for myself, but the Israeli tanks had advanced so far that they’d split the Strip into separate parts. I went to the morgue to search among the bodies, thinking through the worst scenario I could imagine. I had no strength left in me, as if I had lost the last strand of hope in this world.

Heavy hours passed, but none of them arrived.

With the sunrise, I walked out to the street once again to try to call one of my brothers. After several attempts, Yasser answered, and with it, life returned to my body. His voice sounded both shaky and exhausted, as though he were forcing each word out. "We got out by a miracle,” he told me. “It truly was a miracle, but we are still alive and we are all fine."

Then the signal dropped and our call ended.

Eight o'clock in the morning, the fourth of November. I made my way back to that same hard, cold metal chair where I had woken up the day before, a lifetime earlier. I closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. The day played back to me in pieces: the water truck, the young man who was already gone before I ever helped him, his mother's hands wrapped around mine, Yasser's voice breaking at the other end of the phone. I asked myself what our sin was, why all these children and women had to die. But instead of an answer, I only had that chair, my exhausted body, and the hope that if I kept my eyes closed long enough, I might, for once, dream of something else.

[post_title] => 24 Hours in the Emergency Room at Al-Shifa Hospital [post_excerpt] => A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => al-shifa-hospital-gaza-city-palestine-nurse-personal-essay-2023 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-21 04:14:37 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-21 04:14:37 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11034 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 18, 2026September 21, 2026

24 Hours in the Emergency Room at Al-Shifa Hospital

by Faress Arafat

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10985 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_content] =>

For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa.

I credit much of how I live my life to the wisdom of the women in my family. From my grandmother’s tip to drink chamomile tea after dinner ahead of an early morning, to my mother’s insistence on cleaning chicken with vinegar and lemon juice; from learning to grow aloe vera at home to heal wounds in an emergency, to knowing that blowing air into an infant’s face will stop them from choking. All this is part of my inheritance.

While the benefits of chamomile are easily found on the internet, in my family, such knowledge was passed by word of mouth. In some ways, that’s still common today: For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool that is sharpened, exercised, and passed down through generations. Encompassing stories, songs, beliefs, and customs that preserve history, memory, and cultural practices, this tradition influences the choices we make and how we navigate the world.

In Jamaica, where my family comes from, oral tradition was as much an old practice taken from enslaved Africans as it was an act of survival, because they were forbidden from reading and writing. “During slavery, enslaved people were denied literacy and formal education, so oral tradition became the most crucial tool,” says Mickayla Whyte, a library assistant at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. “Oral tradition is the oldest form of traditional preservation, and it allows communities to remember who they are, where they come from, and even where they're going."

These traditions from West and Central African nations blended over time with Indigenous Arawak practices on the island. The survival of folklore like Anansi the Spider—about a mischievous spider who creates and escapes trouble with his wit—alongside the use of herbal remedies, like cerasee tea to lower blood pressure, exemplify the intergenerational strength of oral tradition and the syncretism found across diasporas. Across the diaspora, as in my own family, this tradition is largely sustained by matrifocality.

“In its most simplistic form, matrifocality means mother-focused,” Dr. Leighan Renaud, University of Bristol lecturer and author of Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, tells me. “What that means is that women in their roles as mothers—not necessarily biological mothers—are central to the organization of families and therefore the organization of communities.”

Unlike patriarchy, matrifocality subverts modern ideas of familial and cultural hierarchy. Dr. Renaud notes that women are not so much at the top of a structure, but are instead the nucleus around which society operates.

In my family, this tradition was led by my late great-aunt Nerissa. She was witty, generous, and supportive, with a deep passion for sharing her faith with friends, family, and strangers. Born the fourth of 14 children and a mother to six of her own, Great-Aunt Nerissa was as beloved for her caretaking as she was for passing on family and cultural lore, like knowing not to whistle after dark for fear of attracting ghosts. Before she passed away this spring at 76, she took pride in knowing and sharing our history, and would always wrangle our large family together to tell us stories during holidays. She did this with little complaint, but now, in her absence, I recognize the enormous responsibility she held in carrying our family’s legacy for as long as she did.

Because of her, I learned how much my family sacrificed when they journeyed to the United States. I attended her naturalization ceremony when I was in middle school and remember hearing about all the preparation and studying she did in order to pass the interview and test. She was asked questions about American presidents, laws, and wars that I admittedly still don't know the answers to. As a first-generation American citizen, it left me with a profound understanding of the legal and cultural challenges so many immigrant families face as they attempt to embrace a country that doesn't always return the sentiment.

In the aftermath of grieving her, I also realize the important task of preserving tradition and passing on memory has now fallen to my mother, myself, and the rest of the younger women in my family. This is not a role that I take lightly: In the Caribbean, women like my great-aunt Nerissa are simultaneously regarded as family, community, and cultural pillars.

While they are revered as leaders inside the home, however, women and girls across the Caribbean still experience objectification in both pop culture and daily life, as well as violence, fewer leadership roles, and unequal power relations. Still, misogynistic and sexist ideals often clash with the values taught in many Caribbean homes, where maternal figures are respected for nurturing families. Through her research on child socialization in the region, Dr. Renaud found this paradox exists because “girls are socialized to become mothers, and boys are socialized to stay boys.”

“Even though there is this patriarchal ideology that's kind of pervasive everywhere, girls are being raised to parent,” Dr. Renaud says. “Not just to parent children, but also to parent everybody.”

This caretaking role has been thrust upon Caribbean women for centuries, persisting during slavery and beyond. As Dr. Renaud points out, for enslaved Africans, nuclear families couldn’t exist due to labor divisions that frequently separated men from their wives and children in the home. But the expectation that women should take on a more significant role in preserving and implementing cultural values and practices likely predates transatlantic enslavement altogether.

According to Dr. Renaud, some theories suggest that these truncated traditions derive from West Africa. “So much of who we were as Africans culturally was outlawed in slave plantations,” she says. “What that meant was that so much of the culture happened in the house, and if for whatever reason it's women who are in the house with the children, then it's the women who become responsible for making sure that the culture passes on.”

Whyte agrees, adding that historically, women’s sharing of a family’s oral traditions built community and combated oppression. Our ancestors persevered through stories, songs, and proverbs, using them to transmit lessons on survival, intelligence, and resistance. These practices have continued long after emancipation: When slavery was outlawed across the Caribbean by 1873, we still retained our oral traditions. Like other women across the region, my own foremothers bore the responsibility of remembering health needs, birthdates, and anniversaries, along with preserving skills like foraging, gardening, and cooking. All things necessary for remembrance and survival.

Take my mother’s mother, Grandma Carmen, Great-Aunt Nerissa’s immediate younger sister. Born in the south-central Manchester parish, she was raised in Kingston before emigrating to New York in the 80s at 30 years old. Like my great-aunt, Grandma Carmen has passed on adages like, “Make a friend before you need a friend,” instilling in me the importance of sustaining relationships. She also has shared stories about her childhood pet goat, inspiring me to imagine a slower, “country” life, which eventually led me to buy a pig that was raised on my grandfather's farm in Jamaica. Simultaneously, I’ve often noted her discomfort when telling stories about her childhood. Her life wasn’t an easy one: Grandma Carmen was raised apart from some of her siblings, and in addition to the oral traditions they inherited, they had to create their own form of play, teaching themselves most of the skills they needed to thrive despite limited resources and an unconventional upbringing.

After Great-Aunt Nerissa’s funeral earlier this year, I spent time with my grandmother and her sisters as they pieced together family stories I’d never heard of before, relying only on their memories to corroborate events. I was surprised to learn that some of my family members’ legal names were apparently misspelled on their registration documents when they were newborns. In a couple cases, the names I know them by turned out to be nicknames—my Great-Grandaunt Madgie is actually “Margarita” and my great-aunt Nerissa was legally “Norissia.” I also learned that my great-grandmother died of kidney failure and high-blood pressure around the age of 44 (though nobody seems to know how old she was for certain). It struck me how vital this information is to our family’s medical history, especially considering the ways we’ve combated illnesses since, often following tradition and our ancestors’ wisdom.

“When you live in the Caribbean, usually instead of going to the doctor most of the time, they just practice what they learn from their foreparents,” my grandmother Carmen says. She is 74 years old and lives in New York. “Each generation, they look at life from a different point of view. But then, because you, as a parent, know what works for you, you try to pass it on to your children.”

Oral tradition is a living tradition. As culture evolves alongside technology and other discoveries, so can the ways we document our memories, giving each new generation space to adjust according to our own experiences. I realize now that some advice passed onto me was not always given in the name of custom. In some cases, they were suggestions based on lived experiences that were not mine, leaving me with the choice to take what I needed for my own life and leave the rest to our family’s collective memory.

Still, new technology and methods of documentation could disrupt oral tradition and storytelling as we’ve known it for centuries, potentially causing it to become obsolete. Women’s roles in communities have also changed, as has women’s labor, altering traditional storytelling avenues and frameworks that were once central to family and community life. But Whyte argues we’re still engaging in oral tradition when we use technology, we’re just doing it differently.

“I think we're still sharing stories, because I think social media is still a form of preserving stories,” Whyte says. “If you're to create a video and put it out there, the internet is forever, it's everlasting. That video is going to always be out there, the story is still being preserved, so regardless of women having to work more, we're still connecting.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Nerissa and Grandma Carmen did not foresee a reason to document their experiences beyond word-of-mouth in their small, tight-knit community in Manchester, where traditions were passed vertically. As the family grew and dispersed, my mother’s generation embraced analog recording methods, exchanging Polaroids with those who lived far away and making home videos on VHS tapes that were stored away for years at a time. My generation obsesses over documenting big and small moments with our smartphones and sharing them online instantaneously, with the hopes that others might relate or take interest. We may have a tendency to overshare, but I believe it is fueled by a desire to build community beyond physical limitations, giving more opportunity to spread oral traditions horizontally.

I may be living a vastly different life from the women who came before me, yet we are mirrors of each other. And as long as we keep finding ways to pass on tradition from one generation to the next, our memories and principles, and those of the many ancestors who came before us, will live on.

[post_title] => My Family's Wisdom Is My Inheritance [post_excerpt] => For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => oral-tradition-family-wisdom-matrifocality-african-caribbean-diaspora-storytelling-survival-tool-motherhood-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10985 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026

My Family’s Wisdom Is My Inheritance

by Amaya McDonald

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10980 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_content] =>

A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile.

Daniela Catrileo begins Piñen with an invocation. In a short preface, she asks the reader to imagine a river, powerful and pulsing; to imagine its sounds, its smells; to picture the way it moves, how the water snakes through the earth.

“Now come with me to the river,” she writes. “Give me your hand.”

For Catrileo, this invocation is both purposeful and personal. Piñen is a book of short stories about Mapuche youth, largely centered around girls navigating childhood and adolescence against a backdrop of othering: The Mapuche are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Chile, where these stories take place. The author asks us to invoke the river as a path through “continuity and exile,” and chooses it, in part, for its significance to her family’s lineage and name. (In Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, Catrileo means “cut river,” a symbolism she interweaves throughout her work as a way of exploring how Indigenous people have been “fractured by dispossession” and displacement.)

Her request sets the tone for the rest of the book. “To understand the river, a sensory relationship with its body is essential,” she writes. “If we can manage to understand its song, its language, its movement, perhaps we can translate tomorrow.”

With Catrileo as our guide, we are pulled through Piñen’s currents, both gentle and violent. In one story, the narrator considers the death of a classmate, shot and killed just beneath her window. In another, a young woman remembers her brother, years after he’s disappeared, while stuck on the Santiago Metro. In “Warriache,” a woman reflects on her childhood friendship with another Mapuche girl, a fellow outcast named Yajaira, as a means of remembering and understanding herself. “When I imagine Yajaira, I have an easier time of seeing me, too,” she says. “I am trying to sketch my life, beginning with hers.”

Much of the book explores the idea of collective memory, and the deep wound that colonialism leaves behind. It is also an exercise in how we might begin to correct and defy colonial narratives by uncovering the truth hidden beneath them. (As Catrileo writes, “In the dance of writing, it’s important to open the wound.”) “Colonial shards produce colonial images: fragments that lodge like splinters,” she writes in the book’s preface. “The question of how to create images that fold and divert the colonial gaze runs through my creative practice. Though it may seem like an aesthetic question, it’s also deeply political. To interrogate the image is to interrogate the instruments of geopolitical domination that continue to operate.”

Piñen—which means “dust or grime stuck to the skin” in Mapudungun—is a book about identity and survival, and how they are inherently intertwined; how gender and race and class can change the shape of how a person perseveres. Specific to the Mapuche, it is about how a displaced people and culture can endure, even when forced out of their ancestral home to cities and other places unknown.

Yet while the stories are specific—all take place in Chile around the turn of the century, and follow characters trying and failing to shed the piñen that clings to them—the collection feels most universal in Catrileo’s deep understanding of the precarity of adolescence, and the feeling of gradually becoming who you are. Through this lens, its stories feel both exceptionally jarring and undeniably tender. Perhaps most unsettlingly, in “Pornomisery,” the narrator grapples with the violence that surrounds her: Next door, her neighbor Valeska—a girl around her age—suffers incestual rape at the hands of her father, who eventually kills himself after he learns his daughter is pregnant. Later, the narrator discovers her grandmother had been abused by her own father, and that her mother, too, had been abused by an uncle, something her mother only remembers much later in life.

Much of the story is about feeling helpless in the face of other people’s suffering, and for those who have suffered, domestic rage as a response to silence. “The kitchen was my mother’s place of liberation,” the unnamed narrator says. “I always imagined that instead of crying, she cooked… It was her way of escaping, of screaming.” As the narrator begins to go through puberty, she is hurdled towards something she feels both unequipped for and uninterested in. Still, she knows that the change is entirely out of her control. “Everyone went through the motions to make me a woman,” she says, resentfully. “But they never explained to us why, nor did they ask if I wanted to become one.”

Through all of this, Catrileo does not shy away from the darkest depths of her characters’ pain, particularly the pain of women and girls. But she also never abandons us in its pursuit: Just when you think you might be starting to drown, her hand is there to pull you out of the river, and back into the light.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Piñen" by Daniela Catrileo [post_excerpt] => A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-pinen-by-daniela-catrileo-translated-fiction-short-stories-mapuche-chile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10980 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 27, 2026August 27, 2026

Book of the Month: “Piñen” by Daniela Catrileo

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10817 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_content] =>

Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back.

A mirror might be an innocuous part of your life, but for most of mine, it was filled with the unknown. Each accidental glance meant confronting abstract shapes that filled me with dread. I knew my real reflection was buried somewhere underneath. But I feared if I looked too closely I still wouldn't be able to comprehend what I saw; a fear equal to the tales of Lovecraft.

I wasn’t born afraid of my reflection, but instead, taught to bear witness to my incongruence by the world around me. As a child, my gender was irrelevant to me until people started telling me how it was supposed to be; how it was supposed to look. I’d never wanted to wear a dress, had never liked the color pink, and had never cared for unicorns. But I chafed at the obligation that I had to be something at all.

Growing up, I found an unconscious comfort in a digital social life, where I was freed from those gendered obligations. I recessed into this world, filling my days with hours-long voice calls while playing video games with strangers online. I felt safe from the abstract fear I’d always carried. In the digital world, it didn’t matter what I looked like, or what body I was born into. I had full agency over how others “saw” me. This is the reason so many young trans kids find comfort in communities online: a separation from the physical. But I wasn’t ready to look inward yet.

My connections became tethered to a screen. Even when I did get together with neighborhood friends to play video games or watch movies in their families’ basements, the chances that I'd catch myself reflected were limited. The screen acted as bait so we wouldn't have to look at one another. For a kid who would put a blanket over their bedroom mirror, this was a pretty nice situation to be in. It was only when the monitor shut down that I could see the unknown looking back at me again.

This abstract discomfort I’d always felt finally took shape as I entered an all-boys high school. Standing in a hallway amongst a jungle of teen boys for the first time, I had only one thought: I’m not like them. Maybe every mirror I'd encountered before that moment was unfocused, and this one epiphany corrected my vision, revealing what was always buried on the other side of the mirror: myself. And now, I could see that she was suffocating.

As realization and panic set in, I recessed further online. My only gasps of air came from my growing digital social life. Unlike the grand stage it often feels like today, the internet of my adolescence felt like a town square, where I could meet people I’d otherwise never would. Slowly, my digital circle expanded. Along with select friends from previous school years, I began building a community of trusted people across the country, picked up in different virtual lobbies. I’d spend hours on Skype calls with dozens of friends late into the night, talking about gaming and politics and movies. Much to the certain dismay of our parents, these strangers became some of my closest friends.

After I left the jungle, I was ripped away from the safety of that digital circle. College revealed that my digital life was just a band-aid on a much deeper wound. It was there I finally understood that I was trans, and that hiding this would not only leave my reflection suffocating, but leave me suffocating, too. This urgency forced me to find trusted people around me, and begin to transition socially—online and off. I changed my name to Allison across both worlds, and slightly altered how I dressed offline to feel more congruent with who I wanted to be. I became recognized at school and at work as myself.

In the process, something surprising happened: other people saw the woman in my reflection before I could. I began relishing in my newfound community, many of them other queer folk on their own identity journeys. It was healing to see, in living color, that I was not alone. They encouraged me to celebrate milestones; hormone anniversaries became an additional birthday worth celebrating. The thoughts and feelings I’d hidden my whole life became open conversations. Panic slowed, and the tightness in my chest and the weight on my shoulders began to ease.

To be accepted was like a breath of fresh air on the first warm day of spring. I wish it was simple enough to say this solved all my problems; I still feared my reflection and would flinch whenever I accidentally caught a glimpse. But occasionally, I’d recognize the woman looking back at me, and even be able to meet her eye.

What I previously thought impossible and out of reach was suddenly right in front of me. I wasn’t born loving myself, but I was taught how to. And the people who taught me this—the people who allowed me to be myself—are who I consider family now.

During the pandemic, I traveled across New York visiting state parks with two of these friends from college. We’d take long hikes together, and whenever we’d reach the top of a mountain, I’d finally feel untethered from a screen. On one of these hikes, I decided I didn’t want to make it to the peak. I let my friends go off as I clambered up a small boulder, two-thirds up the trail. For the very first time, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe. I was unburdened by the weight of my own fears, and my body relaxed, allowing me to take a nap on top of the comfiest boulder in central New York.

Those dear strangers online are now family, too. A year ago, we all traveled across the world to meet for the first time in Tokyo, Japan. It's a beautifully strange experience to finally meet people you’ve spoken to through a screen for around a decade in the streets of Asakusa. Yet it never felt like we were “meeting” for the first time; instead, we were celebrating our collective friendship. With roughly a dozen of us, we explored a new country together, visiting shrines and possibly every 7-Eleven in Tokyo. They even helped my now-wife plan her proposal to me on that very trip. (They were also the first to know about our engagement, almost a week before our blood families did.)

This community pulled me out from the other side of the mirror. Each person was a hand stretching out. Without them, I likely would not be here. I cherish my community so deeply, and even though life has taken its grip, we still find ways to talk and to see each other; we find ways to make time.

These days, I don’t cover the mirrors in my apartment. I’m not immune to the fears I once had, and will probably always harbor some form of self-reproach. But mostly, I am living with enthusiasm, despite how hellbent this country is on targeting people like me. With each new policy enacted, any moment of fear I have is quickly assuaged by a friend sending support or a loving message. At a time when I have less protections than ever, I somehow feel the most safe.

You don’t notice healing, you realize you’ve healed. Walking on the street used to require the mental anguish of shutting my peripherals off in fear of catching a distorted reflection of myself in a car or shop window. Sitting in a subway car meant closing my eyes to not see a blurry reflection in the glass on the other side. Until one day, it didn’t.

I wish I could go back in time and tell younger me to not look away. I know if she ever did look for long enough, she would’ve seen herself with a now common smile, surrounded by friends who love her. Just because she didn’t know who she was looking at didn’t mean it was some Lovecraftian horror. Sometimes, it’s just your reflection waiting to be recognized, waiting to be freed.

[post_title] => Befriending My Reflection [post_excerpt] => Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back at me. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => befriending-my-reflection-adult-friendship-week-old-friends-identity-mirror-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10817 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026

Befriending My Reflection

by Allison Baker

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10683 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-06-18 22:14:57 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-06-18 22:14:57 [post_content] =>

In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.

For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been aware of Nigeria’s potential.

Globally, this potential has largely been measured by the country’s natural resources, from relatively recent (and continuing) discoveries of rare earth elements, to crude oil, its greatest export commodity, and arguably also its greatest curse. Discovered some years short of independence from British colonial rule in 1960, oil has been the main cause of poverty and ecological degradation in the Delta region, often stagnating development in Nigeria’s other industries due to over-reliance on its “black gold”.

Then, there’s the potential of our country’s expansive 230 million-plus population, consisting of over 400 ethnic groups (or 500, depending on how they’re counted), with just as many languages. Equally important is our religious diversity, composed largely of Muslims and Christians, as well as practitioners of various traditional religions, the latter sometimes performed (quietly) alongside the Abrahamic faiths. Increasingly, if only marginally, there’s also a rise in irreligiosity and atheism among Nigeria’s youth, noteworthy because Nigerians are, on average, a deeply religious (pontificating and practicing) people.

There is also the potential of our diaspora. From the time of independence or even before it, the Nigerian diaspora has produced notable writers, artists, and musicians, a feat that has only grown as the country’s entertainment industries, especially in music and film, have exploded in the last decade. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a “scammer” stereotype, Nigerians in diaspora—especially in the West—stand out as among the most educated, flourishing immigrant populations across various countries. Last year, Nigerians abroad even remitted over $20 billion back to the country, exceeding its foreign direct investment. This statistic does more than simply demonstrate the economic success enjoyed by many Nigerians abroad; it offers insight into the intimate connections we have to the nation of our birth—or of our parents’ or grandparents' birth. It also shows that, where the government has failed to create economic conditions for the average Nigerian to meet their basic needs, Nigerians individually and collectively have offered the necessary support to fill the gap.

This, however, reveals a truth that has persisted from one generation to the next: Nigeria’s potential has not staved off its reality.

"I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential."

While the truth of any country exists beyond what data reveals, it cannot be entirely ignored. The numbers show that by most measures, Nigerians at home are collectively worse off than they were even a decade ago. Its GDP per capita, for example, has fallen to an estimated $835.49 this year; just four years ago, that figure was $2,057. Unsurprisingly, this has meant an exacerbation of extreme poverty, even as, notoriously, the combined worth of the nation’s five wealthiest people could put an end to it should they so choose.

Just as unsurprising is that Nigeria’s rate of unemployment remains high, despite the National Bureau of Statistics’ recent manipulation to arrive at the now low 4.3% figure, after surpassing 30% unemployment just a few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of living in Nigeria has escalated to its worst in a generation, while rising security concerns, rife in different parts of the country for different reasons, have made it difficult to determine the sheer scale of crime nationally.

Put together, then, the potential of Nigeria is exponential. But the reality of Nigeria is we have a multigenerational kleptocratic political class with little interest in strengthening the nation’s institutions or improving the lives of ordinary people. Whatever improvements have been made—for decades—have been in spite of this class, and often by the sheer will of persistent individuals and grassroots community initiatives.

"Seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice."

You might not know any of this, of course, if you only frequent, or are attentive to, the country during its Detty December period, where the weeks-long partying never ends in the palatable parts of its Lagos metropolis. Even with hiked prices and complaints from Nigerians at home and abroad, who go less for the merriment than to visit family, the period shows no signs of easing. People anywhere, I believe, have a right to enjoyment despite whatever depths of despair we may find ourselves in. But when does this enjoyment start to become smoke and mirrors for the lack—and a desensitization to the lack—experienced by most Nigerians?

If it sounds like I am describing a country on the brink, my visits in the last two years, especially, have felt like I was witnessing it, too. This is the same country where many of our parents survived a late ’60s civil war and perennial eras of dictatorship through to the ’90s. And yet, the country today seems somehow less tolerable, because the last decade of governance has revealed even the smallest gains can be reversed; that this is not a developing country, but a regressing one.

Having frequently meditated on the state of the nation’s potential versus its reality, I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential—and a potential that will never even be minorly realized. What’s more is that the values that Nigerians ordinarily uphold—our ability to persevere, to get through, to make good of what is bad—is also ultimately what holds us back. Realizing this made me all the more hopeless, because how do a people resist over time and collectively when enough is never enough?

With all of this on my mind, last November, visiting Nigeria yet again, I was apprehensive; despite my own relative economic privilege, I’ve been enjoying my stays less, considering them more a labor of my particular family culture than a joyful homecoming. This visit, lasting less than 10 days, would be dominated by art and art makers across two cities—Lagos and Benin City. I’d also be making it to my ancestral hometown, Ughelli, in the Delta.

Yet for all my apprehensions, I found myself less fatigued by the state of the country than contemplative. While I would witness many swaths of society that spoke to the country’s regression, seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice.

Photographs from J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere's Hairstyles exhibit at MAMCO in 2001. (Photo courtesy of MAMCO / Wikimedia Commons.)

In its tenth year, ART X Lagos provided me with a swanky welcome as I encountered the who’s who of the Lagos art scene and beyond, the international fair now among Africa’s largest. Well-curated with numerous official and unofficial events, you would have to try to have a bad time. There were symposiums dedicated to the country’s different postcolonial art schools featuring the likes of Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, founder of one of the largest art galleries in West Africa, named after herself. Then there was the live photography studio inspired by the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who captured Nigerians’ hairstyles as an artistic process, reminding us of the great value of art as a cultural archive.

In the midst of craftspeople, visual artists, sculptors—upcoming and established—there was also hearteningly, programming for children, inviting them to be art makers at a young age. Away from ART X Lagos, the Fela Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion immersive exhibition, ongoing since October, was a gratifying celebration of perhaps one of Nigeria’s most notable cultural icons. Savoring it all, the only reservation I had was a familiar one—that more than just well-off Lagosians and visitors deserve access to such things, too.

Leaving for Benin City shortly after—the old historic home of the once powerful Edo nation, famous for the Benin Bronzes—I attended the inaugural Black Music Art Festival, established by the artist Victor Ehikhamenor. The fair showcased exhibitions and a remarkable new Sculpture Park, all done in tandem with local Nigerians and featuring a plethora of young artists, including Osaru Obaseki. A multidisciplinary artist who won the surprise first prize on opening night, Obaseki stood out for many reasons, but most notably to me, for her incorporation of bronze casting, traditionally done by men. Between her work and that of her contemporaries, innovation was everywhere I looked, including in the mixed media installation Invisible Pedestrians by Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha, AKA Mr. Danfo, and a studio visit with artist Derek Jombo, who blends surrealism with classical realism in portraits of postcolonial Nigerians.

Osaru Obaseki. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)

On the way to Ughelli, four hours by road from Benin, I traveled with a colleague turned friend, Agohogo Otega, a photojournalist and artist whose work I was finally able to purchase after years of eyeing a particular piece showcasing our hometown’s sunrise. Once in Ughelli, I spent time with a cousin I don’t often see, who has turned his artistic vocations from music to visual art once again. He shared his work with me as he told me of his future plans of pursuit.

I had not wanted the best Nigeria has to offer to trick me into succumbing once again into narratives of our potential, and it didn’t. But what happened in spending time with the full range of artists—from those who have international acclaim to those who struggle to afford the most basic items for their practice—was a reminder that while I’ve never had much faith in the Nigerian political class, if I’m to maintain my ties to the country as a whole, I cannot afford to give up on its people.

"Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems."

This includes their many achievements despite the countless factors working against them. Aside from art, even with inadequate infrastructural support, everything from agritech businesses to renewable energy companies are still advancing, continually exhibiting to those that control the nation’s purse strings what the future could be, long before they’ve invested in it. Despite the very real partly religious conflicts and sometimes ensuing violence that has occurred in various parts of the country, for the most part, we also do more than tolerate each other: I was born in Ibadan, and if you’ve ever been there, you know that one’s neighbors are just as likely to be Christian as they are to be Muslim (or traditionalists) and celebrating each other’s festivities is part of the city’s ethos. There are many more Ibadans in Nigeria than not.

It’s why the characterization of Western (and Western-minded) politicians and pundits who don’t understand (or intentionally misunderstand) the complex dynamics of the nation—quick to weaponize “Christian genocide” rhetoric—are speaking out of turn; there are too many additional factors at play to oversimplify our national woes. It is true that Nigeria has an ethnocentrism problem that has seldom been adequately examined in the context of power and privilege, akin to racism. But for a people who still embody the memory of our once independent precolonial nations, that we have never really had many leaders keen to unite us—and in fact have leaders even today who weaponize our differences—my sense is we often belittle our everyday congeniality towards each other. A congeniality I would like to see more of in how we regard each other’s cultural expressions.

Derek Jombo. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)

Given all the tragedies of Nigeria, I remain astonished at the art and the artists the country produces. For a country that is in such dire straits, that quite frankly, has so much for its ordinary citizens to be attentive to, and where institutional support for the creative industries is dire, our artistic production feels like a small miracle. Beyond this, Nigerian families are notorious, if stereotyped, as discouraging their children from artistic undertakings, preferring they go into “practical” fields—medicine, engineering, or otherwise. Of course, there is also the wide gap of privilege: The difference between what a wealthy child is exposed to in Lagos artistically, and what a child from the working poor will be exposed to in Lagos, or Ughelli, or Benin, is great—a distance that ordinarily only exacerbates my despair. But I’d be lying if I didn't admit that it also gives me hope that Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems, as something only to be pursued by the elite.

It is here that Nigeria’s potential merges with its reality. Whether accompanied with other “practical work,” or disappointing their families, or restricting themselves to smaller towns and cities, Nigeria’s artists continue on. Many, without fame and certainly almost no fortune, continue on. And little else can explain why, other than because they can’t help themselves. It is something they must do, even with no fairytale ending in sight, because the art itself is the point. This, above all, is where the unexpected hope lies among a people obsessed with reaping the fruits of one’s labor: that even still, in spite of our condition, creating itself, and not its aftermath, is what matters most.

[post_title] => Where Nigeria's Potential Meets Its Reality [post_excerpt] => In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => nigeria-potential-reality-art-lagos-gallery-sculpture-photography-nike-davies-okundaye-osaru-obaseki-derek-jombo-benin-ughelli [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 20:46:52 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 20:46:52 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10683 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 18, 2026August 3, 2026

Where Nigeria’s Potential Meets Its Reality

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10649 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-06-11 16:53:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-06-11 16:53:52 [post_content] =>

Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to quit “doomscrolling” at night.

It was going okay, until the Minnesota ICE raids accelerated in late January, and staying glued to my phone felt like all I could do to help from an ocean away. A few days later, there was news of yet another anti-trans bathroom bill passing, this time in Kansas, after over 600 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills were introduced across the United States last year. That same week, the Epstein files were released.

Previously ongoing for several years, my doomscrolling had instilled in me a sense of hopelessness that didn’t allow for any light to shine in. After I relapsed, I began to make nihilistic jokes about how dire everything felt, heavy bags under my eyes amidst my renewed nighttime habit. Instead of transphobic laws, anti-immigration sentiment, and sky-high rent existing as separate issues to be tackled with careful activism, all of the “bad” in the world morphed into one large, unintelligible blob, entitled “the horrors.”

Concerned about the possible damage I was doing to my brain, I sought advice from Melody Li, therapist and founder of Inclusive Therapists and Mental Health Liberation. They confirmed my fears were legitimate: According to Li, a “sense of despair” is one of the primary mental health impacts of doomscrolling.

“Social media feeds and the algorithm are designed to be addictive and to keep us scrolling to generate profit,” Li says. “[This] may manifest as feelings of depression, anxiety and hopelessness. When combined with loneliness—as these apps are designed to keep us isolated from community and real-world interactions—the despair may even heighten.”

I knew my anxiety and sense of hopelessness were increasing due to what was going on in the world around me. Unsure of how to stop it, however, I decided to turn to my work and community for guidance.

I am a queer journalist working on a long-term assignment about historic LGBTQIA+ activism, which includes researching movements led by queer British women. On one of my most fun work days, I read about a group of British women known as the Lesbian Avengers, who staged demonstrations against an infamous Thatcher-era law which banned discussion of LGBTQIA+ topics in schools. In 1988, as the law was debated in Parliament, the Avengers threw lengths of washing line over the House of Lords balcony, and abseiled into the chamber. They were immediately thrown out of the building, though some of the group were arrested and put in a “cell by Big Ben,” released several hours later. Despite their efforts, the law passed anyway, and was in place for 15 years until its repeal in 2003, but learning of the Avengers’ bravery and creativity in standing against it was galvanizing.

It also sparked a realization that I wasn’t achieving much by doomscrolling except augmenting my anxiety: If just one story could stir a hope I hadn’t experienced in years, what might learning about others do?

I began with two of the best-known examples of LGBTQIA+ resistance: the 1960s Stonewall Riots and Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in New York and California, respectively. Both were led by trans women and drag queens resisting police harassment and violence, inspiring Pride protests as we know them today. Wanting to better understand the wider movement, I decided to dig further into past and ongoing LGBTQIA+ demonstrations across the globe, and was astonished by the rich history that rarely ever makes it to the mainstream.

I learned, for example, about the prolonged fight for India’s Hijra (transgender and intersex, otherwise known as “third gender”) community to achieve voting rights in 1994. The campaign group, All India Hijra Kalyan Sabha, had already secured their right to vote after a decade of organizing, but in the 90s, “third gender” was still not an option on electoral rolls, forcing voters to choose between “male” and “female”. After years of further activism, the Supreme Court of India finally recognized “third gender” on official documents in 2014.

Today, Hijra people are still deeply marginalized, often facing “invasive” medical exams, difficulty accessing gender-affirming care, and roll-backs to existing rights, but the community continues to fight via widespread protests, community organizing, and online campaigns. Representation in politics, activism, and culture is also improving; in 2015, Madhu Bai made history as the first trans mayor in India, hijra people were represented as “kick ass” warriors in the Dev Patel film Monkey Man, while the community magazine Trans News launched in 2020, increasing global awareness of Hijra people and their struggles. Hijra activists are also reaching a wider global audience in news media across the world, highlighting the need to safeguard and expand their human and civil rights.

In Argentina, legal safeguards for LGBTQIA+ people were propelled by a group of twenty activists who stormed the Buenos Aires Constituent Assembly on August 27, 1996. The group carried large photos of Carlos Jáuregui, a gay activist who died of AIDS-related causes the week prior. Jáuregui was widely known for his HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, for creating the LGBTQIA+ group Gays por los Derechos Civiles in 1991, and for attempting to sue the Archbishop of Buenos Aires for discrimination. He also organized the first ever Pride March in the city in 1992, which was made up of around 300 people, many of whom wore masks to avoid being recognized. (Buenos Aires Pride now attracts around a million people.)

During the August 27 demonstration, activists tracked down members of the commission, refusing to leave until they signed a statement of support for outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Days later, on August 30, the anti-discrimination clause was approved into the Constitution of the city of Buenos Aires, which became the first city in Spanish-speaking Latin America to legally protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination. Today, Argentina’s LGBTQIA+ rights are rated higher than the UK and the US due to their strong protections against hate crimes.

In Uganda, the LGBTQIA+ community continues to stand up against mounting discrimination with joy and courage, throwing “guerrilla-style” Pride celebrations despite some of the strictest anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in the world. At great personal risk, activists and allies alike have fought through several channels, including legally challenging the country’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. A group of Ugandan mothers of LGBTQIA+ people even took on the President in an open letter criticizing homophobic legislation, writing that it has been “horrific” to see their children “verbally threatened, physically targeted and abused for who they are and for whom they love.”

Especially touching to me while investigating these brave, public feats of political activism was the knowledge that they were so often preceded by decades of quieter community-based activism—like the lesbians in San Diego who stepped up to donate blood during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the “buddy systems” which paired people living with HIV with an ally who “provided care, support and friendship when many people turned their backs,” the communities who fundraised for their vulnerable neighbors, and the friends who acted as each other’s chosen families. Many of these past activists’ strategies mirrored anti-ICE action in Minnesota, like noise protests, sit-ins, and mutual aid, demonstrating that in-person organization and community continue to be effective and powerful.

Still, old habits die hard, and despite my renewed hopefulness and resolve, the magnet of my phone nonetheless persisted in drawing my attention during those early-morning hours, the feeling that I had to know all the horrors difficult to expunge. I’m hardly alone: Over half of Gen Z (53%) have reported engaging in doomscrolling, compared to a third of US adults (31%) as a whole. It’s also not the same as ordinary online activity, as studies found LGBTQIA+ youth actually benefit from healthy social media use—while doomscrolling does the opposite, increasing users’ anxiety and emotional exhaustion.

To curb some of these negative consequences, Li suggests allocating time limits on certain apps, turning off notifications, and setting boundaries with friends who might send you “doom” content. They also emphasize engaging with our communities—offline.

“Being in community helps us build collective power and systems of care that center our voices and needs,” they explain. “Doomscrolling will spiral us into isolation and a sense of helplessness… We must resist these tactics by taking part in community, where we can share resources, organize, strategize, and make change together.”

Li’s advice on harnessing our collective power has been especially meaningful to me, though I do still find myself doomscrolling on nights I can’t sleep. But more than before, I’m able to ease the urge to give into hopelessness by gaining strength from the past. I remember the women who abseiled into Parliament, the people who risked their lives dancing in the streets for Pride, the community protesting for trans rights today, and those who have bravely faced, and continue to face, the “doom” head-on. They remind me that the opposite of doomscrolling is action, and I have begun to act—to volunteer with my local LGBTQIA+ community, to amplify marginalized voices, to join local protest groups. Because of their example, I am able to turn away from the cold blue light of the screen, and instead find the light in the community around me.

[post_title] => How To Quit Doomscrolling When the World Is on Fire [post_excerpt] => Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => quit-doomscrolling-lgbtqia-activism-activists-history-marsha-p-johnson-stonewall-compton-cafeterio-riots-pride-hijra-carlos-jauregui-community-politics [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-06-11 16:59:47 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-06-11 16:59:47 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10649 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 11, 2026June 11, 2026

How To Quit Doomscrolling When the World Is on Fire

by Emily Chudy

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10558 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_content] =>

Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.

To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.

In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."

In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).

It seemed like a solid plan.

After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.

The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.

They changed tack.

Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.

Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.

"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.

Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.

“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.

To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.

It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.

The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.

The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.

This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.

The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.

After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”

The movement was thrilled.

Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.

“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”

Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.

“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.

In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.

Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.

“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.

Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.

The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."

"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”

Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.

“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.

“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.

Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.

The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.

The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.

It plans to sue all of them.

Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.

[post_title] => "I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up" [post_excerpt] => Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => intersex-ghana-constitution-protection-lgbtqia-childrens-rights [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-05-15 20:00:07 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-05-15 20:00:07 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10558 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 15, 2026May 15, 2026

“I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up”

by Ayodeji Rotinwa

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10374 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-03-27 21:37:14 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-03-27 21:37:14 [post_content] =>

How the ephemerality of the internet and the many ways we present ourselves online has warped our ability to know who we really are.

Will the Future Like You? Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention begins with a declaration: Our personal identities have not kept pace with the tempo of technology. And, according to author Patricia Martin, this imbalance has made us wholly unprepared to explore—let alone answer—the age-old question of who we really are.

In her book, Martin, a cognitive psychology-informed cultural analyst and host of the podcast Jung in the World, frames many of her arguments using Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, applying them to identity formation in the digital age. If Jung’s original thesis proposes that humans rely on universal themes and inherited behaviors in the psyche to present who we are across self, shadow, persona, and anima, Martin contends the ephemerality of the internet has warped our inheritance. Her primary concern are the selves we present to the world via our various performances online, often manufactured as authentic while being anything but. Carrying out numerous ethnographic approaches including content analysis, narrative interviews, and sorting and coding “15,000 online users across 500 million posts,” she concludes these performances are also occurring at an exorbitant rate never experienced before in human history, sowing mass identity confusion in the process.

Having become increasingly skeptical (and weary) of internet self-presentation via social media, I devoured Martin’s latest work, which utilized psychoanalytical language and frameworks to explore observations I’ve mainly considered through a cultural and anthropological lens. But even those who don’t agree with Martin (or me) about the current state of affairs will likely find instructive value in the book’s summations about our ever brave new technological era and its effects on identity.

According to Martin, there are three main elements contributing to our modern distortions of self-construction and development: “personal fog,” “chronic self-doubt,” and “cascading crossroads.” Borrowing from Jung’s definition of the persona as a complex system that helps the individual relate with the world socially by wearing a kind of mask, Martin argues that personal fog comes from the continuous amplification and proliferation of various personas online, which obliterate our sense of who we are. Chronic self-doubt, meanwhile, delineates the distances between our digital presentations, which rely on external validation, and the selves we present offline, a gap that can cause tremendous self-uncertainty. Finally, cascading crossroads is characterized by how previously reliable identity anchors—such as family and work, or even other modes, such as class, gender, and where we consider home—now fluctuate more frequently, making our shape-shifting far more incessant.

Among the many examples Martin offers of this increasing ephemerality, she cites the story of the trailblazing confessional blogger, Heather Armstrong. In the early aughts, Armstrong’s blog, Dooce, was a “mommy tell-all” magnet to millions, especially young mothers, who regularly consumed her relatable personal accounts of raising two children in Salt Lake City, Utah. But even before Dooce’s eventual decline due to the rise of social media, Martin points out that as Armstrong “matured, she found her light waning,” and the blogger increasingly divulged more serious confessions, including daily alcohol consumption and marital issues, not to mention the details of her history with depression. Martin isn’t explicit about whether Armstrong’s solemn shift was a cry for help or an effort to reinvigorate the blog. She does, however, add that “Dooce attempted several comebacks. But traffic never bounced back.” In 2023, Armstrong died by suicide. Examining how she was remembered, Martin notes “how little was said about her massive output of content, the effort it took, and the emotional toll of constant reinvention…”

While Armstrong’s story is a particularly dire case, there are others—admittedly less tragic—throughout the book that still speak to the toll our relationship to having an audience is taking on our relationship to ourselves. Martin also makes clear this goes beyond those who are, in some shape or form, attempting to be influencers: All of us online are liable to the emotional struggles of trying to juggle various presentations at cost to our psyche and identity development.

However, the book doesn’t propose that we all abandon the internet (to the extent that we can) to counter these identity disruptions. Nor does Martin suggest that we wholly desert digital performance and presentation altogether. Rather, she asks the reader to more carefully consider the repercussions to our relationships—both to ourselves and others—online, where our identities are overwhelmed by seemingly endless transmutations, and ultimately underpinned by digital spaces extorting our identity confusion for profit.

This inevitably has affinities with Karl Marx’s concept of the alienation of the factory worker from anything that could give their work meaning. But for me, it brought to mind Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and its thesis that the thingification of the colonized subject turns them into a commodity, isolating a person from themselves and the other. Transposing Cesaire’s contentions onto Martin’s begs questions worth probing further: Are we being colonized by the internet? Or by the tech bros that run it?

Luckily, Martin doesn’t leave us without specific resolutions for alleviating our identity disruptions, the greatest of which is—perhaps surprisingly—a spiritual recommendation: that we reconsider the soul. Some anecdotes in the book are even dedicated to people who've been able to subvert identity confusion by relying on time-honored means of transformation and soul-enrichment: insulating themselves offline, and leaning on close bonds in the flesh.

Martin also challenges us not to render onto technology what cannot be done by technology. Instead, she encourages us to create and honor our most true selves beyond the curations the internet can only offer. “We set boundaries, we verify claims, and we don’t give ourselves away too easily for the sake of a little fawning attention,” Martin writes in the concluding chapters of the book; to me, sound advice regardless of which continuum of internet identity discourse you choose to be on. She also offers perhaps one resolve for the question the book’s title proposes, Will the Future Like You?: Ultimately, the quest to answer this in the digital space is a hollow endeavor, because it requires an endless reconfiguration of selves, often to our own detriment. So, whatever selves we do offer up as performance in digital spaces, at the very least, we should refuse to give in fully—saving us perhaps not only from ourselves, but for ourselves.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Will The Future Like You?" by Patricia Martin [post_excerpt] => How the ephemerality of the internet has warped our ability to know who we are. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => march-book-of-the-month-botm-will-the-future-like-you-patricia-martin-identity-online-social-media-nonfiction-psychology [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10374 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 27, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Will The Future Like You?” by Patricia Martin

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10212 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-02-26 12:45:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-02-26 12:45:10 [post_content] =>

A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.

The Mixed Marriage Project’s title will more than likely give an onlooker pause. Perhaps that’s the point. But before conjuring up too many presumptions based on the name, one might also note it is the work of renowned law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts. Amongst other books, Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (about black women’s reproductive history in the United States) and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. In her latest, a memoir interwoven with historical research, she unfolds her parents’ interracial relationship, and through it, partly unravels a United States’ history of the subject itself.

The “project” of the book’s title is personal for Roberts: In the 1930s, her father, a white American of Welsh and German descent, set out to examine interracial relationships between black and white people specifically, while studying to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. His interview-based research, which explored interracial unions formed as early as the late 1800s, continued till the 1960s and ’70s, and included interviewing the children of couples he’d earlier surveyed. This feat was supposed to become a book, sold to a publisher while her father was working as a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. But the book was never published, and its stories left untold until now.

Roberts theorizes the reason for this was that her father’s work had become so interwoven into his identity—and their family life—that its completion would have caused a real identity disruption. Who was he if he wasn’t working on the project? And where did that leave her and her family?

Through her own research, Roberts learns her mother, a black, Jamaican immigrant, was also involved in this work, conducting interviews alongside her father for many years. Both were committed to the project’s objectives, one of which was to demonstrate that interracial relationships are not inherently abnormal, because black and white people are not fundamentally different. This was also how her parents met: While majoring in chemistry at Roosevelt, her mother became her father’s research assistant. (In the book, Roberts explicitly states she “wonder[s] how their professional partnership evolved into a romantic one—and whether they worried about the perception of impropriety.”) This prompts Roberts to question an underlying reason for her parents' marriage: Were they supposed to be embodiments of their own mixed marriage project? If Roberts’ parents were indeed as much a part of the study as they were leads of it, she concludes, it would make her and her sisters its subjects, too—or, at least, its personified outcomes.

Rather than be rattled by this possibility, the author measures it against the people she personally knew her parents to be—curious, culturally-aware, well-traveled, and community-minded. Her parents’ relationship, after all, existed beyond their work, and they were initially drawn to each other by their shared sense of adventure, similar values on education, and complementary sensibilities—her mother as the planner and her father as the spontaneous one. By her own admission, Roberts gives them a latitude that an outsider might not. But I reckon this is where the book shines as memoir, rather than an investigation of an investigation: the reader gets to know Roberts’ parents through her loving eyes. Loving eyes that, for the record, do not condone the same politics her parents—especially her father—may have arrived at through their work: that interracial relationships offer some kind of medium to restore black and white relations in the United States, shaped by white supremacy and violence. (On this, Roberts pointedly disagrees.)

Beyond family history, the themes in Project will be recognizable to anyone versed on the discourse, likely causing you to wonder if anything really changes in these United States. The politics of the study’s participants—black men, black women, white men, and white women in heterosexual, interracial relationships—reveal how black men-white women couples were seen as more “acceptable” but also more arduous in the long-run; white women often lost privilege they couldn’t regain unless divorced. The research also highlighted the sexual tropes attached to black women-white men couples—and the misogynoir that informs outsiders' views of them. Recurring themes, regardless of interracial pairings, showed how marital cutting across the color line affected one’s choice of neighborhood and the life afforded to them and, possibly, their children. Also recurring—especially in the civil rights era—were the many well-meaning couples who entered these marriages in the hopes of proving to the world as much as to themselves that interracial coupling inherently combats a racist society. This hope, Roberts argues, was often an erroneous one, as countless couples later found out.

In the lasting analysis of her father’s work, Roberts arrives at the same conclusion that she began with regarding interracial relationships: They are not panacea for a society, a country, or a world that has yet to unravel itself from white supremacy, let alone repair its many casualties. But in Project, Roberts shows us that despite flawed, socially-constructed and racialized societies, people will enter unions and arrangements of all kinds, her parents included. These unions may not transcend race, but they do demonstrate that, in spite of the race politics attached, people will deem them worth fighting for. Some do so naively and are thus confronted with seeing the depths of racism like they never have before. But others, especially the curious, culturally-aware, and community-minded, go into them with eyes wide open, prepared to confront all of its politics united.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Mixed Marriage Project" by Dorothy E. Roberts [post_excerpt] => A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => february-book-of-the-month-botm-pick-the-mixed-marriage-project-by-dorothy-e-roberts-memoir-interracial-relationships-dating-history-research [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:19 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:19 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10212 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 26, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Mixed Marriage Project” by Dorothy E. Roberts

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9993 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_content] =>

A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all.

Many millennials (or non-millenials, for that matter) will be familiar with the overarching plight of Amil Niazi’s Life After Ambition, her "good enough memoir": the experience of being stuck in the rat race of chasing one dream after another, only to find yourself on a never-ending grind. In this race, there’s always one more goal to achieve—one more professional hurdle to overcome, one more career ambition to attain—before the dream can be realized. For women especially, relentlessly pursuing a profession, while ensuring all other aspects of your life are left unscathed, becomes an ever-shifting goalpost; the quintessential “having it all”.

As the book’s title implies, Niazi unfolds the futility of this chase, made especially futile given the instabilities accompanying her career of choice—journalism and writing. But the memoir is as much a personal unfolding as it is a professional one. In it, we learn of Niazi’s parents' almost romcom-like origins before she disabuses the reader of the myth of their marriage and the prospect of an idyllic childhood. There are the anticipated working-class migrant struggles, the family never having quite enough, which takes them across oceans to seek a better life in England, where the author was born, and eventually, to Canada, where the author has spent most of her life. There’s also the abuse between her parents, which Niazi touches without ever quite expounding on, even as she informs of their eventual divorce and sketches her own experience of intimate partner abuse later in life.

In Niazi’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, there’s a persistent feeling of lack. There’s little romanticizing of her circumstances, and she admits her personal rat race was likely born from this instinct: Storytelling—reporting and writing—was the one endeavor that allowed her to make sense of the world. In distressing but humorous episodes, she depicts a life of underemployment before eventually landing a job that sets her on a viable career path. Amid all the instabilities, she moves from Vancouver to Toronto with a boyfriend who physically abuses her—and there, the violent ending of their final contact results in a hard-to-shake addiction to prescription drugs. Through all of this, Niazi continues to work, uncertain of who she can trust with the vulnerable parts of her life, but finding stability through her ambitions—learning along the way, her calculus won’t always pay off.

There are bright spots throughout Niazi’s ordeals, despite the numerous and varied difficulties. There is a dog she loves and cares for, friends who intervene, and a reliable boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband. Yet her career ambitions remain the driving force that shapes her life, until suddenly, it isn’t; and for Niazi, a large part of this shift happens when she becomes a mother. After a period in London—chosen, of course, for her career ambitions—she ultimately returns to Toronto with her family when she realizes those ambitions have changed.

Indeed, in the final analysis of Life After Ambition, I wonder if the author doesn’t slightly betray the title. She gains fresh perspective through her choice to pursue having a third child, and by attempting the kind of writing career she’s always longed for, one less defined by output, and instead, by balance. For her, motherhood and writing are intertwined and related; one aids the other, and though she must make sacrifices to have both, neither can be forfeited.

Perhaps less than delineating what life looks like after ambition fades and falters, what the author concludes is what becomes of us—especially of many women—when our ambitions include more than the careers we set out to have. In so doing, what Niazi offers in her debut book is not only a re-think of our lives as she unravels her own, but a re-defining of ambition entirely, demanding we consider the whole of our lives, and not just the parts we keep separate in the name of career.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Life After Ambition" by Amil Niazi [post_excerpt] => A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-botm-january-pick-life-after-ambition-amil-niazi-memoir [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9993 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 29, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Life After Ambition” by Amil Niazi

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9811 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-13 18:45:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-13 18:45:25 [post_content] =>

With my veganism and other important belief systems in my life, I've decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether.

Three months ago, I ate a cheese pizza. This isn’t exactly headline news, but it mattered to me, because it broke a streak of many months, maybe years, since I’d last eaten dairy. I had been traveling and felt exhausted and defeated, and for whatever reason, the only thing that would soothe me in that moment was a real cheese pizza. I ate it, my tummy hurt, I felt bad. Then, I woke up in the morning and went on calling myself a vegan.

It wasn’t the first time I’d faltered. Although I don’t make a habit of it, since going vegan seven years ago, I’ve eaten dairy a few times, including once, when a Shinto priest offered my husband and I two small cakes during a trip to Japan. (Vegan or not, it felt both rude and disrespectful to refuse.)

These minor incidents could have been opportunities for me to give up my veganism entirely; proof that I’d “failed” or that my efforts were meaningless. But surprisingly, they've instead shifted my perspective: While I’ll never formally reintroduce dairy back into my diet, I’ve decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether.

Recently, I’ve begun trying to apply this grace to other guiding principles and belief systems in my life. There are so many things I care about that it can be difficult to do everything justice: the environment, disability, animal rights, poverty. Because of this, sometimes, it can feel as if living by any kind of set belief system is pointless, that our individual choices make no difference in the much larger fight. We are up against capitalism, war, the meat industry, violence, and some of the most anti-planet government policies we have ever seen. When you feel as if the world is crumbling around you, how much damage is an errant cheese pizza or Starbucks drink or Shein skirt really going to cause? But I believe this absolutism completely dismisses the power of our collective efforts to enact meaningful change, and how much we lose when we abandon our principles altogether.

For me, my mistakes have become a recentering reminder of why I became a vegan in the first place: as a commitment to limiting any damage to the earth and its living things, beginning with what I eat. While I ate fish until I was 10, I have never eaten meat, something that used to shock people more than it does now. My mother was a vegetarian, and when I was four or five years old, I was given the choice to add meat to my diet, but I said no. By then, I understood that it came from the same animals I liked so much, making a stance of ethical vegetarianism feel easy: I loved pigs, refused to watch Bambi, and had never even killed a bug.

Throughout my teens and twenties, as I gained new knowledge and autonomy, my beliefs continued to evolve. I donated to animal charities regularly and started to learn more about the environmental issues we are collectively facing, including how the meat and dairy industries are accelerating climate change. I gave up eggs at 13 and dairy at 19. After seeing a plaice at an aquarium, I vowed to never eat seafood again. This was in the ‘90s and ‘00s, when being a vegetarian (let alone a vegan) was far more limiting than it is today, and not exactly a popular stance. Even within my family, my mother’s choice to raise me as a vegetarian was controversial. During these years, I was ostensibly quiet about my vegetarianism, and took a similar approach when I became a vegan in my twenties. Luckily, Leicester, my hometown in the UK, has a large Hindu and Sikh population, so there were many vegetarian restaurants and supermarkets where I could eat and shop. But elsewhere, I often found myself defending my dietary choices, even when I tried my best not to bring them up.

Over the years, when asked why I ate the way I did, I’d simply say that I did not want to eat animals. But inevitably, people would push back, probing, for example, whether I would eat grass-fed beef or free-range chicken, assuming that if animals had better living conditions for their short lives, I’d agree their consumption was more “acceptable.” But their logic always posited the rights of nonhuman animals in opposition to the rights of human animals, and to me, they’re inextricable: To reject violence and exploitation means to reject it against all living creatures.

My vegan philosophy is continuously changing, but this core belief has not, even as its parameters progress. Lately, for example, I’ve been worried that eating mushrooms might be cruel because of the growing evidence of their intelligence. I’ve also become increasingly aware that other animals such as insects die as a consequence of crop agriculture. It’s difficult to know where my boundaries are, because my veganism is about minimizing harm, which means as I garner information, I reassess my choices. Still, I’m not perfect, because nobody is—especially when our food and agricultural systems make it near impossible to make faultless ethical choices. But my imperfection is also what allows my beliefs to evolve and adapt: Without room to falter, we can’t have space to grow.

Of course, I didn’t always see it this way. In fact, knowing just how difficult and conflicting our moral offerings can be, for a long time, despite mostly living as a vegan, I shied away from the label. I didn’t think I could live up to its standards and I didn’t want to feel any more cast out than I already had as a vegetarian. I couldn’t imagine giving up certain foods like cheese and chocolate for the rest of my life, and I felt embarrassed at the idea of falling short. But as my vegan philosophy evolved to leave room for faltering, I realized that my veganism could be an ideal to aim for, rather than a set state that binds me to guilt when I fail to meet it. Soon after, I encountered a Vox article titled “Vegans Are Radical. That’s Why We Need Them,” that both illustrated and illuminated this very point.

The piece touched on something I have known my whole life: Vegans are unpopular. Part of the reason is because we shine a light on much of the general population’s cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals and food, which can be a slippery slope to exposing an individual’s broader moral hypocrisy. It also explains why, growing up, I pretended to be cool and apolitical about my vegetarianism, and later my veganism—despite both being inherently political. On the outside, I acted as if I didn’t care what anyone else ate or did, but I was lying. On the inside, I cared very much, and still do.

The Vox piece also refers to veganism as an act of solidarity, which it is. By taking the stance that “animals are sentient beings with lives of their own” and imbuing “it into one’s body and everyday practice,” veganism relies on one of the most universal activities we all participate in to enact its politics: eating. But this stance of solidarity can put you at odds with those who ultimately don’t want to feel bad about what they do or eat—especially if you forgo quiet veganism, as I now have. The louder you are about your beliefs, the more you identify yourself with them, and the more shameful it is when you misstep. When I was quietly vegan, I had no one to answer to if I ate a chocolate bar in a moment of weakness.

There is an assumption that, because I am loud about my ethical beliefs, I think that I am perfect and that everyone else should be, too. But this isn’t the case. Furthermore, this aspiration to an ideal while accepting your own shortcomings applies to other values or choices people may aim for, like eschewing fast fashion or boycotting particular brands or corporations. It’s also why our mistakes can so often inspire nihilism: If we can’t change the world on an individual level, why aspire to ethical principles at all? In the end, maybe it’s because our morals are personal, and when we stray from them, we have ourselves to answer to.

When you care deeply about something, as I do, you want to solve the problem completely. And while I do not expect everyone to be vegan, I do want everyone to do what they can to reduce our collective suffering, whatever form it may take. This can feel insurmountable against the tidal wave of people, corporations, and governments that not only do not care, but seem to be actively campaigning to make the world worse than it is. But the good news is that even when you feel defeated or nihilistic, holding steadfast to radical beliefs is how we can push back. Because for every corporation lobbying against our collective well being, there is an organization or movement gaining ground or a small group of people somewhere fighting to make it better. Consider the huge wins achieved by activists against odds that once seemed impossible: improving factory workers’ conditions, regulating Big Tobacco, banning CFCs, and so many more. Small actions build into bigger and bigger wins.

Within my movement, I am inspired by those running small animal rescues and large organizations alike, from World Animal Protection and WWF to Sea Shepherd and the Animal Justice Project. Following and supporting the everyday work of farm rescues like Edgar’s Mission in Australia and Coppershell closer to home always fills me with pride. The work is often thankless, even when these movements achieve big wins, like banning animal testing in certain countries, recognizing animal sentience in the UK or ending whaling for profit. But the love that humans can have for a single lamb rescued from a slaughter auction, despite knowing they cannot save them all, always stops me from giving up.

Reflecting on my own activism over the last 32 years, while I’ve never had the stomach to hold vigil at a slaughterhouse or put my body on the line in a protest, I have stood with people who do. Veganism is, at its simplest, an act of political boycott. I put my money where my mouth is, donating regularly to vegan charities and organizations and frequenting vegan restaurants, supermarkets, and brands. I’ve also co-founded an agency that supports vegan brands and non-profits with branding and copywriting. While it never feels like enough, it’s the only way I know to live my life.

These acts of resistance against the system may be small, but they’re also part of a larger global movement to enact change. The meat and dairy industries have needed to reimagine their advertising to reflect customers’ consciousness, sometimes even tapping celebrity sponsors to polish their image. Some companies have also released plant-based alternatives and reduced their meat offerings. Many others offer buzzwords like “grass-fed” or “regenerative” beef, attempting to tap into diligent meat consumers, despite evidence that it isn’t any better for the cow or the planet. Still, these changes reveal a transformation in societal thinking, and hopefully, there will be more to come.

When I take the long view, even of my own life, there are many more vegetarians and vegans today than there were when I was a child. What’s more, there are more vegan friendly options at restaurants and bars, and fewer eyerolls when you request something plant-based, because even non-vegans might enjoy their morning coffee with oat or soy milk more than they ever did with a cow’s. It isn’t only the availability of options, but shifting attitudes. It has been years since I have sat with a group of people in a restaurant and endured a probing about why exactly I’m ordering a plant-based burger. My choices just aren’t weird or interesting anymore, and that’s a wonderful thing.

When the world isn’t changing as fast as you’d like it to, and when you know the powers that be are against you and your politics, it can be so hard to try, and to keep trying. But the combination of relinquishing perfection, alongside pursuing community and solidarity with like-minded individuals, is how we fight on, slowly and clumsily, knowing there will be missteps. Staying on a path of reducing harm and aspiring to live by our ideals does far more for our individual and collective well-being than giving up after we’ve faltered. This is how we refuse to give into nihilism. This is how we refuse to let the corporations and militaries and lobbyists win. They want, or rather, need you to believe you can’t make a difference, and so you shouldn’t even try. But before we can begin or continue persevering in any radical change in earnest, we must first reject this lie, and continue to aspire to our ethics, each and every day.

[post_title] => Practice Not Perfection [post_excerpt] => With my veganism and other important belief systems in my life, I've decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => morality-imperfection-practice-veganism-vegan-diet-lifestyle-belief-systems-guiding-principles-individual-collective-choice-food [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-14 22:38:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-14 22:38:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9811 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 13, 2026January 14, 2026

Practice Not Perfection

by Marianne Eloise

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