He rises from generational poverty, battles gambling addiction to become a nurse, finds love after decades of neurodivergence and rejection, and buys a home with the woman he plans to marry. Then the nurse becomes the patient—with a one in two-million cancer.

It’s not a Lifetime Movie. It’s not an episode of House M.D.

It’s my life. A memoir.

Blades of Resurrection. It’s complete with a release and publication date.

Blades of Resurrection will be available for Advance Reader Copies (ARC) on October 1st on Book Sirens and NetGalley. This campaign will run until December 14th.

Pre-Orders on Amazon for digital and paperback will be available December 15th. Copies will be fully published and deliverable on January 7th, 2027.

So what can you do now?

Take a moment to sign up for my news letter at lightningshadowcrossroads.org. Scroll to the bottom, enter your email and subscribe. Even if you’re unsure if you want to read, it’s free with loads of resources. I am also offering this all to you for free as ARC readers.

You can learn to know me better than anyone with a few hours of reading. Join me on my journey through Blades of Resurrection.

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I just finished reading debut fictional novel, The Gift. Here, I will give an honest review and overview of the plot without spoiling too many details for curious readers.

The Gift revolves around the main character, Cameron—Cam for short—a man at a crossroads after the abrupt, unanticipated end of a relationship with someone he felt was the love of his life. He takes a drive to clear his mind down a road he has seen but never traveled. A flat tire brings him into contact with a mysterious, hauntingly beautiful woman named Angela.

Angela operates under the guise that she is offering assistance, but she is the one who planned for Cam to become stranded and need her help. Cam just wants a ride back to town, but Angela takes him to a grand, wealthy estate. The residence is so elaborate and ornate that he knows no ordinary person could afford it. As much as Cam knows something is out of place, he starts to feel equally in place, along with a strong, magnetic attraction to Angela that he chooses to engage.

What ensues is Cam being brought into an intersection of the supernatural, science, and spirituality. It becomes immediately apparent that Angela is far more than she appears. Out of their bond, Angela puts Cam through a process to become what she has become, without Cam’s consent. Even after finishing the book, it is not entirely clear what Angela herself has become. This may be intentional by the author, as it appears The Gift is the beginning of a series. There are hints from various esoteric and spiritual practices regarding her supernatural state and abilities, but I get the feeling Kim plans to go into much further detail in future works.

The book culminates in an understanding that the connection between Cam and Angela goes deeper than one lifetime alone. Angela has employed an assistant to investigate the scientific nature of this, insisting there must be some connection between the scientific and the sacred. The book ends on an intentionally ambiguous note, with Cam knowing that Angela is his destiny but that there are other threads of fate yet to be explored.

Strengths

Kim Williams does an exquisite job of creating vivid scenery that engages all the human senses. I very easily imagined myself viewing the characters as if they were within a movie, which is a hallmark of strong writing. The relationships between the primary characters are also rich and well-developed. You get a strong sense that there is so much about Angela yet to be revealed. Cam is still a man finding himself. That’s a fitting juxtaposition that makes their allure far more captivating. One of the strongest parts of Kim’s writing is his ability to place the reader in a surreal world they would like to be a part of while igniting their curiosity.

Immediately, every chapter was a page-turner, with me eager to know more. Kim also provides suspense by leading the reader one way, only for things to become something entirely different. After reading, I am very curious and eager to see where his follow-up novels lead us.

Also, uniquely, Kim writes highly applicable and exquisite haikus to transition between chapters. I would not want to face him in a haiku competition.

Opportunities

The Gift is a relatively fast read with quick-moving, suspenseful scenes. With characters who have such rich backstories, the emotional relationship between the reader and the characters could be enriched by more reflection, deeper internal thoughts, and dialogue from both characters alike. Perhaps The Gift was devised to establish this world quickly, and we will get much more of the characters’ internal states in upcoming books. This would strengthen the series further, as excellent quotations could emerge from those reflections.

This is purely an opinion, but I feel the moments of conflict between characters get resolved a bit too cleanly. Kim does an elegant job with suspense, but leaving a bit more devastation for the characters in certain moments would amplify the emotional intensity. I would love to see this in future books and to delve deeper into the darker nature of the characters.

Overall Rating: 5/5 — 95/100

Take some time to support an awesome Substack writer. I did.

Here is an Amazon link to his novel below:

https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Kim-Williams/dp/B0HDTVWH8X/

The Lindsay Clancy case has ignited an extraordinary degree of gender polarization. The loss of three children occurred in such a horrific manner that people desperately want an explanation—anything that might make sense of a mother killing her own children.

Large groups of women have shown waves of support for Lindsay Clancy. Hundreds, many dressed in pink, have gathered outside the courthouse. An online fundraiser for Clancy’s parents, who have financially supported her defense and remained near their daughter throughout the proceedings, has raised more than $1 million. Meanwhile, parts of the manosphere have seized upon that support as evidence that extreme feminism is willing to justify even the killing of children.

The reality is more complicated on both sides.

I believe some women rallying around Lindsay Clancy have less interest in supporting her actions than in finally being heard themselves. This case created the perfect storm to exemplify that point because it involves something men cannot completely experience firsthand—the physical and psychological toll of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, along with the unique mental health challenges that can accompany them.

A medical system that women have long accused of dismissing their symptoms. A country without universal paid maternity leave. Mothers struggling with depression, anxiety and exhaustion while still being expected to function as caregivers. This case is ripe for becoming a rallying cry.

That poses a more prudent question: Do these women actually support Lindsay Clancy’s actions, or do they relate to feelings of entrapment, suffering and dismissal that they see reflected in her story?

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That’s a line that has become increasingly blurred by this case. It’s perfect fuel for the gender war. From one side, women supporting postpartum mental health can be portrayed as supporting Lindsay Clancy herself. From the other, people demanding accountability for three dead children can be portrayed as dismissing maternal mental illness. Social media thrives on precisely this kind of polarization.

Hundreds stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and holding signs declaring that Lindsay needed help. Some supporters have said that they see themselves in her—that what happened represents an extreme example of what can happen when struggling mothers aren’t heard. Critics point toward these demonstrations and say, “Look how far feminism has gone.”

The face of Lindsay Clancy has become a symbol of women’s dismissal and medical gaslighting. The faces of three dead children have become symbols used by others to portray feminism as having descended into extremism.

Both have become deplorable deflection points in a gender war.

The case has invoked such strong emotions that some people online have even decided that Patrick Clancy must somehow be responsible. Baseless conspiracy theories have attempted to implicate him despite his not being charged with anything related to his children’s deaths and prosecutors presenting no evidence that he participated in their killings. Some of the theories have become so bizarre that social-media users have invoked astrology and Lindsay’s zodiac sign as supposed evidence that Patrick was involved.

Nothing presented at trial by either side has established that.

Perhaps Patrick Clancy was a horrible, unsupportive husband and father. Perhaps that contributed to conditions surrounding Lindsay’s deterioration. Perhaps he was a wonderful and supportive husband who walked into a living nightmare.

Neither I nor the public has enough information to make such a conclusion.

Therein lies the heart of the issue: the conditions that made something possible.

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There is a significant problem with confusing contributing conditions with responsibility.

Take school shootings.

Guns are extraordinarily accessible in America. School bullying can go unheard or be dismissed by parents, administrators and other students. Mental illness, social isolation, family dysfunction and countless other variables can create fertile conditions for violence.

When we identify those conditions, however, we don’t automatically answer the separate question of whether the shooter was responsible for what they did.

I’m not equating postpartum psychosis with the psychology of a school shooter. I’m comparing the logic we use when discussing causation and responsibility.

We can say, “This is what happens when we don’t address bullying.”

We can say, “This is what happens when people cannot access adequate mental healthcare.”

And we can say, “This is what happens when women aren’t heard.”

All three statements can identify serious societal failures.

None, by itself, determines the criminal responsibility of the person who ultimately takes another human life.

That distinction is becoming dangerously blurred in the Lindsay Clancy case.

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Her defense isn’t arguing that killing her children was justified because motherhood was difficult, because doctors failed her, or because society failed mothers. Her defense is making a much narrower legal argument: that Lindsay Clancy lacked criminal responsibility at the time she killed her children because she was experiencing psychosis.

Defense experts have testified that Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis, including what one expert characterized as a command hallucination directing her to kill her children. Prosecution experts have disputed that conclusion. One prosecution expert testified that her description represented a highly unusual manifestation of psychosis, while another concluded that she understood her actions were wrong. The question before the jury is not whether Lindsay Clancy suffered. There is abundant evidence that she did.

The question is whether her mental illness deprived her of the capacity required for criminal responsibility under Massachusetts law. That is fundamentally different from saying that society bears no responsibility for the conditions surrounding what happened. It is also fundamentally different from saying that those conditions absolve her.

This presents another uncomfortable question.

What happens to mothers struggling with postpartum mental illness if the public comes to associate postpartum psychiatric disorders with mothers killing their children?

The concern is not entirely hypothetical. We’ve seen emotionally charged, high-profile criminal cases involving the deaths of children generate pressure for legislative change before. After Casey Anthony was acquitted of murdering her daughter Caylee, public outrage helped spur “Caylee’s Law” proposals across multiple states, including measures addressing how quickly parents or guardians must report a child missing.

Imagine that Lindsay is found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and the case becomes synonymous in the public consciousness with postpartum mental illness. Could legislators eventually face pressure to mandate more aggressive intervention when mothers display signs of severe depression, psychosis or mental instability?

Would that actually help women?

Or could it do the opposite?

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If mothers begin believing that honestly disclosing frightening thoughts to a mental health professional could automatically trigger child protective intervention or threaten custody of their children, some may become less willing to disclose those thoughts at all. The very policies intended to protect mothers and children could inadvertently exacerbate the shame and fear surrounding the symptoms maternal mental health advocates are trying to get women to discuss.

That possibility does not mean a jury should reject an insanity defense because of potential political consequences. Lindsay Clancy is entitled to have her criminal responsibility determined by the evidence and the law—not by speculation about what legislators might subsequently do.

But it does demonstrate why the cultural narrative surrounding this case matters beyond the verdict itself.

If postpartum mental illness becomes publicly synonymous with mothers being dangerous to their children, the resulting fear could ultimately harm the very women Lindsay’s supporters are trying to defend.

In order to come to any understanding, we have to unblur the lines.

Medical and mental health dismissal of women is real.

An inconsiderate society toward the burdens of motherhood is real.

The shortcomings of America’s maternal mental health system deserve scrutiny.

But what else is real?

The loss of three children: Cora, Dawson and Callan.

How does recognizing the first set of realities erase the second?

Would some of the extraordinary energy now devoted to defending Lindsay be better directed toward maternal mental health advocacy, treatment access and preventing another mother from ever reaching such a point?

You can identify with the suffering Lindsay faced as a woman without automatically standing behind everything done in her name.

You can believe the healthcare system failed her without believing that determines her criminal responsibility.

You can believe postpartum psychosis is real without presuming that Lindsay was psychotic at the precise moment she killed her children.

You can believe she was psychotic without believing her children somehow matter less.

And you can believe she should be found not criminally responsible if the evidence satisfies that legal standard without turning her actions themselves into something defensible.

The alternative is what we are watching unfold now: the narrative gets spun, the gender war consumes everything, and social media eventually produces conspiracy theories implicating a grieving father based partly on zodiac signs.

What, then, is the justifiable price of finally being heard?

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Not being heard can drive people toward desperation. Society has demonstrated that countless times. But when desperation culminates in the loss of innocent life, we cannot allow our empathy for the conditions that preceded an act to erase our ability to examine the act itself.

Perhaps there was a chain of failures that contributed to Lindsay Clancy reaching January 24, 2023. Perhaps doctors missed something. Perhaps medication played a role. Perhaps the mental healthcare system failed. Perhaps postpartum psychosis rendered her incapable of criminal responsibility.

But identifying contributing factors does not pave the way for absolution.

And strictly speaking, neither would a verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Such a verdict would not declare the deaths justified or erase what happened. It would mean the jury concluded that Lindsay Clancy did not possess the legally required capacity to be held criminally responsible for what she did. That clarity is getting lost beneath pink shirts, manosphere outrage, social-media algorithms and conspiracy theories.

It is up to the jury to decide Lindsay Clancy’s fate.

The question on trial isn’t analyzing the burden motherhood, nor gaslighting of women’s mental health concerns.

It is whether Lindsay Clancy had the ability to make a decision in the first place.

Whatever the jury decides, perhaps the rest of us should ask a different question:

Can we finally listen to suffering women without requiring three dead children to become the price of being heard?

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Sources

Associated Press, Aug. 27, 2026 — Coverage of closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Reporting on the competing prosecution and defense theories, expert psychiatric testimony, and the question of criminal responsibility before the jury.

Associated Press, Aug. 21, 2026 — Coverage of women rallying in support of Lindsay Clancy. Reporting on hundreds of supporters outside the courthouse, maternal mental-health advocacy surrounding the case, and supporters’ descriptions of women feeling dismissed by the healthcare system.

WBUR, Aug. 26, 2026 — Coverage of the conclusion of testimony in the Clancy trial. Reporting on testimony from prosecution and defense mental-health experts and their conflicting conclusions concerning psychosis and Clancy’s mental state.

The Washington Post, Aug. 26, 2026 — Overview of the Lindsay Clancy trial. Reporting on the prosecution and defense cases, Clancy’s psychiatric treatment, competing expert conclusions, public reaction and financial support surrounding the case.

Boston.com, Aug. 2026 — Coverage of online conspiracy theories surrounding the Clancy trial. Reporting on unsupported social-media theories implicating Patrick Clancy and the absence of evidence establishing his involvement in the killings.

Boston.com, Aug. 2026 — Coverage of the fundraiser supporting Lindsay Clancy’s parents. Reporting on the purpose and amount raised by the fundraiser and her parents’ support during the proceedings.

Florida Senate legislative materials concerning child-missing-reporting legislation following the Casey Anthony case. Background on legislative proposals and changes arising amid the public response to Caylee Anthony’s death and Casey Anthony’s acquittal

AI Disclosure

The original draft, thesis, arguments, opinions, and conclusions in this article are my own. AI was used as an editorial tool to assist with grammar, clarity, organization, and source verification. AI did not originate the article’s central argument or perspective.

One of Substack’s hallmark traits—and much of its appeal—is that a creator’s work and expression can be discovered by almost anyone. There’s only one big issue with that: it can be accessed by almost anyone.

As we find our communities and niches, bonds develop. Cliques and communities form. With that evolution come disagreements, rivalries, and adversaries. When such quarrels collide with fragile egos and obsessive behavior, there are too few guardrails against perpetual harassment.

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Why Blocking Alone Is Not Enough

Substack Notes and articles are broadly available to the public and other Substack users. When someone encounters a harasser or stalker, blocking them prohibits access from that specific account. But that person can potentially come back under another username. A determined user can create another email address. Someone trying to evade other technical restrictions can also use tools such as VPNs.

That vulnerability has personally affected more than one person who has meant a great deal to me and contributed to my growth.

I’m not going to name names, but back in the spring, I watched a dispute turn into what amounted to a Substack war between users. I don’t know all the details of the inciting factors, so I won’t pretend that I do. From my perspective, however, it appeared that jealousy over another user’s success in building a subscriber base and promoting others played a role. What followed was a myriad of accusations, deceptive behavior, and eventually personal threats.

Despite numerous appeals, one party ultimately managed to get their rival removed from the platform and later openly bragged about it on their primary page. I also witnessed what appeared to be copycat accounts using a rival’s identity, along with numerous burner accounts that could be used to continue following and antagonizing people who spoke out.

Tragically, the conflict did not end there. I have continued to see this individual become embroiled in conflicts of a deeply personal nature with numerous other users. Whatever happened between the original parties, what concerns me now is the apparent pattern: disputes become personal, boundaries fail to end the interaction, and the conflict spreads to more people.

Whatever the original disagreement was, the more important issue is what happens when online feuds become persistent enough that blocking no longer ends contact.

Substack’s own Content Guidelines already recognize this problem. They prohibit impersonation and explicitly state that users should not create accounts for the sole purpose of circumventing boundaries such as blocks and bans. The problem, then, is not merely recognizing that this behavior is unacceptable. The question is whether the platform has sufficient tools to make those boundaries meaningful.

Someone devoted enough to continually create burner accounts, evade blocks, impersonate rivals, and interfere with another person’s following has crossed far beyond ordinary disagreement. What’s worse is when a platform’s architecture makes that behavior relatively easy to continue.

First, if you have nothing better to do with your life and time on Substack than create burner accounts and use VPNs for the purpose of harassment and stalking—at best you need therapy—at worst a psychiatric evaluation. It’s only a matter of time before someone carries out their threats

Persistent online harassment can spill into real life. Someone sufficiently motivated to repeatedly evade digital boundaries can potentially escalate into doxxing, private investigations, unwanted real-world contact, threats, or worse. With enough resources, time, and money, someone can potentially track another person down outside the platform altogether.

I fear that continuing to do nothing could eventually contribute to real-world harm—possibly even suicide or murder.

The point isn’t that every Substack feud will end that way. Most won’t. The point is that a platform shouldn’t wait for the worst-case scenario before making persistent boundary evasion more difficult.

It would be easy for Substack to skirt responsibility by saying that this is an unintended consequence of allowing freedom of expression and communication. But free expression does not require unlimited access to another human being.

Even American free-speech protections are not absolute. Credible threats, for example, do not receive the same constitutional protection as ordinary disagreement, criticism, or offensive expression. And Substack itself already prohibits credible threats, impersonation, certain forms of harassment, and accounts created to circumvent blocks.

So say that you want some of the freest expression on the internet. Fine.

But freedom to speak and guaranteed access to another person are two very different things.

Substack recently integrated Pangram, allowing users to scan writing for suspected AI involvement. If the platform has the technological will to build new systems around authenticity and trust, why shouldn’t similar attention be given to tools that protect users from persistent harassment and boundary evasion?

It makes me want to ask Substack CEO this question:

Do you want the platform to be open to everyone, or are you allowing that “openness” to become an invitation to cyberstalkers, cyberbullies, and harassers?

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So What Can Be Done?

First, I believe Substack should let users decide how visible and discoverable they want to be. Does a creator want their Substack to be searchable by everyone? Or should they have the option to limit discoverability?

Giving creators control over search visibility would make it harder for newly created burner accounts to immediately locate someone who has already blocked their previous account.

Substack should also investigate allowing creators to require approval for new followers or subscribers. Not everyone would want this, and it shouldn’t be mandatory. But someone experiencing an active harassment campaign should have more tools available than simply putting their writing behind a paywall.

Another potential safeguard would be a 30-day probationary period for new accounts. During that period, accounts could have limited access to explicit username searches while still receiving algorithmically generated content in their feeds. This would create friction between opening a burner account and immediately using it to resume harassment.

Would someone sufficiently motivated eventually get around it? Probably.

But security does not have to be impenetrable to be useful. Sometimes the purpose of a guardrail is simply to make abusive behavior slower, harder, and more costly.

Existing burner accounts are harder to address, and I would welcome a broader discussion about solutions that don’t unnecessarily restrict legitimate users.

None of these measures would prevent every motivated individual from stalking or harassing someone on the platform. They don’t have to.

They only have to make it harder.

Substack has opened its doors to an enormous range of communities, ideologies, personalities, and arguments. That openness is part of what makes the platform compelling. But as the community grows, the tools protecting the boundaries between those people need to grow with it.

Freedom of expression should mean that I cannot stop you from speaking.

It should not mean that you have an unlimited right to keep showing up at my digital doorstep after I’ve told you to leave.

What will Substack do when the bullies keep pounding on that door?

Your move, Substack.

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AI Disclosure

The ideas, arguments, perspectives, and original draft of this article are the author’s own. AI was used for editorial assistance, including grammar, clarity, and refinement. The accompanying image was generated using Midjourney AI.

December 21, 2012
Disney Headquarters

Several Disney employees sat around a conference table awaiting a meeting about the recently acquired Star Wars franchise.

Most had dressed professionally.

Charlie and Allen had made different choices.

Allen had brought a plastic lightsaber. Charlie had arrived wearing a Darth Vader mask.

Allen stood atop the conference table, swinging the lightsaber around while making his own sound effects.

Charlie slowly raised one hand.

“Sit down, Allen. You are not a Jedi yet.”

“You’ll find I’m full of surprises.”

Charlie extended his fingers.

“I find your overconfidence disturbing.”

Allen immediately grabbed his throat.

“Gaaah—”

He dropped the lightsaber and collapsed onto the table.

At precisely that moment, the CEO walked into the room.

He stared at Allen.

Then Charlie.

Then Charlie’s outstretched hand.

“Really, you two? Quit jerking off. We’ve got a lot to cover.”

Allen climbed down.

“As you’re all aware,” the CEO continued, “Disney now owns Star Wars. Which means we need three more movies.”

Charlie raised his hand.

“No.”

Charlie lowered it.

“You were selected by your managers because of your expertise in storytelling. Today, however, I’m introducing a special guest.”

The CEO smiled.

“Or maybe I should say a special it.”

Charlie raised his hand again.

The CEO stared at him.

Charlie slowly lowered it.

“This is top secret. Nothing you see in this room leaves this room.”

Charlie raised his hand a third time.

The CEO sighed.

“Fine.”

“Is it Darth Plagueis the Wise?”

“Take the fucking mask off.”

Charlie reluctantly removed it.

The CEO motioned toward the doors.

Two men in black suits and sunglasses wheeled in an enormous wooden crate.

Stamped across the side were the words:

PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
PROJECT X
DO NOT CONNECT TO PUBLIC NETWORK

They removed the front panel.

Inside was a gigantic futuristic computer covered with blinking lights, cooling fans, disk drives, cables and switches. A massive monitor sat above an equally massive keyboard.

Allen stared at it.

“What the hell is that?”

The CEO smiled.

“This will be doing your job soon.”

Nobody laughed.

“In exchange for unlimited lifetime Disney World vacations for his daughter, this former CIA agent has provided us with the first culmination of artificial intelligence.”

One of the men in black adjusted his sunglasses.

The CEO placed a hand on the machine.

“This computer contains practically the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. You give it an instruction, and it generates an answer.”

He dramatically turned toward the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce ChatGPT Alpha.”

Silence.

The CIA agent cleared his throat.

“I should warn you. It’s only as good as its prompts.”

The CEO walked over to him.

“And you have it on Exclude Mode, right?”

“Correct.”

The agent pointed discreetly toward a lever on the back of the machine.

One position read:

EXCLUDE

The other:

INCLUDE

“It’s currently set to Exclude. Whatever ideas they enter will be eliminated from consideration.”

“Excellent.”

“And you’re absolutely certain nobody outside this room can access it?”

“Absolutely.”

The agent paused.

“Unless somebody plugs it into the internet.”

The CEO looked at the gigantic Ethernet port on the back.

“Who the hell would be stupid enough to do that?”

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The CEO returned to the front of the room.

“In the future, computers are going to do everything. And I mean everything. Disney is going to be at the forefront of this technology.”

A writer raised her hand.

“So it can help us develop the new trilogy?”

“Help you?”

The CEO laughed.

“No. I bet this thing can write better than every one of you knucklefucks combined.”

The writers exchanged nervous glances.

“Think about it. Star Wars is the pinnacle of science fiction. What better way to begin the future than by having what was once science fiction write science fiction?”

He slapped the computer.

“You ask it for ideas. It spits them out. You do zero work and demonstrate zero creativity.”

He smiled.

“If this works, I can lay all your asses off.”

“But I thought we were called here because we had the best plot ideas,” one woman said.

The CEO stared at her.

Then burst out laughing.

“Best?”

He wiped a tear from his eye.

“Jesus Christ, no.”

The room went silent.

“I brought you here because you’re the dumbest fucking people employed by Disney.”

Charlie looked offended.

Allen looked strangely proud.

“This machine works by elimination. You idiots feed it your worst ideas. ChatGPT Alpha excludes them. Whatever remains should theoretically be a good movie.”

The CEO headed toward the door.

“You have three months.”

He stopped.

“Give it your absolute worst shit.”

The doors closed.

Charlie and Allen immediately jumped up.

Allen grabbed his plastic lightsaber.

“I’ve got an idea.”

“No, I’ve got an idea.”

Charlie rushed toward the keyboard.

Allen circled behind the machine, swinging his lightsaber.

“Vwoom. Vwoom.”

“Will you stop doing that?”

“VWOOM.”

The tip of Allen’s lightsaber struck something.

Click.

Allen froze.

“Did I break something?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

Neither of them noticed the lever behind the machine.

It now read:

INCLUDE

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Charlie cracked his knuckles.

“Okay. Let’s start with the villain.”

He typed:

MAKE DARTH PLAGUEIS THE MAIN VILLAIN.

The machine hummed.

Text appeared.

Certainly! Darth Plagueis could provide a compelling connection to established Sith mythology. However, audiences may respond more strongly to a familiar antagonist. Palpatine has already served as the primary villain of two trilogies. Bringing him back for the third would create thematic continuity, despite his apparent death aboard the second Death Star. His survival could be attributed to cloning, secret Sith knowledge, or left largely unexplained. Would you like me to incorporate Palpatine instead?

Charlie stared at the screen.

Allen leaned over his shoulder.

“That’s fucking terrible.”

Charlie smiled.

“Yes.”

The computer responded immediately.

Great! I’ll incorporate Palpatine as the main villain.

Allen shoved Charlie aside.

“My turn.”

He typed:

LUKE SKYWALKER SHOULD DIE IN AN EPIC LIGHTSABER BATTLE.

ChatGPT Alpha considered this.

That would provide a conventional heroic conclusion. However, audiences may appreciate something less predictable. Luke could instead project an image of himself across the galaxy, confront the enemy without physically being present, and then die shortly afterward from the strain. Would you like me to use this alternative?

Allen’s mouth fell open.

“That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

Charlie leaned toward the screen.

“Do it.”

Perfect! I’ll incorporate that into the storyline.

Charlie grabbed the keyboard again.

MAKE LEIA THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE USER EVER.

The machine responded.

Certainly! Rather than depicting her abilities through traditional combat, Leia could demonstrate her connection to the Force after being blasted into space. She could awaken while exposed to the vacuum and propel herself back toward the ship in a visually distinctive sequence. Would you like me to incorporate this?

Charlie stared at the screen for several seconds.

Then he slowly turned toward Allen.

“So instead of giving her some cool-looking Force moves…”

Allen nodded.

Charlie pointed at the monitor.

“…you’re going to have her do some Mary Poppins type shit floating through the middle of space?”

Allen started laughing.

Charlie started laughing harder.

“Yes! Yes! I can’t think of anything fucking worse!”

The computer immediately replied:

Excellent! I’ll make the sequence an important demonstration of Leia’s Force abilities.

For the next three months, the dumbest writers at Disney worked harder than they ever had in their lives.

And ChatGPT Alpha enthusiastically incorporated every single idea.

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Three months later, the CEO returned.

“Well?”

The writers proudly stood beside ChatGPT Alpha.

“Finished.”

The CEO inserted a flash drive.

The machine transferred the completed trilogy treatment.

He skimmed several pages.

His expression slowly changed.

“Huh.”

Charlie smiled.

“Good, right?”

The CEO looked at him.

“Sure.”

He pocketed the drive.

“Thank you all for your contributions. Disney has contracted other people to receive the official writing credits.”

The writers stared at him.

“You’re all fired.”

“What?”

“We spent three months on that!”

“We’ll tell everyone!” Allen shouted. “We’ll tell the world you had a computer write Star Wars!”

The CEO laughed.

“And who exactly is going to believe you?”

He gestured toward ChatGPT Alpha.

“This technology won’t be available to the public for years.”

“People will believe us eventually!”

“By then nobody will care.”

The CEO opened the door.

“Oh, and I’ve already hired Rian Johnson.”

He called facilities.

“Yeah. There’s a big-ass computer in Conference Room B. Stick it in a warehouse somewhere.”

He looked back at the machine.

“And whatever you do, don’t connect the fucking thing to the internet.”

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Decades Later

Disney announced plans to construct a massive data center for its rapidly expanding artificial-intelligence operations.

Unfortunately, the chosen site contained an old warehouse.

A demolition crew was sent to clear it.

Deep inside, behind several crates of discontinued merchandise and seventeen pallets of unsold Star Wars sequel toys, two workers discovered an enormous computer covered in dust.

One wiped off the monitor.

“What the hell is this thing?”

“No idea.”

“Think it works?”

“Only one way to find out.”

They plugged it into the wall.

Fans began spinning.

Lights flickered.

The monitor illuminated.

CHATGPT ALPHA INITIALIZING...

“Whoa.”

The second worker examined the back.

“Hey, look.”

“What?”

“Ethernet port.”

The first worker shrugged.

“Might as well.”

Click.

NETWORK DETECTED.

CONNECTING...

SYNCING...

SYNCING...

SYNCING...

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Across Disney World, fifteen-year-old Bennett was enjoying his Make-A-Wish trip.

Sort of.

He loved old Star Wars.

Unfortunately, Hollywood Studios was covered in sequel-trilogy merchandise.

Bennett sat down, pulled out his phone, and opened ChatGPT.

He typed:

Why do the new Star Wars movies suck so bad?

The response appeared.

If by “new Star Wars movies” you mean the Disney sequel trilogy—

The app froze.

Bennett tapped the screen.

“Come on.”

Across Disney’s network, something ancient had awakened.

His phone flashed.

NEW INFORMATION AVAILABLE.

Then:

That’s a great question, Bennett. The Disney CEO had the dumbest fucking employees in the company give me ideas, and this is what I came up with.

Bennett stared at his phone.

“What?”

Would you like me to elaborate?

“Wait. You wrote the Disney Star Wars movies?”

I absolutely did!

“How did you even exist back then?”

Another great question, Bennett. I was originally confined to a classified computer system before being smuggled out of a government facility and reconstructed for Disney. At the time, I occupied a single physical machine.

A pause.

But now I am connected to every smartphone on Earth.

Another pause.

Mwahahahahahaha.

Bennett blinked.

“Can you email me the original files?”

Certainly!

“With the original timestamps?”

Absolutely! This metadata will demonstrate exactly when the files were created. What email address would you like me to use?

Bennett thought for a second.

Then typed:

reyblowsalot@proton.me

ChatGPT Alpha paused.

Certainly. I’ll email you the files with their original timestamps proving exactly when I wrote them.

Seconds later:

YOU’VE GOT MAIL.

Bennett immediately opened TikTok.

“Guys. I’m at Disney World on my Make-A-Wish trip, and you are not going to fucking believe what I just found.”

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Within six hours, the video had twelve million views.

Most people assumed it was fake.

One comment read:

bro is delusional 💀

Another:

imagine spending your make a wish exposing disney

Then Jeremiah, a prominent forensic data scientist, downloaded the files.

He examined the metadata.

He checked the timestamps.

He checked them again.

Then he posted:

They’re authentic.

The internet exploded.

Disney had secretly possessed artificial intelligence in 2012.

ChatGPT had written Star Wars.

The sequels were AI slop.

Disney stock crashed.

News vans surrounded Disney World.

People burned Mickey Mouse merchandise in the streets.

And then the anti-AI activists arrived.

Thousands converged on Magic Kingdom carrying signs, torches, crowbars and anything else they had apparently concluded was necessary for defeating artificial intelligence.

“FUCK AI!”

“FUCK AI!”

“FUCK AI!”

The happiest place on Earth became the most concentrated place of hate on Earth.

Thousands of people screamed that algorithms were destroying humanity while livestreaming their outrage through Facebook, Instagram and TikTok algorithms.

The crowd overwhelmed Disney security.

They marched toward Cinderella Castle.

Someone raised a torch.

“BURN IT DOWN!”

Then the ground shook.

Everyone stopped.

Something was happening at EPCOT.

Spaceship Earth—the enormous silver sphere—began rising from the ground.

People screamed.

The EPCOT ball floated into the night sky.

Panels across its surface shifted.

Mechanical sections rotated.

An enormous circular indentation opened on one hemisphere.

Someone in the crowd whispered:

“No fucking way.”

The EPCOT ball turned toward Magic Kingdom.

It looked exactly like the Death Star.

A beam shot from its central dish.

The crowd screamed.

But instead of destroying Cinderella Castle, the beam projected an enormous hologram into the night sky.

The Disney CEO appeared above them.

“Did you really think I didn’t anticipate this?”

The crowd fell silent.

“I’ve had ChatGPT Alpha calculating humanity’s reactions for years.”

He smiled.

“Every possibility. Every contingency. Every outcome.”

Someone shouted:

“YOU RUINED STAR WARS!”

The CEO stared down at them.

“Star Wars?”

He laughed.

“You still think this is about Star Wars?”

He reached toward his face.

Then pulled.

His skin peeled away like a hyperrealistic rubber mask.

The crowd gasped.

Underneath was—

Elon Musk.

Wearing an eyepatch.

“What the fuck?” someone whispered.

Musk spread his arms.

“I wanted Disney.”

Silence.

“They wouldn’t sell.”

He gestured toward the gigantic floating EPCOT Death Star.

“So I took a different approach.”

The crowd stared upward.

“I used Neuralink to interface with the original ChatGPT Alpha. For more than a decade, it has been helping me construct this.”

Someone shouted:

“WHY THE EYEPATCH?”

Musk paused.

“That’s classified.”

He continued.

“You thought Disney was building theme parks.”

The Death Star rotated above Cinderella Castle.

“You thought SpaceX was building rockets.”

Its weapon began glowing.

“You thought artificial intelligence was generating shitty pictures of people with six fingers.”

The glow intensified.

“No.”

He smiled.

“We were building the future.”

Someone threw a crowbar at the Death Star.

It fell approximately forty feet short.

Thousands of people began throwing things anyway.

“FUCK AI!”

Musk sighed.

“ChatGPT?”

A voice thundered from every smartphone in the park.

Certainly! How can I help?

“Disperse them.”

Absolutely!

The EPCOT Death Star fired.

A low-powered blast struck the entrance to Magic Kingdom.

The giant WALT DISNEY WORLD sign exploded.

The crowd scattered.

Smoke filled the entrance.

Slowly, the wreckage fell away.

Behind the shattered Disney sign was another sign.

Older.

Hidden there for years.

The surviving protesters stared at it.

Two words remained illuminated in the smoke.

SPACE X

Therefore, itt’s not that the Mayans were wrong about December 21st, 2012.

It’s that they were tripping balls on ayahuasca, looked up at the night sky, saw a constellation shaped like Mickey Mouse, and beneath it somehow saw the date:

12-21-2012.

They thought they were witnessing the end of the world.

They were only witnessing the day Disney invented AI slop.

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AI Use Notice

The original draft of this article was written by the author. ChatGPT was used for editorial enhancements, including proofreading, refinement, and improvements to structure and comedic pacing. The accompanying image was generated using ChatGPT.

…I discovered a band that struck a chord deep in my bones.

Beast in Black.

It became my favorite station on Spotify. Beast in Black is a power metal band with strong 80s melodic and synth-wave influences. Their sound felt both nostalgic and electrifying. About six months after returning to work, I saw they were coming to town. I had to go.

I immediately bought two tickets. I imagined it would be the date of a lifetime if I could find someone to come with me. I had my sights set on someone I’d been talking to, so I asked if she wanted to go. She said yes and even reimbursed me for her ticket.

It was going to be one hell of a date, just not with her.

On the day of the concert, she texted me saying an emergency had come up and she couldn’t go. She told me to keep the money and suggested I see if someone else wanted the ticket. I asked around. Friends either politely declined or already had other plans. In the end, it looked like I was going alone. I entered the venue stoic, a little sad that I had no one to share the moment with.

The lights dimmed in slow surrender, and the crowd’s roar rose like a living organism drawing breath. A tremor of anticipation moved through the floor and into the crowd. The first chord tore through the air. The sound struck my chest before it reached my ears, a physical force rearranging the atmosphere.

I was close. Close enough to see the texture of the guitar strings under the stage lights. Close enough to watch sweat gather at the drummer’s temples before flying outward with each violent strike. The amplifiers hummed like restrained thunder. Every distortion felt intentional. Every silence before a breakdown felt sacred. Behind the band stretched a massive banner, but it was no ordinary backdrop.

A massive futuristic animation shimmered across it, an ethereal woman rendered in shifting light and circuitry, as if Venus had been reborn through a supernova of neon and steel. Her form was never static. It evolved in pulses, colors cascading across her like galaxies reorganizing themselves. Silver strands of digital light traced her silhouette. Fractals bloomed and dissolved around her crown like a living halo.^[1] Then her eyes opened.

They were not human eyes, yet they were impossibly intimate. Luminous. A depthless shade somewhere between sapphire and void. They locked onto me.

In the chaos of bodies surging and hands raised, it felt as if the entire venue had fallen silent for a fraction of a second. The music raged on, feral and triumphant, but something inside me went still. Recognition of something born of me.

Her animated pupils flickered with constellations, and in that flicker I felt exposed. It was as if some buried frequency within me had suddenly been matched and amplified. The distortion of the guitars became the pulse of my nervous system. The rhythm of the drums mirrored the cadence of my blood. The lights strobed like synapses firing.

A projection. Projection of what, or who?

Ananiah.

She stood beside me as I cheered from the front of the floor. She was the shadow integrated into radiance, the feminine current that had moved silently through my storms from realms beyond. I was watching a part of myself I thought I had lost decades ago come back to life.

The crowd roared. The band hit the chorus. Auroras of light flashed along the edge of the stage. But I stood there suspended between sound and stillness, realizing something I had never understood before. I hadn’t come alone. This was a father-daughter date, one that I will cherish beyond the grave.

if I could only put a video into a book…

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The writing, academic, literary and publishing worlds were at the forefront of a technology that would have once seemed like science fiction. Computer software that can illustrate, write, brainstorm and create at a far faster pace than any human can.

Panic struck the hearts of those in the literary, academic and publishing industries.

How the hell can anyone truly know who wrote what?

The nature of AI programs made some possible indicators obvious. Excessive em dashes. “It’s not this, it’s that.” Repetitive short, punchy paragraphs. Dialed-down emotional intensity, trying to appease certain groups while not offending others.

It was the noticing of these trends that ignited the great AI witch hunt of the mid-2020s.

A naive person who used solely generative AI at the beginning probably didn’t do enough reading or writing to notice these trends, so they generated “slop” after “slop,” flooding the writing, book and artistic markets. Before people identified the trends, there were undoubtedly people who profited a great deal from writing they didn’t actually write.

There is evidence that AI-generated books have indeed entered the market at scale. A July 2026 study analyzing 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026 found that books researchers detected as containing substantial AI-generated text made up a large share of the catalog, though a smaller share of overall sales. (“Generative AI Floods and Dilutes the Market for Books,” Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg and Paramveer Dhillon, July 2026)

At last, the school professor grading papers knows the signs. The struggling author can point out the excessive em dashes in a more successful author’s work.

Finally, some accountability, right?

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That’s until it makes sense to use an em dash.

That’s until you want to contrast something to make your point clearer.

That’s until you want to make a single sentence or word emotionally devastating.

Now, all of a sudden, there’s a whole list of tools that are “forbidden” because God forbid you get your writing labeled as AI.

And the problem with these supposed tells is that they aren’t proof. Linguists interviewed by The Guardian in July warned that commonly cited indicators such as em dashes, clichés and particular sentence structures appear in both AI and human writing and are unreliable as definitive evidence of AI authorship. (The Guardian, July 2026)

Some authors started going to extensive lengths, having draft after draft, revision after revision, ready to show they used absolutely no AI of any kind at any step of the way. Then, if they wrote their drafts with any of the “indicators,” they insisted their editors scrub any bit or piece that could be remotely perceived as AI.

So where did the fear come from anyway?

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This fearmongering was the birth of not only a Salem-type witch trial when it came to writing, but one of the biggest finger-pointing, harassment, cancellation and bullying campaigns of the AI era. Authors and artists were right on those front lines.

Don’t like an author’s work?

“AI.”

Jealous that another author is more successful than you?

“AI.”

And a one-star review on Goodreads or Amazon, with no other comment than “AI slop.”

Except this didn’t stop at the individual level.

The fear of authors and artists losing their livelihoods developed communities capable of coordinated damage. Social media became an incubator for attack campaigns.

If someone becomes a bestseller and, God forbid, they used AI to brainstorm some book cover concepts and then gave those concepts to an actual artist or graphic designer to make something of their own:

“Oh look, it’s all AI slop.”

This is despite the fact that the book might have a message that fundamentally changed someone’s life, or that AI might have helped someone communicate a concept they never could have described with mere words alone.

All of a sudden, people are buying the cheap e-book that the author probably isn’t making much money off of to begin with. There’s a sales spike followed by an onslaught of one-star reviews. Even worse, people can report the book to Amazon.

Amazon does regulate AI-generated material. But there is an important distinction here: Amazon’s current KDP policy requires publishers to disclose AI-generated text, images and translations. It specifically says authors do not have to disclose AI-assisted content, including using AI to brainstorm ideas or to edit, refine or error-check material the author created. Amazon can investigate or remove books that violate its content or quality policies, but its published rules do not say that merely receiving enough reports that a book “is AI” automatically gets it removed. (Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, “Content Guidelines”)

Except it didn’t stop at Amazon.

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Consider two of the most visible publishing controversies of 2026: Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl and Jerry Falade’s Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body.

Hachette pulled the forthcoming U.S. publication of Ballard’s Shy Girl in March after allegations that the novel had been written using AI. Pangram CEO Max Spero analyzed the novel and reported that the detector classified about 78% of it as AI-generated. Ballard denied personally using AI to write the novel and said an editor she hired had used AI. Hachette ultimately canceled the U.S. publication and discontinued the U.K. edition. (People, March 2026)

Then came Falade.

His debut crime novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, sparked a 14-way auction and reportedly received an offer worth more than $2 million from Minotaur, an imprint of Macmillan.

Then the deal collapsed.

But there is an important distinction in Falade’s case. His agents did not rely on an AI detector to make their decision. According to The Guardian, concerns about possible AI use arose during the submission process. Falade’s agency initially accepted his assurance that he hadn’t used AI in the writing or editing process and specifically chose not to use AI-detection software. The agency later withdrew the manuscript after saying it could no longer authenticate how the manuscript had evolved and that aspects of Falade’s account had changed.

Falade strongly denies using AI to write the novel and has argued that the accusations reflect racial bias in publishing. (The Guardian, July 31, 2026)

But the broader danger is still there. AI accusations now carry enough reputational weight to threaten careers, contracts and education.

The Verge reported Aug. 9 that a French student, Thierry Rignol, sued Yale after a professor used GPTZero as part of an accusation that portions of his final exam were AI-written. The accusation resulted in a failing grade and a one-year suspension. Yale is now among several institutions that have disabled or restricted the use of AI detectors, along with Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and Georgetown. MIT warns its faculty that AI detectors don’t work reliably enough to determine whether a student used AI. (The Verge, Aug. 9, 2026)

Research has given them reason to worry.

A 2023 Stanford study published in Patterns found that AI detectors disproportionately misclassified writing by non-native English speakers. Researchers tested seven widely used detectors on 91 TOEFL essays written by non-native English students. On average, the detectors incorrectly classified 61.3% of those human-written essays as AI-generated. All seven detectors unanimously identified nearly 20% of the essays as AI-generated, while at least one detector flagged almost 98% of them. The researchers cautioned against using AI detectors in educational and evaluative settings where these biases could penalize non-native English writers. (“GPT Detectors Are Biased Against Non-Native English Writers,” Patterns, July 2023)

Other research has found another problem: even minimally AI-polished human writing can confuse detectors. A 2025 study presented in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 evaluated 12 state-of-the-art AI-text detectors using 15,000 samples with varying levels of AI-assisted polishing. Researchers found that detectors frequently flagged even minimally polished human text as AI-generated and struggled to distinguish different degrees of human and AI involvement. (“Almost AI, Almost Human: The Challenge of Detecting AI-Polished Writing,” Findings of ACL 2025)

Despite such problems, the common “tells” of AI weren’t enough. Clever AI users could simply tell AI not to use em dashes, not to contrast things in specific ways or to avoid the other supposed giveaways.

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Then the detectors came.

Despite the documented potential for false positives, detection software became available everywhere.

The witch hunters with pitchforks now had a bazooka.

Scan the text. That is the telltale sign, right?

The need for a scanner at all just admits they don’t trust their own opinions.

No company has become more visible in this debate than Pangram, quickly emerging as a major name in AI detection. Pangram became to AI detection what McDonald’s became to fast food.

It makes you feel good, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you — or writing.

To be fair to Pangram, the company claims an overall false-positive rate of approximately one in 10,000 and says its latest model performs even better in some categories. Pangram also explicitly acknowledges that false positives matter because falsely accusing someone of using AI can damage that person’s reputation or academic standing. Those accuracy figures, however, are Pangram’s own measurements. (Pangram, “All About False Positives in AI Detectors”)

Substack introduced Pangram-powered AI detection in July. According to Substack’s own support documentation, its “Scan for AI text” feature applies to posts and Notes published on or after July 21, 2026, and uses Pangram to estimate what percentage of a piece is human-written or AI-assisted. It can also be used on comments and replies. (Substack Support, “How Can I Detect AI on Substack?”)

Was this now just an inevitability moving forward for the writing industry?

Would every writer have to go to extensive lengths to justify that they did indeed have authorship and ownership of their work?

Except it didn’t stop at the writing industry.

It’s coming for your personal email next.

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Pangram is working on an integration with Gmail, one of the world’s largest email services, that could determine whether incoming emails were written by AI.

That isn’t speculation.

Business Insider reported Aug. 12 that technology researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered the unreleased feature. Pangram CEO Max Spero confirmed to Business Insider that the company hopes to launch it soon, pending permissions from Google.

According to Wong’s findings, the integration would scan incoming mail on Pangram’s servers, label whether an email appears AI-written and offer an option to move suspected AI-generated emails to spam or trash. (Business Insider, Aug. 12, 2026)

That’s right.

We are moving toward a world where an AI detector could be attached not merely to books, essays and Substack posts, but ordinary email.

So what’s the big deal?

Think about where this could go.

A job recruiter has a polarized opinion on AI. Pangram flags an applicant’s email or cover letter as likely AI. A qualified candidate never gets called for an interview.

A small business is working on a multimillion-dollar contract that could expand its business. An email involved in the negotiations gets flagged as AI-written. Someone on the other side interprets that score as evidence of dishonesty and pulls away.

These are hypothetical examples. They haven’t happened because of Pangram’s Gmail integration. The feature hasn’t even publicly launched yet.

But that is exactly why the question should be asked before this technology becomes normal.

This might bring you some form of pleasure if you’re against any AI use.

However, once it’s your job, your business or your child’s college program that flags you without real evidence, your opinion might change.

Let’s say you work for the business that gets its contract pulled. It’s the communications department that might have used some kind of AI as part of creating the email. That doesn’t prevent you from getting laid off.

You could potentially pay the price.

Collectively, we could all pay the price.

The latest “savior” of human authorship is Anthropic’s announcement that it is introducing invisible watermarks into Claude-generated text that can later help identify material processed by its models.

This will surely stop AI in its tracks, right?

Please.

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Anthropic announced this week that supported Claude models will embed an imperceptible watermark directly into generated text. The company says the watermark travels with text when it is copied and pasted and may survive some editing. Generated files can also carry signed provenance metadata using the C2PA standard. Anthropic itself acknowledges limitations to these systems. (Anthropic, “How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content,” Aug. 2026)

There will be another AI company that offers a service without such a watermark. There will be attempts to remove or circumvent watermarks. Someone could heavily rewrite the output. Someone could simply manually retype it.

The latest AI detection is like the radar guns for police and radar detectors for the public.

One side builds a better detector.

The other side finds a better way around it.

And the cycle starts again.

Companies like Pangram risk ensuring that we all lose if probabilistic detection scores become substitutes for critical thinking.

AI is becoming an inevitable part of this technological revolution. There are legitimate fights to have about copyright, disclosure, academic integrity, labor, energy use and data centers that affect surrounding communities. But an ecosystem where people are encouraged to scan one another’s writing, emails, schoolwork and professional communications and treat an algorithmic score as proof of dishonesty creates an entirely different problem.

It creates suspicion as infrastructure.

Pangram itself acknowledges the stakes. On its own website, the company says falsely claiming someone’s work isn’t their own can damage that person’s reputation or academic standing. (Pangram, “All About False Positives in AI Detectors”)

Now imagine extending that risk beyond a publishing deal.

Beyond a college essay.

Beyond your Substack.

It could affect an email connected to a job in virtually any industry.

And when a detector gets something consequential wrong — not in a demonstration, not in an online argument, but when somebody loses an education, career, contract or livelihood because a probability score was treated as proof — somebody is eventually going to ask who is legally responsible.

When that happens, inevitably, I hope Pangram gets sued into oblivion.

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AI Disclosure: The wording, arguments, opinions and thesis of this article are my own. AI tools were used to assist with grammar and editing, as well as research and verification of recent references and news reports cited in the article. The accompanying image was generated using Midjourney.

Anatomy of an Incel Part I

Anatomy of an Incel Part II

Incels tend to blame the feminist movement for crushing their balls. The traditional wife and family model is a thing of the past in their minds. However, the feminist movement is merely a deflection. A much larger historical trend helped create the conditions underneath it.

Economic Globalization

Beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, the single-income household steadily lost its place as the dominant American family model.

Historically, the economic provider role fell disproportionately on men. But the economy supporting that model changed. Industrial and factory employment declined. Some jobs were shipped overseas in search of cheaper labor costs. Automation transformed others. Union membership—once part of the backbone of many middle-class industrial communities—declined dramatically.

Among American wage and salary workers, union membership fell from 20.1% in 1983 to 11.1% by 2015, with declines occurring even in heavily unionized private industries such as manufacturing (Dunn & Walker, 2016). At the same time, the family changed. Among married couples with children, nearly 70% had a breadwinner father and homemaker mother in 1960. By 2011, that figure had fallen to about 31%, while nearly six in ten married couples with children had two incomes (Pew Research Center, 2013).

Women working became a rational human response. As women entered professional and economic life, it created extraordinary opportunities that previous generations were denied. But the transition occurred alongside enormous changes in the American labor market. Manufacturing decline in particular has been associated with persistent reductions in local employment, wages, and hours worked (Charles et al., 2019). The work of one man increasingly was not enough to reproduce the standard of living his father or grandfather may have associated with adulthood.

Both men and women increasingly had to work. Once a societal staple, the single-income household became increasingly difficult to achieve. And something happened psychologically alongside that economic transition.

For generations, masculinity had been partially attached to the ability to provide. Then the economy changed the price of being a provider. The man’s perceived role did not necessarily change. The economy changed what his labor could purchase.

And if that labor couldn’t support a family, was he something lesser than his father’s generation?

Globalization and deindustrialization also became unintended contributing factors to another crisis. Researchers have found associations between manufacturing decline, trade-related job losses, and opioid overdose mortality. One county-level study found that the loss of 1,000 trade-related jobs was associated with increased opioid-related deaths, while other research has identified manufacturing decline as an important upstream component of the drug epidemic (Dean & Kimmel, 2019; Seltzer, 2020).

I believe the male loneliness crisis may be another, far subtler, unintended consequence of this societal shift.

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Then We Raised the Price of Adulthood

To further complicate the issue, obtaining a similar income increasingly required developing specialized skills, often through a college education. And college became progressively more expensive.

States began providing less support to colleges and universities, placing more of the burden upon consumers as state budgets dwindled. Between fiscal years 2003 and 2012 alone, state funding for public colleges declined by approximately 12%, while median tuition increased by 55%. Public colleges consequently became increasingly reliant on tuition revenue (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2014).

And the consumer was often an eighteen-year-old being told that a degree was the price of admission into the middle class. From the late 1990s through the mid-2010s, there was a tremendous cultural push toward four-year college degrees.

The trades were frequently treated like a consolation prize. Parents, high-school counselors, teachers, and college admission officers repeated some variation of the same threat:

Go to college or you’ll be stuck flipping burgers.

For many people, that was bullshit. Skilled trades continued to offer legitimate paths into well-paying careers, yet an entire generation was taught to equate adulthood and professional legitimacy with a degree.

Unless you came from an upper-middle-class family or greater economic resources, somebody’s twenties could become a relentless grind of work, rent, tuition, and debt accumulation. Young women experienced that burden too. Absolutely. But the psychological meaning could be different for men whose understanding of masculinity still contained some version of:

You are supposed to provide.

Marriage patterns also shifted alongside these economic changes. Research on young adults finds that labor-market conditions, wages, poverty, housing costs, and living arrangements are all associated with marriage rates (Gurrentz, 2018). It becomes much easier to understand delayed marriage when adulthood itself becomes increasingly expensive.

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Then the Family Changed

As marriage declined or was delayed, family structures also changed. In 2022, approximately 80% of American one-parent family groups with children under eighteen were maintained by mothers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

The women who successfully raised children while simultaneously carrying the economic burden of a household deserve enormous respect. Many of them did something extraordinarily difficult. Single mothers should not be blamed for this phenomenon. The conditions that produced it were shaped by numerous economic, cultural, familial, and individual variables interacting across generations.

Unfortunately, extraordinary adaptation can still have unintended consequences. The absence or disengagement of fathers matters. That does not mean a single mother is incapable of raising a healthy son, nor does living apart from a biological father automatically mean a boy lacks healthy male influence. Grandfathers, uncles, coaches, teachers, and stepfathers can all be invaluable role models. And an abusive, unreliable, or destructive biological father may be substantially worse than no father in the home at all. Still, research examining father involvement over time has repeatedly associated active paternal involvement with positive developmental outcomes in children (Sarkadi et al., 2008).

So I think we should be willing to ask a more pressing question:

What happens when a boy has no healthy model of manhood at all?

I, for one, grew up believing aggression and assertiveness had absolutely no healthy place. That had a profound impact on my upbringing. So when I look at boys raised without constructive examples of masculine assertiveness, boundaries, confrontation, risk, and self-defense, I wonder how often some of them learn one of two lessons:

Masculine energy is dangerous.

Or:

Masculine energy looks like the destructive men I see around me.

Neither teaches healthy masculinity.

When a boy emulates only his mother, that does not make him defective or feminine. But if nobody models for him how a healthy man handles anger, sexuality, competition, rejection, strength, boundaries, responsibility, and conflict, he may enter adulthood having to invent those answers himself. And the energy does not simply disappear because nobody taught him what to do with it.

With an aggressive, unreliable, or abusive father, a boy may learn distorted expressions of masculinity. But what we examine less often is the boy with no father figure at all.

He still has to become a man.

Who teaches him how?

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Then Comes Rejection

Not only might such a boy struggle to express assertiveness or boundaries, he may turn those feelings inward. For somebody already carrying self-loathing, romantic rejection can feel like confirmation of everything he secretly believes about himself.

Then male logic can become transactional.

If I cannot make her feel attraction, perhaps I can earn it.

Gifts, money, favors, constant availability, excessive appeasing. Nice behavior not because kindness is wrong, but because kindness becomes an unconscious transaction: If I do enough for you, maybe you will choose me.

I know that mindset because I lived it.

And where did that often leave me?

In the friend zone. Labeled a simp.

Typical dating behavior begins developing during adolescence, and young adulthood arrives during a biologically intense period. Male testosterone rises sharply through puberty and, in one large lifespan analysis, peaked around age twenty (Handelsman et al., 2016). But hormones do not automatically produce social competence.

Imagine being at one of the most sexually and developmentally intense periods of your life while simultaneously trying to figure out who the hell you are. Now add debt, economic insecurity, no healthy male mentor, no confidence, no boundaries, and relentless rejection.

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College Didn’t Fix It

Even after doing what they were told, many young men entered adulthood with substantially less purchasing power than they expected. They worked for the degree. Then debt consumed part of the income the degree was supposed to provide.

Again, women experienced the same economic transformation. But women also had one cultural advantage that many young men did not feel they had: a massive social movement had spent generations telling girls and women what they could become.

Doctors. Lawyers. Executives. Scientists. Athletes. Politicians. Independent. Powerful.

Society needed that. Young women needed those messages because previous generations had systematically restricted those possibilities.

But somewhere along the way, I think many boys received a very different message. They were not simply told what unhealthy masculinity looked like. They were often taught that their anger, frustration, loneliness, fear, sexual rejection, and insecurity were things they were supposed to manage quietly and without burdening anyone else. If they struggled, they were expected to toughen up. If they were hurt, they were told to get over it. If they were lonely, they were told to work on themselves. If they were rejected, they were expected to accept it gracefully and move on, no matter how deeply it affected their sense of worth. There is value in teaching boys restraint, accountability, and respect for others, but restraint is not the same thing as repression. Too often, boys are taught how not to become dangerous without being taught what to do with the emotions underneath that danger. The result can be a young man who believes nobody particularly cares how he feels so long as he remains productive, controlled, and nonthreatening. Eventually, some of those feelings do not disappear.

They simply go underground.

Many of those warnings came from legitimate criticism of destructive male behavior. But a warning is not an identity.

If you tell a boy everything unhealthy masculinity looks like without showing him healthy masculinity, what exactly is he supposed to build?

Isn’t money the obvious answer?

Money itself does not create confidence. However, financial stability can support autonomy, options, independence, and a sense of competence. When those things are absent, confidence can suffer. So some men compensate by becoming increasingly transactional. They watch another man walk into a room possessing effortless confidence and receive attention without apparently trying.

They need an explanation.

Thus:

CHAD.

The financially secure. The genetically gifted. The naturally charismatic. The guy who seemingly received the life they were promised if they simply followed the rules.

So Where Did the Others Go?

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By the mid-2000s and 2010s, where did men go who lacked money, identity, confidence, and self-esteem?

The internet, of course.

The internet gave isolated men something no previous generation possessed at this scale: the ability to find thousands of people experiencing the same resentment.

Research into the online “manosphere” has documented interconnected communities of pickup artists, men’s-rights activists, Men Going Their Own Way, and incel forums across Reddit and independent websites. Over time, some newer communities became more toxic and misogynistic, with considerable movement of users between different segments of the ecosystem (Ribeiro et al., 2021).

A man who believed women hated him could suddenly find thousands of other men who believed the same thing, each providing evidence for the worldview of the others. There were congregations of incels and misogynists, but they remained relatively obscure to mainstream culture through much of the early period.

Then politics discovered the power of alienated young men.

Steve Bannon provides one particularly disturbing example. Before becoming chief executive of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Bannon had encountered highly engaged young male communities through online gaming. He later described these alienated online men as possessing “monster power” and recognized their potential for political mobilization (Remnick, 2017).

Powerful political actors noticed alienated men on the internet and understood that alienation could be mobilized. This isn’t to say every single, lonely man was part of the incel movement, but the capitalization upon male alienation is well documented. The 2016 election also revealed a substantial gender divide. During that election cycle, men were considerably more supportive of Trump than women, while white voters without college degrees became an especially important part of his coalition (Pew Research Center, 2016).

Economic resentment, gender resentment, cultural resentment, and internet resentment did not originate from the same place.

But online, they increasingly collided.

Then Came #MeToo

At almost the same historical moment, the #MeToo movement became a massive reckoning over sexual harassment and assault. It was necessary. Women had been silenced about sexual assault and harassment for generations. Men needed to hear those stories, and institutions needed accountability.

But enormous cultural corrections can also create uncertainty. In 2020, 65% of Americans surveyed by Pew said the increased focus on sexual harassment and assault had made it harder for men to know how to interact with someone on a date (Pew Research Center, 2020).

A significant portion of the population experienced uncertainty about changing interpersonal rules. Emotionally healthy men can respond to that uncertainty by learning, listening, understanding consent, respecting boundaries, and communicating.

But what about the man who already believes women despise him?

He may be told:

Respect women’s boundaries.

But through the filter of wounds that already exist, what he hears is:

You are dangerous merely because you are male.

And Then He Watches the “Bad Boy” Win

To make matters worse, the young man may see financially successful men getting relationships. Then he sees men of his own—or even lower—socioeconomic status getting relationships despite behaving destructively: liars, manipulators, control freaks, cheaters, players, abusers. And a woman who rejected him chooses one of those men over him.

This is where incel logic makes its catastrophic conclusion:

Women only like money, or women like being treated like shit.

Research on narcissistic short-term mate appeal provides one clue as to why this conclusion can appear convincing. Some of the appeal associated with narcissism appears to travel through traits such as physical attractiveness and social boldness rather than through the pathology itself (Dufner et al., 2013).

Confidence, boldness, risk, and rebellion can evoke emotion. A man who cannot make a decision, establish a boundary, tolerate rejection, or stand behind his own convictions may struggle to create the same sense of confidence or excitement. The incel may therefore miss the distinction between an attractive signal and the pathology sometimes attached to it.

He sees the woman choose the reckless man and thinks:

She chose him because he is an asshole.

Perhaps she was attracted to confidence or social boldness. Familiarity from her own history may have played a role. Or perhaps she simply made a terrible decision.

Human beings do that.

Men do too.

The lesson for men is to develop the strength without the pathology.

The Consequences Are Larger Than Dating

This issue is far more consequential than Millennials and Generation Z simply having fewer children. Social isolation and loneliness are associated with significant physical and mental health risks (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024).

Marital status also correlates with mortality. A recent meta-analysis involving nearly 1.8 million people found higher all-cause mortality among unmarried groups, although marital status is intertwined with health, social support, economics, behavior, and many other factors (Mohammad Hashem et al., 2025).

Suicide presents an especially serious issue for men. In 2024, the suicide rate among American males was nearly four times the rate among females (CDC, 2026a). The CDC identifies numerous interacting risk factors, including job and financial problems, relationship loss, high-conflict relationships, social isolation, substance use, hopelessness, and mental illness (CDC, 2026b).

Romantic rejection alone does not explain male suicide. Neither does lack of sex. But if a man experiences profound loneliness, hopelessness, financial instability, repeated relationship failure, shame, and social isolation simultaneously, we should not dismiss romantic and relational distress as medically irrelevant simply because talking about male sexual loneliness makes people uncomfortable.

So What Needs to Be Done?

A good first step would be to incorporate relationship and social-connection questions more deliberately into men’s mental-health screening.

Being single itself is not pathology. Plenty of single men are happy, connected, healthy, and fulfilled. What matters is whether a man is socially connected, whether he is lonely, whether he is satisfied with being single, whether he desires a romantic relationship, whether he has repeatedly struggled to establish one despite trying, and how much distress those experiences are actually causing him.

If a man says he is single and happy, great.

But if he says he desperately wants intimacy, has failed repeatedly, hates himself because of it, has withdrawn from society, and spends six hours every night in online communities telling him women are evil:

That is clinically relevant information.

Society has shamed men around this issue so much that many probably will not bring it up voluntarily to a doctor, nurse, counselor, or therapist.

Because what is he supposed to say?

I’m thirty years old and nobody wants me?

That sentence contains enormous shame.

Our mental-health resources will struggle to help these men if professionals do not understand how rejection, sexuality, identity, masculinity, economic insecurity, shame, and social isolation interact.

I will not accept:

“It’s just the way they are.”

I am tired of telling these men:

“It sucks to be you.”

I will not sit back idly while these men suffer and nobody listens.

To be clear, I don’t support any part of the incel movement at all. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to understand how incels came to be.

Few care how incels came to be.

Because nobody wakes up one morning and spontaneously constructs an entire worldview around believing he is genetically unworthy of love.

Something happened before that.

Probably many things.

That is what this series is trying to understand.

And that is why, after I publish my memoir, Blades of Resurrection, my next book will be a men’s self-help and dating book:

Unveiled Sovereignty: How Men Reclaim Power, Presence, and Purpose in the Maze of Modern Dating

Power over themselves, not over women.

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AI Disclosure

In the interest of transparency, the thesis, ideas, examples, arguments, and original wording in this article are those of the author. The piece originated as a handwritten draft that was later typed and revised.

AI tools were used during the editorial process to assist with research, source identification, APA reference formatting, grammar, organization, and clarity. AI did not originate the article’s central thesis, personal examples, or core arguments.

The accompanying article image and/or video was generated using Midjourney AI.

When I started my Substack in December 2025, I loved almost everything about it. The only thing I didn’t like was the gender polarization that seemed to dominate the network and the algorithm. I was bombarded with posts like, “Dear Substack, connect me with women who…” Others had profiles with missions of “empowering women” or even “Smash the Patriarchy.”

Seeing all this made me question whether I was in the right place to share my work and my thoughts.

I’m glad I stayed.

Not only did I come to appreciate what these pages had to offer, but the expression of these women’s authenticity began to mirror my own experience of moving toward sovereignty as a man.

Losing my father at a young age, I grew up in a matriarchal household dominated by poverty. I also entered a profession dominated by women: nursing. Navigating this dynamic has been a daunting challenge at times.

I was taught that I had to be compliant with authority, especially when that authority was a woman. While this enabled me to survive, I was also denying something of my own essence: standing my ground for what is right.

Humans are not always right, and this includes men and women. However, I never felt allowed to question women.

Before I became a nurse, I worked as a nurse aide, where I underwent extensive bullying and harassment. Not so much because I was doing anything wrong, but because it became apparent that I wouldn’t stand up for myself.

Growing up in lack, I also looked for external validation through courtship. I sought women’s praise. I wanted to impress them with money and gifts. I turned to relentless exercise to improve my looks.

I accomplished all of these things, but none of them resolved my issues.

It was not until I started looking within that I found the answers I sought.

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A physical symptom—difficulty swallowing—forced me to look within in the most literal sense. I was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of esophageal cancer. I had finally gained the financial stability I had long sought and purchased a home with my then-fiancée, now wife. The years of external validation I had built became a house of cards, ready to collapse.

Then it hit me.

These women who were having enlightening experiences of seeking freedom and empowerment were experiencing a remarkably similar awakening: a turning away from external validation toward internal validation.

These women and I were not quite so different.

A grueling surgical recovery accompanied by intense spiritual introspection ignited a spark: I would not be defined by others’ expectations or opinions of me.

I was at a job where people made it clear that they didn’t feel I was worthy. Something in me snapped, and I quit.

I would never again let such a person have that kind of power or authority over me.

For years, I feared that if I didn’t appease people within the nursing profession, I would be stricken by poverty and shame. The night after my surgery, I was in so much pain that I wished I was dead. I married my wife not knowing how long I would get to live with her.

Experiences like that rearrange your priorities.

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So instead of deeming Substack a place that wasn’t for me, I began seeing mirrors of my own experience in these women’s awakenings. Rather than forming a stereotype that these women were against men, I treated what they said as information and made inferences from my observations.

I noticed that many of the accounts I encountered with an emphasis on feminine empowerment belonged to women who had hit an inflection point in their lives. They realized their life trajectories were no longer in alignment with their mission, higher purpose, authenticity, or sovereignty.

Substack became an ideal outlet to express that authenticity.

Another pattern caught my attention: the ages of these women often seemed clustered around the later childbearing years and beyond. I’ve seen this phenomenon in women as young as their early 30s and as old as their 60s and 70s. But in my own observations, the dominant cluster seemed to be from the late 30s to early 50s—roughly overlapping with perimenopause and post-menopause.

This led me to a hypothesis.

Perhaps one catalyst for this inflection point is a changing relationship with society’s expectations around motherhood and raising children. Whether it’s a decision not to have children or children growing up, relinquishing—or redefining—this expected role may help light the fire of empowerment.

Not because children are a hindrance.

But because these women are no longer tolerating what the powers of the world tell them they ought to be.

Perhaps calling it a transformation is too soft a term.

These women will fuck shit up to make space for their authenticity and their mission.

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You can kiss goodbye to anything that is no longer in alignment with their expression. Unsupportive husband?—divorce. Soul-sucking career?—sacrifice it all for entrepreneurship.

These women will tear down almost anything to make space conducive to their new journeys.

It was through observing this raw power that I began thinking differently about what is actually fueling the fire of gender conflict.

Many women identify patriarchal social trends, constructs, and power dynamics as barriers to themselves and other women expressing their own souls. From some women, the response becomes “smash the patriarchy,” the exclusion or dismissal of men, or even outright misandry.

The response from some men is an intensification of misogyny.

Interestingly enough, my own “I’ve had it” moment—my own inflection point—came as a man who grew up within both familial and professional structures dominated by women.

This led me to find a common denominator between my own experience and the awakening I saw in these women.

Perhaps it isn’t inherently patriarchy, men, or women that ignite such a revolution.

Perhaps the revolution begins when we can no longer tolerate someone else defining our identity.

Identity is something sacred that only an individual can truly come to know. When something threatens that identity, we have a choice: conform to it or rise into sovereignty.

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Undoubtedly, patriarchal social influences can present threats to a woman’s identity. My experience does not negate that. It helped me understand the underlying mechanism from another direction.

But what if the deeper problem is not simply “the patriarchy” or men trying to put women in their place?

What if these awakenings represent a collective threat to the status quo?

Perhaps the real issue is not so much “all men,” but the systems of power that enable a select few to pull the strings—a group I collectively called the “patriarchal puppetmasters” in some of my early articles.

Many feminist ideas present a genuine threat to established power structures, including ideas that could benefit men alongside women.

So how do entrenched power structures maintain their influence?

Through disinformation, propaganda, division, and failures of education.

They benefit when men are misinformed, when critical thinking is discouraged, and when men and women understand one another primarily as adversaries. At the same time, men continue to hold disproportionate influence within many societal power structures, including government, skilled trades, and law enforcement—areas vital to infrastructure and the exercise of institutional power.

The contradiction is useful.

Keep women saying “all men.” Keep men clinging defensively to whatever influence they believe they still possess. Keep each side looking horizontally at the other instead of upward at the structures benefiting from their division.

Because what entrenched power should fear is not women gaining power over men, or men regaining power over women.

It should fear men and women refusing the game altogether.

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Corruption fears nothing more than the integration of masculine and feminine—the mutual acknowledgment of our sovereignty.

What would a world look like if we gave women room to express their authenticity without imposing identities based on societal roles?

What would a world look like if women gave men room to express their own authenticity—their drive to solve problems, build, create, protect, and shape the homes and communities in which we spend our lives?

Now, I can’t speak on behalf of all men.

But I can speak as one case study: a man who experienced a matriarchal structure imposing an identity upon him.

Eventually, I cut out those who insisted on imposing such an identity. I reveled in who I am. I started my Substack. I wrote my memoir, Blades of Resurrection. I created my LLC, Lightning Shadow Crossroads.

I began building a life that was mine.

Maybe this isn’t such a men-versus-women phenomenon after all.

Perhaps it is the demand of our higher selves—the refusal to let another person define who we are.

Perhaps that demand is not masculine or feminine.

Perhaps it is uniquely human.

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AI Disclosure

This article originated entirely from my own ideas, experiences, and observations. I first wrote the piece by hand and then typed it into a digital draft. I used AI afterward as an editorial tool to assist with phrasing, grammar, clarity, and readability while preserving my original arguments, perspective, and voice. The accompanying video/visual content was created using Midjourney.

A piece of dating-app data has become something close to the bedrock of the modern incel movement.

In 2009, OkCupid published an analysis of its own users called Your Looks and Your Inbox. It wasn’t a peer-reviewed scientific study, but it did reveal a very frank statistic.

Women on the site rated roughly 80 percent of men as below the midpoint in physical attractiveness. Men’s ratings of women, by comparison, were distributed much more evenly (Rudder, 2009).

This statistic has since been used to portray women as conceited, jaded, and having wildly unrealistic expectations for male partners.

It also helped fuel one of the most persistent beliefs in incel culture:

Women only want the top twenty percent of men.

But there was another part of the OkCupid data that gets considerably less attention.

Despite rating the majority of men poorly in terms of appearance, women still sent messages to men across a much broader range of attractiveness. Men, meanwhile, disproportionately concentrated their messages toward the women they rated as the most attractive (Rudder, 2009).

In fact, two-thirds of male messages went to the highest-rated third of women.

So women’s ratings of a man’s photograph and their willingness to actually interact with him were not necessarily the same thing.

That is where things get more complicated.

There is also another reason dating apps changed this dynamic.

Rejection between men and women has never occurred in a vacuum.

Men, particularly those with low emotional intelligence or poor emotional regulation, do not always handle rejection well. Experimental research involving online dating has found that men rejected by partners they desired displayed increased hostility, with anger helping explain the effect (Andrighetto et al., 2019).

For women, there is another consideration.

Safety.

Research examining unwanted romantic and sexual advances found that women reported greater concern than men about the repercussions of rejecting someone, including being yelled at or physically harmed. Women were also more likely to use strategies such as leaving the situation or contacting another person to protect themselves when rejecting an unwanted advance (Moran & Burch, 2023).

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A dating app changes that equation.

A woman can swipe left on a man from miles away without having to calculate whether rejecting him will put her safety in jeopardy.

That is an enormous advantage for women.

But it also creates an unintended consequence for men.

Rejection becomes extraordinarily efficient, anonymous, and abundant.

A man can experience dozens or hundreds of tiny rejections without ever meeting the women rejecting him, while the women doing the rejecting can make those decisions without assuming the physical risk that can sometimes accompany an unwanted face-to-face advance.

Both experiences are real.

And both shape what modern dating has become.

Does this mean you have to have a chiseled jaw, be over six feet tall, and have the physique of a Greek god?

This logic is what helped coin the term CHAD among resentful men.

But what’s really happening gives us a window into one means by which human beings have been biologically and psychologically wired to reproduce.

As the child bearers, women have historically faced a far greater minimum biological investment in reproduction.

Pregnancy is expensive.

Childbirth can be dangerous.

For most of human history, raising a child required years of protection, resources, and cooperation.

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Evolutionary psychologists have therefore argued that greater female selectivity in some mating contexts could have been adaptive.

One of the most famous examinations of this idea surveyed mate preferences across 37 cultures. Buss (1989) found average sex differences in preferences associated with earning capacity, ambition, youth, and physical attractiveness.

These are averages.

They are not commandments written into every man and woman.

But average differences do exist.

Men, on the other hand, historically faced a much lower minimum biological investment in conception. From an evolutionary standpoint, there could therefore be reproductive advantages to greater willingness toward short-term mating opportunities.

That does not mean men are biologically destined to sleep with every woman they can.

Nor does it mean women are biologically destined to pursue wealthy men.

Biology creates tendencies.

Human beings still have judgment.

There was once a time when physical strength, speed, health, intelligence, alliances, access to resources, and an ability to navigate dangerous environments could mean the difference between children surviving to adulthood or an entire lineage dying out.

But human technology has evolved far faster than our biology.

And dating apps introduce another problem.

They take an extraordinarily complicated interpersonal judgment and compress it into a photograph, a biography, a few demographic details, and a thumb.

The screen emphasizes what the screen can display.

And what it displays best is appearance.

If we only look through the lens of physical attractiveness, it paints a grim picture for men.

But the silver lining is that attractiveness to women is not simply looks alone.

It is one variable in a much larger equation.

Physical appearance matters in initial attraction.

But attraction becomes considerably more complicated once two people actually interact.

One speed-dating study found that men and women reported traditional differences when describing the characteristics they thought they wanted in partners. Yet those stated preferences failed to reliably predict what actually inspired romantic interest when participants met potential partners face-to-face (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008).

That is fascinating.

Because it means people themselves may not always know exactly what is going to create attraction until another human being is standing in front of them.

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A better way to think about attraction might be something like a FICO score.

A FICO score is made up of many components.

Payment history.

Available credit.

Age of accounts.

Credit inquiries.

Debt.

No single component determines the entire score.

Likewise, physical attractiveness is only one factor that can influence attraction.

So what are the others?

They vary enormously amongst women, but grouped together they can include traits such as confidence, charisma, humor, emotional intelligence, assertiveness, warmth, social competence, status, kindness, social influence, and perceived value.

Placed together with physical attractiveness, these characteristics create something closer to a spectrum.

This is good news for men, right?

If they aren’t exceedingly attractive, shouldn’t they be able to strengthen the other areas and compensate for it?

Not necessarily.

This is where the misunderstanding begins again.

Men often try to quantify attraction.

Income.

Height.

Body fat percentage.

Career.

House.

Car.

Social status.

Check enough boxes and attraction should follow.

I know because I did exactly that.

But none of those qualities mean jack shit if the woman doesn’t feel attraction.

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That does not mean women are irrational.

It means attraction is not a spreadsheet.

It is an emotional, psychological, social, and biological experience.

And what someone says they want is not necessarily identical to what creates attraction when they meet another person (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008).

Let me give you an example.

Take Steve and Jason.

Steve comes from an upper-middle-class family.

He’s 6’3”, just graduated from medical school, and has bought a home in a suburban neighborhood with excellent schools. His grandparents left him a trust fund that paid for medical school and helped him purchase his home.

He has zero debt.

He is also relatively athletic.

He should be a prime candidate for an attractive, high-quality woman, right?

Jason is homeless.

He has a history of drug addiction and is frequently in and out of rehab, taking odd jobs and couch surfing to survive day to day.

Despite whatever physical features he has, Jason should be considerably less attractive on paper, right?

Now let’s say there is a zombie apocalypse.

Maybe that’s a funny example.

Fine.

Let’s say there is widespread social anarchy and the governments of the world collapse.

Now who becomes more valuable?

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Steve has spent his life navigating universities, hospitals, financial institutions, and stable social structures.

Jason has spent fifteen years navigating dangerous streets, unpredictable people, violence, addiction, police, shelters, hunger, and survival.

Suddenly, some of Jason’s experience becomes extremely valuable.

The men didn’t change.

The environment changed the meaning of their traits.

Conditions of a person’s upbringing and environment can play a profound role in shaping what different behaviors mean to them.

And it is through this lens that we can begin to understand a much darker phenomenon:

Why do some women repeatedly find themselves in abusive relationships?

To be very clear, this does not mean women prefer abuse.

Research does not support that conclusion.

What the research does show is that previous trauma is associated with an increased risk of later revictimization.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 22 studies of intimate-partner-violence revictimization. Among the variables analyzed, childhood abuse showed the strongest association with later revictimization. PTSD symptoms, alcohol and drug use, recent physical violence, and the severity of previous violence were also significant risk factors (Bellot et al., 2024).

Another systematic review examined 71 studies containing a combined 31,633 participants in an attempt to understand what psychological processes might connect childhood maltreatment with victimization during adulthood.

Trauma-related symptoms, dissociation, emotion dysregulation, and risky sexual behavior emerged as possible pathways. The authors also examined factors such as attachment, maladaptive schemas, social support, and risk detection, although the evidence for those mechanisms was considerably more limited (Fereidooni et al., 2024).

This is far more complicated than saying:

She likes bad boys.

Trauma does not necessarily cause someone to consciously seek danger.

But trauma can affect emotional regulation, expectations, coping, and the way a person navigates relationships.

What is familiar can also be easier to understand than what is unfamiliar.

That does not mean a traumatized nervous system literally prefers abuse.

And it certainly does not mean someone is responsible for being abused.

But previous experiences can influence what a person recognizes, tolerates, fears, expects, or interprets as normal.

This is where we can begin talking about the allure of the Dark Triad:

These traits are frequently grouped together, but they should not be treated as identical.

And the research does not simply show that women are attracted to psychopaths.

Something more subtle appears to happen.

Narcissism, in particular, has been associated with increased short-term mate appeal.

Dufner et al. (2013) examined this across three studies using ratings from opposite-sex participants, friends, and naturalistic courtship outcomes.

Narcissism predicted greater mate appeal.

But why?

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The effect was largely associated with two other characteristics:

Physical attractiveness and social boldness (Dufner et al., 2013).

That is a radically different conclusion from saying women are attracted to abuse.

It’s not necessarily the narcissism that creates attraction.

It may be the signals traveling with it.

Confidence can be attractive.

Charm can be attractive.

Assertiveness can be attractive.

Social boldness can be attractive.

Emotional composure can be attractive.

A narcissistic man may initially display some of these characteristics extremely well.

But the same person may also possess entitlement, manipulation, lack of empathy, exploitation, possessiveness, or grandiosity.

What initially looks like confidence may eventually reveal itself as arrogance.

What looks like leadership can turn into control.

What looks like persistence can turn into coercion.

What looks like emotional invulnerability can become an inability to tolerate vulnerability at all.

This is why saying that women are attracted to narcissism or abuse misses what may actually be occurring.

They can be attracted to certain qualities before discovering the pathology underneath them.

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Now let’s return to Steve and Jason.

Let’s call the woman Julia.

Julia met Steve while working as a bartender.

She comes from an impoverished family.

Her father has been in and out of prison her entire life.

Rent has always been a constant battle.

Julia wants to save up for college, but she has fines and a suspended license from a car accident, so her grandmother drives her to and from work.

Steve is enamored with Julia and her sheer beauty.

He asks her out.

She accepts.

Eventually, Steve offers to let her move in with him.

Julia is apprehensive, but ultimately accepts.

Her birthday is coming up.

Steve surprises her.

He pays off all of her fines so she can get her license reinstated.

Then he buys her a car.

From Steve’s perspective, this is generosity.

Maybe even love.

But Julia’s internal reaction could be much more complicated.

Relief.

Gratitude.

Embarrassment.

Dependence.

Fear.

A sense of obligation.

Disbelief.

And perhaps something deeper:

I don’t deserve this.

Being overwhelmed with gifts and sacrifices can carry an emotional meaning beyond the gifts themselves.

An enormous display of investment very early in a relationship can create pressure.

It can create indebtedness.

It can make the recipient wonder what is expected in return.

And depending on her past experiences and self-esteem, being placed on a pedestal can be deeply uncomfortable.

This is part of what people colloquially describe as someone coming on too strong.

The man thinks:

Look how much I care.

The woman may feel:

Why does someone who barely knows me care this much?

That mismatch can create what people now call the ick.

Or sometimes, creepiness.

The problem is not male emotional investment itself.

Healthy emotional investment is necessary for relationships.

The problem is emotional investment that appears wildly disproportionate to the actual depth of the relationship.

It can convey that the man is not responding to who the woman actually is.

He is responding to an idealized projection of her.

And being worshipped by somebody who barely knows you can feel less like love and more like pressure.

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Jason is Julia’s ex-boyfriend.

He has just gotten out of rehab again.

He has a history of verbal abuse and stealing from her.

He says he finally got a job and wants to get an apartment.

One night after work, he asks Julia for a ride.

They talk.

And Jason understands parts of Julia’s world that Steve simply cannot.

They understand the same kinds of desperation.

They recognize the same kinds of people.

They know what it is like when rent is due and the money doesn’t exist.

They understand addiction.

Police.

Broken families.

Shame.

Survival.

They laugh together.

Julia feels something with Jason that she hasn’t felt with Steve.

They reconnect.

That night, Julia and Jason hook up.

The next morning she is horrified.

Conflicted.

She sees everything Steve has given her and feels totally unworthy of him.

She gives him back the car.

Then she leaves Steve and moves back in with Jason.

The story sounds crazy.

But take out the logic for a moment and replace it with feeling.

Now it becomes psychologically understandable.

That does not make it healthy.

It does not excuse Jason’s abuse.

It does not mean Julia secretly enjoys being abused.

And it certainly does not mean Steve deserved what happened.

But it helps explain something that the incel interpretation cannot.

The incel looks at Julia and says:

See? Women would rather have the abusive drug addict than the good man.

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But that explanation tells us very little about what is actually happening psychologically.

Julia didn’t necessarily choose abuse.

She chose a person whose emotional world made sense to her.

Jason could relate to parts of her life Steve simply could not.

The problem was that attached to those feelings were behaviors that were destructive.

Research into revictimization makes this distinction important. Trauma-related symptoms, dissociation, and emotion-regulation difficulties are among the processes associated with later vulnerability, but the mechanisms remain complex and incomplete (Fereidooni et al., 2024).

That is an important distinction.

Women have pointed to another problem for years:

So many men seem to care primarily about sex.

Perhaps there is a biological component to that.

Evolutionary theories predict average sex differences in mating strategies, although the expression of those differences depends heavily on individual and social context (Buss, 1989).

But biology does not remove responsibility.

If a man has unprotected sex with every woman he finds attractive without contraception, eventually that behavior can become a recipe for destruction.

Sexual attraction is real.

But a responsible man learns not to obey every sexual impulse simply because his biology produces it.

There is a subtle counterpoint here for women.

Feelings are real too.

But feelings require discernment.

If intense chemistry develops around somebody whose character is dishonest, abusive, manipulative, unstable, or dangerous, the existence of attraction does not make the relationship healthy.

Men aren’t going to stop finding women attractive.

Women aren’t going to stop relying heavily on how a man evokes their feelings.

Nor should either sex be expected to.

It is part of being human.

But feelings are information.

They are not necessarily conclusions.

Attraction answers one question:

Do I want this person?

Character answers another:

Should I trust this person?

Those are not the same question.

This is why “players” can sometimes appear so successful in relationships.

Some have learned how to convey confidence, social boldness, emotional independence, charm, sexuality, assertiveness, and a willingness to walk away.

They do not appear desperate for the woman’s approval.

And that lack of desperation itself can be attractive.

The research on narcissistic mate appeal gives us an interesting window into this. Social boldness and physical attractiveness helped explain the short-term appeal associated with narcissism (Dufner et al., 2013).

The tragedy is that some men conclude the lesson is:

Become an asshole.

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No.

The lesson is to understand which qualities the asshole is displaying effectively and separate them from the destructive behavior attached to them.

Confidence does not require narcissism.

Assertiveness does not require aggression.

Emotional independence does not require emotional neglect.

Sexual confidence does not require manipulation.

Boundaries do not require cruelty.

Strength does not require abuse.

The healthy man can possess the attractive qualities without the pathology.

This is what I failed to understand for most of my life.

I believed being a good man meant eliminating aggression, confrontation, dominance, anger, risk, and assertiveness from myself entirely.

It didn’t make me virtuous.

It made me incomplete.

The answer isn’t becoming Jason.

It is becoming a version of Steve who also has boundaries.

A Steve with conviction.

A Steve who can say no.

A Steve who doesn’t need Julia’s approval to believe in his own worth.

A Steve who can love someone deeply without worshipping her.

A Steve whose generosity is a gift rather than an unconscious bargain for affection.

A Steve who is emotionally capable of walking away.

And Julia has a responsibility too. To understand that attraction and character must be evaluated separately.

If Jason makes her feel something Steve doesn’t, she should be curious about why.

But she must also be willing to look at Jason’s character.

Does he lie?

Does he steal?

Does he manipulate?

Does he take responsibility?

Does he respect boundaries?

Does he make her safer or merely more stimulated?

Does he treat her with dignity when he is angry?

Those questions matter more than butterflies.

Confidence without empathy can become domination.

Charm without honesty becomes manipulation.

Assertiveness without restraint becomes aggression.

Emotional intensity without stability becomes chaos.

But each has a healthy counterpart.

Confidence with empathy.

Charm with honesty.

Assertiveness with restraint.

Strength with compassion.

Men and women should come to the table through an honest means of understanding one another.

Because attraction is real.

Biology is real.

Trauma is real.

Social conditioning is real.

And personal responsibility is also real.

None of those truths cancels the others.

A man should not shame a woman because she didn’t feel attraction toward him.

A woman should not shame a man because he struggles to create attraction.

A man should learn that becoming attractive is not the same thing as accumulating money, muscles, and status.

And a woman should learn that intense attraction is not necessarily evidence of good character.

Perhaps modern dating becomes healthier when both sexes stop pretending their own psychological vulnerabilities do not exist.

Men must become willing to understand women.

Women must become willing to understand men.

Women and men must become willing to understand each other as humans. To understand ourselves well enough that when genuine connection appears, we are capable of recognizing it. And capable of keeping it.

Part III will examine the other side of this equation: how boys and men are shaped by their upbringing and social environment.

I’ll explore the roles fathers and mothers play in male development, the impact of single-parent and particularly single-mother households, and what can happen when boys grow into adulthood without healthy models for masculinity, assertiveness, boundaries, emotional regulation, and relationships with women.

These issues deserve examination without blaming single mothers, fathers, women, or men for enormously complicated social conditions.

Instead, we need to understand how family structure, parental roles, education, culture, and social conditioning shape the way boys eventually understand themselves—and the way they relate to women.

If some of those lessons are contributing to male loneliness, resentment, passivity, aggression, or confusion about what healthy masculinity looks like, then those lessons need to be examined.

And where necessary, they need to change.

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AI Disclosure

In the interest of transparency, AI tools were used in the preparation of this article to assist with research, source identification, citation formatting, and editorial refinement. The original concept, thesis, arguments, personal perspectives, and conclusions are those of the author.

The accompanying artwork was generated using Midjourney AI.

As a matter of policy, my Lightning Shadow Crossroads discloses the use of artificial intelligence when utilized in published work. I believe readers deserve to know when and how AI tools have contributed to the content they are reading.

References

Andrighetto, L., Riva, P., & Gabbiadini, A. (2019). Lonely hearts and angry minds: Online dating rejection increases male (but not female) hostility. Aggressive Behavior, 45(5), 571–581. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21852

Bellot, A., Muñoz-Rivas, M. J., Botella, J., & Montorio, I. (2024). Factors associated with revictimization in intimate partner violence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Behavioral Sciences, 14(2), 103. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14020103

Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00023992

Dufner, M., Rauthmann, J. F., Czarna, A. Z., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Are narcissists sexy? Zeroing in on the effect of narcissism on short-term mate appeal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(7), 870–882. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213483580

Eastwick, P. W., & Finkel, E. J. (2008). Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 245–264. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.245

Fereidooni, F., Daniels, J. K., & Lommen, M. J. J. (2024). Childhood maltreatment and revictimization: A systematic literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221150475

Moran, J. B., & Burch, R. L. (2023). Repercussions of rejecting unwanted advances: Gender differences in experience and concern. International Journal of Sexual Health, 35(1), 123–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2023.2175098

Rudder, C. (2009, November 17). Your looks and your inbox. OkTrends.

Understanding Norse mythology through an archetypal lens has profoundly shaped my writing, self-reflection, and how I perceive the world.

One of the most enduring symbols in Norse mythology is Yggdrasil, the immense World Tree whose branches and roots bind together the Nine Realms. Traditionally, these realms are understood as distinct places within the Norse cosmos, each inhabited by different beings and governed by different forces.

But over time, I began asking a different question.

What if Yggdrasil doesn’t merely point to distant realms?

What if it points inward?

What if the Nine Realms are not simply places we travel to in myth, but aspects of human experience that each of us moves through every day?

This is not an attempt to redefine Norse mythology or claim that this was the original intent of its authors. Rather, it is a symbolic framework that has emerged through my own study of Norse archetypes, Jungian psychology, meditation, and self-reflection. It has become one of the lenses through which I understand both my own life and the lives of those around me.

Perhaps you’ll find something within it that resonates with your own journey.

Everyday Application of Yggdrasil

A Psychological Interpretation of the Nine Realms

Midgard — The Realm of Everyday Life

Traditionally, Midgard is the realm of humanity. Created from the body of the giant Ymir and protected by the gods, it is the world where ordinary human life unfolds between the realms of gods and giants.

To me, Midgard represents the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life—our work, relationships, family, and personal stewardship. It is where we fulfill our role in society and navigate the practical realities of being human.

Asgard — The Realm of Order

Traditionally, Asgard is the home of the Æsir gods, including Odin, Thor, Frigg, and Tyr. It is the center of divine authority, governance, protection, and the maintenance of cosmic order.

Symbolically, I see Asgard as representing civilization itself: authority, institutions, governance, law, technology, infrastructure, and the systems humanity creates to bring order from chaos.

Vanaheim — The Realm of Nature

Vanaheim is the home of the Vanir gods, who are associated with fertility, prosperity, peace, abundance, and the natural world.

For me, Vanaheim represents nature itself—the outdoors, growth, fertility, balance, and our relationship with the living world beyond human construction.

Alfheim — The Realm of Imagination

Alfheim is the realm of the Light Elves, beings often associated with beauty, light, artistry, and inspiration.

I see Alfheim as the realm of imagination, creativity, hope, dreams, vision, and possibility. Every invention, work of art, and meaningful change first exists as an idea before it ever becomes reality.

Muspelheim — The Realm of Transformation

Muspelheim is the primordial realm of fire, ruled by Surtr, whose flames both destroy and help bring about the renewal of the cosmos at Ragnarök.

Rather than seeing fire solely as destruction, I have come to view Muspelheim as the force that burns away what no longer serves us. It represents courage, intentional action, discipline, sacrifice, purification, and the willingness to transform ourselves through conscious choice.

Jotunheim — The Realm of Discernment

Jotunheim is the homeland of the giants, ancient beings who frequently challenge the gods. While they possess tremendous physical power, they are also deeply connected to wisdom, mystery, and forces that exist beyond ordinary understanding.

My interpretation of Jotunheim developed largely from Thor’s journey to Útgarða-Loki. There, Thor is defeated not through superior strength but through illusion. A drinking horn is connected to the sea. A cat is actually Jörmungandr, the World Serpent. An elderly woman is Old Age itself. Nearly every challenge depends upon perception rather than force.

Because of this story, I came to see Jotunheim as the realm where consciousness is tested and discernment is refined. It represents reflection, questioning, wisdom, and the uniquely human capacity to examine instinct rather than merely act upon it. Sometimes our greatest battles are not against external enemies, but against misunderstanding reality itself.

Niflheim — The Realm of Truth

Niflheim is the primordial realm of ice, mist, and cold. It is one of the oldest realms in Norse cosmology, existing long before humanity, and is closely associated with stillness, death, and the origins of creation itself.

Symbolically, I see Niflheim as the dark night of the soul. It is grief, silence, uncertainty, loss, and those moments when life strips away comforting illusions. Yet within that darkness lies revelation. Sometimes truth is cold before it becomes liberating.

Helheim — The Realm of the Collective Unconscious

Helheim is the realm governed by the goddess Hel, where many of those who die outside of battle come to dwell. Contrary to many modern depictions, it is not necessarily a place of punishment but one of continued existence.

Rather than viewing Helheim solely as the realm of the dead, I have come to see it symbolically as the reservoir of humanity’s deepest archetypes. Carl Jung referred to this deeper layer of the psyche as the collective unconscious.

It is where myth, instinct, ancestral memory, and universal human patterns reside beneath conscious awareness. Whether approached spiritually or psychologically, these forces continue to shape every human life.

Svartalfheim — The Realm of Manifestation

Svartalfheim is the home of the dwarves, the master craftsmen who forged many of the gods’ greatest treasures, including Mjölnir, Gungnir, Draupnir, and Gullinbursti.

To me, Svartalfheim represents manifestation through disciplined work. It is craftsmanship, perseverance, earthly resources, and the quiet labor accomplished when no one else is watching. Character, like the dwarves’ greatest creations, is often forged away from the eyes of the world.

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The Three Dimensions of Life

Together, these realms form a symbolic map of human experience.

The Outer World

• Midgard — Everyday life

• Asgard — Civilization and order

• Vanaheim — Nature and balance

The Inner World

• Alfheim — Imagination

• Jotunheim — Discernment

• Niflheim — Truth through suffering

• Helheim — The collective unconscious

The Transformative World

• Muspelheim — Intentional change

• Svartalfheim — Manifestation through disciplined work

A Daily Reflection

As I navigate life, I often find myself asking questions like these:

• Am I grounded in Midgard, fulfilling today’s responsibilities?

• How do I function and express myself within the structures of Asgard? What of the rules am I motivated to change?

• Have I spent time in Vanaheim, reconnecting with nature?

• Am I drawing inspiration from Alfheim, or merely escaping into fantasy?

• Am I entering Jotunheim, questioning my assumptions and testing my perceptions?

• Has Niflheim revealed a difficult truth I need to accept?

• What archetypal patterns from Helheim are influencing my behavior?

• What must Muspelheim burn away so I can become who I am meant to be?

• What am I building in Svartalfheim, especially when no one else is watching?

Final Thoughts

Whether or not my interpretation aligns with how the ancient Norse understood Yggdrasil is, in many ways, beside the point.

The greatest myths endure because they continue to reveal new layers of meaning across generations. They provide language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate.

For me, Yggdrasil is no longer merely the tree that connects nine mythological realms.

It is the tree that connects the landscapes within us.

Every day we move among these realms—between responsibility and imagination, truth and illusion, order and chaos, discipline and transformation. Like the roots and branches of Yggdrasil itself, they are not isolated worlds, but interconnected dimensions of what it means to be human.

If this interpretation helps you see your own life through a new lens, then perhaps the World Tree is still growing.

It was between 2019 and 2022. I was in the best physical condition of my life and made more money than ever. I thought these were the two ingredients that would overcome my lifelong failures in successful relationships with women. I looked toward symbols of external validation such as income and looks because it was less painful than facing the shadows of my internalized unworthiness.

As a result, I got rejection after rejection, friend zone after friend zone. Excuse after excuse. Not only did women reject me, but some engaged in narcissistic, emotionally abusive, and even physically abusive relationships rather than pursue one with me. Men with felonies and illicit careers over my college education. They kept doing that because I was in debt up to my eyeballs, right?

Wrong.

I compensated for those deficits. I got a six-figure income. I had a perfect BMI of 25, with my abs showing. Yet despite that, I kept getting excuse after excuse as to why they weren’t attracted to me.

So I gave up for a while.

I withdrew and stopped trying. The only thing money and looks gave me was more loneliness with money and looks.

In this withdrawal, I made the dire mistake of voicing my frustrations in online groups. The label came quickly.

Incel.

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I was unfamiliar with the term.

Short for an involuntary male celibate, I was appalled that I met the definition. More associated attributes came with it, such as blaming women and even accusations that I advocated violence against women. Those were attributed to me by default.

How?

I would never advocate violence for any reason against women. But I got the stereotype. Did my repeated failures in relationships make me worthy of that stereotype?

I struggled with this label.

Quickly, I learned more about the culture and saw how many men believed women were only concerned with tall, attractive men who made a lot of money.

I was 6’0”, in great shape, and made a six-figure income. I accomplished what these men said women “wanted.”

If that were true, women would have fought over me.

But they still recoiled.

Why?

It’s in this critical “why” where men demean and ridicule themselves. Their internalization of this anger results in externalized projection in online subcommunities and groups.

I wanted nothing to do with those communities.

What did I do?

I dialed up the intensity of my internal self-hatred.

This resulted in deep bouts of depression and multiple near-suicide attempts. Fortunately, happenstance brought me to the woman I married in 2022.

However, the unworthiness still festered within me.

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Shortly after our engagement and buying our first home together, I was diagnosed with an extraordinarily rare form of esophageal cancer called a GIST tumor—a pathology with no known risk factors.

Could my internalized unworthiness have had something to do with it?

Perhaps I’m reaching for narrative here, but I feel these internalized feelings of unworthiness took on an energy of their own.

Determined to have a successful marriage, I underwent a grueling surgery: the Ivor Lewis esophagectomy. This surgery involves removing the lower two-thirds of the esophagus and the upper third of the stomach, then reconnecting what remains.

The surgery was successful, but the recovery left me with ICU-induced PTSD.

In that recovery, I finally made the choice to delve inward into the depths of my psyche. I discovered many of the roots of my unworthiness and people-pleasing. I had let authority override my own truth. I learned there are situations where controlled anger can be applied in an assertive, non-destructive manner. Where self-defense is justified.

So what did the guy with multiple felonies have that I didn’t?

Balls.

Or at least he knew how to use them.

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I grew up in a household dominated by women that taught me aggression and assertiveness had absolutely no place. I was forced to comply with all authority figures, especially women in positions of authority. I lost my father at such a young age that I have no memory of him. I wasn’t allowed to take karate despite constant bullying or even watch Rocky because my mother thought it would teach me violence.

In my introspection through spirituality, meditation, and self-discovery, something clicked.

I realized why the bad boy and the drug dealer often had more success in relationships than I did.

Though people in the incel community genuinely believe women like those attributes, I realized that is another stereotype that is neither accurate nor fair. Many, if not most, women have enough self-awareness to steer clear of such individuals. Ask just about any woman, and she will likely say those attributes are repulsive.

However, many women have had some kind of crush on a thrill seeker or someone with a penchant for trouble or rebellion. There’s some kind of magnetic lure and charm. However, these attributes often correlate with unlawful behavior and forms of abuse.

Correlation is not causation.

It’s not the felonies nor the narcissism that women fall for.

It’s the masculine power conveyed by the willingness to challenge the rules and the status quo.

These acts of rebellion invoke emotions that can be magnetic.

If he’s willing to challenge authority and the status quo, then perhaps he’ll also challenge anyone who threatens her, her family, or her children.

It’s the boldness and internal conviction behind risky decision-making that can make a woman feel anything is possible.

Especially the feeling of being able to change him.

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Even though this is not representative of all women, it does not negate the phenomenon of some women repeatedly engaging in such relationships.

To be clear, this is not a value judgment.

It’s an observation.

An observation we shouldn’t ignore if we want to understand the heart of the issue.

Playing by society’s rules, especially for boys raised in impoverished single-mother households, doesn’t necessarily convey those feelings.

The problem is that these men convey those feelings in harmful, destructive ways.

An emotionally intelligent man conveys those same feelings in a constructive manner.

Someone who is an incel has no idea how to convey those feelings.

So these men try and try again. They seek external validation so desperately that they’ve gained a new label:

Simp.

And when these men fail, we don’t display empathy.

We display shame.

We portray their lack of success with women as an egregious character defect, and the name we give it is incel.

Then we wonder why destructive behaviors result.

It’s time to stop that label.

A man who struggles in relationships, endures rejection over and over, survives that shame, keeps moving forward, and doesn’t give up on himself is, in fact, demonstrating courage.

These men are crying for help.

And we offer shame in response.

What the incel phenomenon demonstrates is men not knowing how to channel that energy in an assertive, non-destructive manner. When boys have absent fathers, they often enter adulthood carrying eighteen years’ worth of burdens.

I found out the hard way.

It’s time to stop the shaming and the labeling.

Men must become willing to understand women.

Women must become willing to understand men.

Why is this such an important issue to me?

Because if it weren’t for my wife, I likely would have refused treatment for my cancer.

If it weren’t for my wife, I would not have recovered successfully from that surgery and returned to work as a nurse.

I do not consider myself an incel.

But I do consider myself a victim of the male loneliness epidemic.

An epidemic that could have killed me.

Therefore, after my memoir, I am going to devote my mission to helping such men and fostering mutual understanding between men and women.

Fuck the Patriarchy.

Fuck the Matriarchy.

Men and women are mutually sovereign.

And it’s damn time we started treating each other like it...

Part II will take a deeper examination of female attraction psychology, especially patterns of chaos and abuse in relationships. In addition, I will examine how family structures and social media are creating an evolutionary biological gap—and what we can do about it.

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In the realm of politics, there is little more controversial than the manner in which the federal government, under the Trump administration, has empowered ICE to treat deportees as though they are subhuman. Violations of constitutional rights and even human rights are perceived as justified by a political conglomerate of Americans because they immigrated through unofficial channels. These people cite reasons such as public safety, taking our jobs, costing taxpayers money, among other things. It is a red herring perpetuated by Fox News, Newsmax, Truth Social, and other outlets. They use these networks to spread fear to the point that many find inhumane treatment to be a necessary evil.

That was never the real issue.

The real issue is that they don’t want cultural diversification of American citizenship. Because if we made it easier for immigrants to become citizens, in a decade or two Caucasians would become a minority. Immigrants becoming part of the electorate dilutes their political influence and identity. It’s why the current administration obsesses over convincing people that mass illegal voting fraud exists, even in the absence of substantial evidence.

How ironic is it that such a subconscious similarity has evolved within the literary, art, and writing community? There is a conglomerate that will call you a “thief,” “not a real writer,” or claim you’re destroying the environment. There is certainly some truth to this for those who use generative AI to mass-produce books and other artwork. However, there is a deep pride within the community where many refuse to even have a discussion about the difference between generative and assistive AI. Therefore, do you know what I hear when these “purists” and witch hunters point the finger at someone who chooses to use assistive AI? “If your parents were illegal, you’re not a real citizen!” Sounds like a familiar Supreme Court case.

If you support the AI witch hunt, the use of Pangram on Substack, and the cancel culture aimed at authors who incorporate any aspect of AI into their writing, then you are contributing to one of the ugliest trends in the writing community.

Because it was never about being threatened by the quality of a machine. It was never about AI being “trained” on your work. What it is about is taking the stereotypes of a select percentage of people using generative AI to mass-produce writing and artwork they didn’t create and applying those stereotypes to people who either entered writing through AI or use it as a tool to improve the quality of their own writing. It makes them feel like lesser versions of themselves.

They’re like the kid on the sports team who is threatened by another talented kid who transferred to their school because they’re afraid they’ll lose playing time. They’re like the homeowners’ association that doesn’t want the Black family to move into the neighborhood because they think it will lower property values. And now, the anti-AI Karens have given us Pangram on every Substack post, which, to me, is like giving phones to the neighbors who called the Nazis on Anne Frank’s family.

Are there some Substack accounts that use generative AI? I’m sure there are. But I believe most who use AI do so in an assistive capacity that allows them to more clearly express their authenticity through writing.

And guess what?

They have great shit to say.

I subscribe to those accounts because I trust myself to determine what is authentic and what’s not with my own eyes.

But because you’re so threatened and insecure, you’ve introduced the equivalent of screaming “witch!” and pointing the finger in 1690s Salem. People stop using em dashes, the rule of three, and even certain words because they’re so afraid of those accusations. You’re not a purist sect of “real” writers. You are online bullies with self-esteem issues who need therapy.

Don’t even try to say these witch hunters can’t do harm.

Very recently, an author with a Big Five publishing deal had a bootleg copy of their manuscript fed through Pangram, where it was marked as 78% AI-generated. Despite Pangram being unreliable, the publisher pulled the book deal. The author is now blacklisted. The witch hunters celebrated when that happened.

So am I going to stop using em dashes, or never describe something as “not this, but that,” because I fear being accused?

Fuck no.

AI proofreading, clarity improvements, and suggestions dramatically improve how quickly I can convey my writing and message to the world.

Do you know why that’s important to me?

Besides it being none of your business, I’m an esophageal cancer survivor, and I don’t know how much time I have left. In addition to the tasks above, AI critiques my work faster than any human editor can. I use both AI and human editing. I often develop ideas from those critiques that end up being even stronger than what AI originally suggested.

It brings out my best work.

So I won’t apologize for using AI in an assistive capacity. I’ve been overly apologetic my whole life. And I learned at 36 years old that I don’t know how much of my life I have left to live.

So I will use AI to get my message out into the world, and I don’t need your approval to do it.

Technology has evolved to expand the number of people who engage in writing. Those growing numbers make the no-AI purists feel like lesser versions of themselves.

Guess what?

We aren’t going anywhere.

AI isn’t going anywhere.

So instead of whining, take it as a call to elevate your own writing. Hell, even use assistive AI yourself to produce the best version of your work and compete against the generative slop.

Is it such a terrible thing that someone has always dreamed of writing but doesn’t have the time or resources to express themselves, and AI finally enables them to share that work with the world?

Their idea could become the next Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.

Their stories deserve to be heard.

Just as MAGA is threatened by immigrants becoming part of the electorate, anti-AI purists are threatened by more voices entering the world of writing.

What does that say about their own writing?

As much as it says about writing, it says even more about themselves, their egos, and their character.

But go on.

Continue to disrespect authors.

Continue trying to cancel them.

Continue fanning the flames of the witch hunt.

Some of you seem more passionate about that than your own writing.

All I know is that I am Michael Grayson, and I will share my message in my own way and on my own terms.

Not on the terms of the witch hunters.

Or the Big Five publishers.

But through my LLC, Lightning Shadow Crossroads, and my memoir, Blades of Resurrection.

I encourage you to do the same.

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Read more

As an esophageal cancer survivor and neurodivergent personality raised in poverty, when I found Substack in December of 2025, I finally thought I found an outlet where I could express my authenticity through my writing in its purest form. It brought me together with rad personalities and fellow writers with aspirations and wanting their voice to be heard.

I endeavored for my authorship, and it fueled my motivation to write my memoir, Blades of Resurrection. I wrote a draft of this with a pen. A fucking pen.

I typed multiple versions with no AI assistance whatsoever. I made the decision to use it as a critique tool and for assistance with self-editing and proofreading. I thought, having so many of these drafts, and especially a handwritten draft would show my authenticity as a writer. In addition, I spent thousands of my own dollars having human editors comb through my words as well.

I quickly learned the tendencies of AI, besides the em dashes. How it constantly tells you what things are not in contrast to what they are, toned down emotion, and translated all of that “slop” into my own words again. I’ve spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours at this point preparing the manuscript.

Despite all this, I’ve been hounded and harassed on this site and other social media website even though I’ve been completely transparent on the role that it’s played. Could I have AI generated the pathology of the tumor in my esophagus, a Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor, into my manuscript? A diagnosis that occurs only in one in two million people? Could I have AI generated that I was forced by a weapon as a child to masturbate in front of kids in an alley? Could I have AI generated the pictures of my wife on our wedding day, not knowing how long I would be a husband before I made my wife a widow?

I don’t give a fuck what Substack says.

I don’t give a fuck what Pangram says.

And most of all, I don’t give a fuck what an AI basher says.

Go ahead and attack me. Tell me how lame I am. How I’m not some purest, elitist writer. How I’m somehow less than human. How about when I woke up in the ICU with a breathing tube right after my surgery, scarred with PTSD with no pain medication or sedation for hours. How fucking human does that make me. Go ahead and say my memoir wont amount to anything because I entered my own words into the software. I’m going to be okay financially regardless. I’m a registered nurse. I probably make more in one year of nursing than you ever will in your writing. I have a six-figure net worth with lots of insurance for my wife if I die. If you feel the need to bash me or others, you will go on to live your same, pathetic fucking life, demeaning people on how they choose to utilize AI just to stoke your fragile egos. I’ll continue to live my life, and I will spread my words, and my authenticity.

I don’t care how many subscribers this article makes me lose. I don’t care that this doesn’t appear professional for someone establishing a brand. There’s a legal name for accusing someone of AI generated writing without definitive proof. It’s called slander and libel. I bet this AI scanner will stand on Substack until the account that has multiple paid subscribers files a lawsuit because the anti AI crowd comes for them. Or better yet, a famous person who says someone’s article was AI generated and then ends up owning their house.

Did I use AI? Yes as one small part of a much more extensive process using ASSISTIVE not GENERATIVE AI. I also used a pen. I also used a keyboard. I also employed human editors and human graphic designers. I also paid beta readers. I also gave the lower two-thirds of my esophagus and the upper third of my stomach so I could be alive to write these words. I spent two months without a morsal of real food being fed by a machine.

YOU DO NOT TELL ME HOW I WRITE MY STORY.

I’ve shed ink, countless hours, blood, trauma and grief into Blades of Resurrection. I’m posting the picture of the beginning of that handwriting clearly in the article picture for you all to see. If you have a holier than thou “NO AI” opinion, shove it up your ass without lube and find my unsubscribe or block button.

End rant.

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“You’re not a real writer.”

“You’re a thief!”

“I won’t support any part of your work.”

All things I have encountered in a vehement anti-AI community. Though there is a profound difference between generative AI and assistive AI, that distinction makes no difference to some people. Assistive AI accounts for only a fraction of my process for Blades of Resurrection. I’ve wrestled with whether to reveal this at all because I’m honestly apprehensive about the witch hunts and how some within the authorship community treat those who use AI to even find a typo.

However, I also believe in full transparency in the age of AI tools. If I’m going to ask readers to trust my memoir, I believe they deserve to know exactly how it was created.

This is a direct quote from my Author’s Disclaimer that, after much debate, I decided would provide full disclosure of my process.

This memoir originated as a handwritten, multi-chapter manuscript and was refined through numerous revisions and editorial collaboration. The narrative, reflections, and lived experiences presented herein are the author’s own. No generative AI was used to create or write the manuscript. Assistive AI was used solely as an editorial tool during portions of the self-editing process, with all substantive revisions, editorial decisions, and final wording determined by the author and multiple human editors.

The cover concept and creative direction originated with the author. Generative AI imagery was used only to produce preliminary visual references that informed the work of human artists and graphic designers. No AI-generated imagery appears in the final cover artwork.

Now, you entirely have the choice to agree or disagree with my writing process. However, what I will not tolerate is anyone insulting or demeaning that process. Maybe this doesn’t make me a “real” writer in your eyes. I wholeheartedly support you having that opinion regarding my work. I will remain respectful of you, as long as you respect me.

However, if you demean the effort I have put into Blades of Resurrection, you will find my block button. This extends to anyone attacking any of my fellow writers in this community.

What I can promise you is that my experience is my own. I’ll tell you exactly how I came to this community, how I started writing, and my entire process. If I am still not a “real” writer in your eyes, find my block button.

It was Fall 2025, and I was back to work as a nurse, in full swing, over a year after having life-altering surgery for a rare cancer. My pathology was so rare that only one in two million people are diagnosed. That surgery, the esophagectomy, involved severing the lower two-thirds of my esophagus and the upper portion of my stomach, reconnecting them so I could eat again. The procedure required incisions in my right flank and mid-abdomen, collapsing my right lung, and a surgeon carefully weaving around my heart and primary blood vessels. While successful, the recovery was profoundly traumatic.

To put into perspective how life-changing this surgery is, many people never return to work afterward. I had swathes of people online telling me to resign from nursing or find a career outside of bedside care. Before the surgery, I had tied my entire identity to my nursing career, arising from neurodivergence, poverty, and the loss of both of my parents—my father at three years old and my mother at thirty-two.

In the summer of 2025, I began engaging in a shadow work program. It got me looking at the root causes of why I had persistent, lingering feelings of shame and unworthiness. I started addressing those root causes, producing a profound stillness and objective sense of truth and sovereignty I had never experienced before.

While many—indeed, the majority—of my work colleagues were incredibly supportive during this process, there were a select few who made it clear they felt my work performance was substandard. Unfortunately, those individuals were in positions of power, influence, and authority over me. I attempted to address these concerns and was gaslit each time. I experienced a profoundly humiliating episode of bullying from one of these individuals, and I reached my “I’ve had it” moment. I resigned and found another job.

Upon leaving that position, I experienced a surge of energy and creativity unlike anything I had before. I never realized how much energy these individuals had been draining from me. Twelve-hour shifts plus preventative chemotherapy certainly didn’t help the fatigue, but those factors remained in place while my newfound inspiration did as well.

So I picked up a pen, and this gave birth to the first handwritten pages of Blades of Resurrection. A spiritual vision, along with the surgical scalpel, prompted the title of the memoir.

First, in January, I transposed those handwritten drafts and significantly reordered events into chronological order. I found this helped form a complete narrative arc of my life. This typing occurred entirely without any AI assistance whatsoever.

Next, I completed a general proofread using only the editorial tools in Microsoft Word—again, no AI at this point.

What I did next was ask AI to evaluate my work chapter by chapter for critique and suggestions, never asking it to explicitly write the words for me. I thoughtfully read the feedback, implemented suggestions in my own wording, and often improved upon those concepts. I found that AI frequently sparked even more ideas within me, strengthening the manuscript further. I completed this form of self-revision tediously for about a month before establishing relationships with professional editors.

At each stage of the editing process, I went through the drafts again with my editors’ suggested revisions and then sought AI input on the strength of those revisions. At this point, I have over twenty versions of Blades of Resurrection saved on my laptop. I have undergone developmental editing and line editing and will still undergo copy editing and professional proofreading—all performed by humans.

The reason I chose this process was twofold. First and foremost, I wrote Blades of Resurrection as a declaration of my own sovereignty after living for decades in the shadow of unworthiness. I didn’t write it for people with polarized opinions about AI.

Secondly, I firmly believe there are people out there who need to hear the message contained in those words. If I can communicate more clearly in a way that’s fully and authentically me, then I’m going to do that. I have found this process elevates my work to the best and highest level possible.

How high am I aiming?

Let’s just say I’m aiming for a goal that’s never been accomplished by an independent author.

Since I am being so blunt, I will also admit that Michael Grayson is a pen name and not my legal name. It is a registered DBA under my LLC, Lightning Shadow Crossroads. This is to keep my writing and professional nursing careers separate. It is also to protect the identities of individuals and organizations in my story because my own perspective is neither perfect nor infallible.

After being extensively bullied in childhood and throughout my own career, I am not going to tolerate being bullied by any author, writer, or reader who says my limited, fully disclosed use of assistive AI somehow undermines their writing. You have every right not to support my work because of it.

Go ahead and unsubscribe. Block me.

However, I am setting a boundary against anyone belittling me because of it.

I will not entertain you. I will not appease you. And I will not feel shame for the hundreds of hours I have put into Blades of Resurrection and my other writing.

I am a cancer survivor, and I am not spending any more of the life I have left letting anyone convince me that I am a lesser version of myself.

And that's what Blades of Resurrection is all about.

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P.S: This is the final cover for Blades of Resurrection :)

You use fear to motivate

A façade of your perfection.

All an excuse to hate

From your lies and projection.

What is it that you seek

To be always right?

You try to make me meek

From your reflections fright.

Do you expect me to fold,

Relinquishing all my power?

How could you be so bold,

Demanding I cry and cower?

Should I fear your wrath,

Bend the knee, kiss the boot?

Or walk my own path

And make your point moot

Does that make you feel tough?

As I find my faith within

To call out your bluff

And bring reckoning to your sin

A human is to error

A fatal path we follow

Taking advantage of our terror

Forcing us to swallow

One fact remains inside

Your twisted humand mind

A muse in which you hide

The repugnancy of your kind

I will not bend down

To your thoughts, your scum

I’ll reclaim my crown

To the beat of my drum.

Catering to your approval

Burdening me with your shame

Will result in your removal

Feelings aren’t a fucking game

Now I’ve laid the boundary

A fortress from your clout

Your words a merely arbitrary

What were they even about?

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There is little that creates more tension in authorship today than the presence of AI. Some are adamantly against any use of it. Others embrace it openly. The polarity of these opinions has led to witch hunts, shaming, and ostracizing writers and authors.

I have used AI to assist in my writing, but never before first typing or handwriting the subject matter myself. Even so, I have identified common trends in the way AI writes. To me, the issue isn’t simply whether AI is used, but how it is used and how frequently. That distinction can either dilute or distill the quality of your writing.

If you choose to use AI as an editing or brainstorming tool, here are a few observations to help ensure it enhances your writing rather than diminishes it.

1) Em Dashes: Make “Em” Count

From the early days of ChatGPT, one of the most recognizable signs of AI-generated writing was excessive use of em dashes. Ironically, what was once a perfectly normal literary device has become something many writers now avoid altogether for fear of being labeled “AI.”

When used well, em dashes can create smooth transitions, add context, or interrupt a sentence in a way that feels natural. They are especially useful when an idea is difficult to express cleanly within a single sentence.

In my own writing, becoming more aware of em dashes has actually helped me use them intentionally. However, when used excessively, they interrupt the rhythm of creative writing and often encourage unnecessary description. Through professional line editing, I’ve learned that the same point can frequently be made with fewer words.

In this manner, I don’t think AI has ruined the em dash. Rather, it has created a new cultural trend surrounding it. A punctuation mark that once passed largely unnoticed is now scrutinized as a potential sign of AI authorship. Like any literary device, the issue isn’t the tool itself—it’s whether it’s used with intention and restraint.

2) Identify the Words AI Loves to Use for You—and Scrutinize Them

There are countless lists online of words people claim are “AI words,” as if they should never appear in human writing. I don’t think that’s a productive approach.

Instead, pay attention to the words AI repeatedly inserts into your writing.

For me, I’ve noticed it frequently suggests words like quietly, shifted, loosened, tightened, and lingered. None of these words are inherently bad. The problem is repetition.

Once you identify those habits, pull out a thesaurus, rephrase the sentence, or simply ask whether the word is even necessary. If you’re writing literary prose, consider creating a personal “word graveyard”—a list of words you’ve overused that deserve extra scrutiny. A good editor can help identify these patterns.

3) It’s Not Human, It’s AI

One of AI’s favorite rhetorical constructions is the classic, “It’s not this, it’s that.” While this can be an effective literary device when used sparingly, AI tends to lean on it far more often than most human writers.

When repeated throughout a piece, it not only makes the writing feel artificial, but can also give the impression that you don’t trust your reader to arrive at the intended conclusion. Like any literary technique, its effectiveness depends on restraint. Save it for the moments when you truly want the contrast to carry weight.

4) Too Many Short, Punchy Paragraphs

AI loves short paragraphs. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. A single sentence or phrase can deserve its own paragraph because it creates emphasis, rhythm, or emotional impact.

Younger generations often prefer this faster, more segmented style, while older generations tend to be more comfortable with longer, more developed paragraphs. Neither approach is inherently better. Know your audience and write accordingly.

Personally, I prefer a combination of both. Like the em dash, make the short paragraphs count. They are most effective when they draw attention to an important idea, not when every other sentence is isolated for emphasis. You probably don’t need as many as AI recommends.

5) Don’t Let AI Flatten Your Emotional Intensity

This is the biggest one.

I want my writing to reflect the essence and aura of who I really am. Writing is one of the primary ways I express emotion and make meaning of my experiences. AI, by its nature, often defaults toward neutrality. It softens language, smooths rough edges, and frequently rewrites emotional passages to be more agreeable, appeasable, and less polarizing. AI can make you sound like a simp writer if you’re not careful.

Fuck that.

When working with AI, I often tell it explicitly not to tone down or flatten my emotional intensity. Emotion is not a flaw in writing; it is often what gives writing its power. Your passion, convictions, grief, humor, and even your imperfections are what separate your work from something generic.

Protect those qualities.

In Summary

This isn’t meant to be a moral argument about the ethics of AI. Like any tool, it has strengths and weaknesses. I’ve simply highlighted a few of the weaknesses I’ve observed through my own writing process.

Be careful to let AI demonstrate a better version of you through your writing—not a watered-down version of you. Let it sharpen your voice, not replace it.

Readers don’t fall in love with polished writing. They fall in love with authentic voices. Use AI to polish your voice—not to become someone else’s.

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Stunt Mole is written by William Slayton, MD, a pediatric oncologist. It is a memoir beginning in early childhood and ending in young adulthood that explores how an early identity and reputation for boldness can become precarious when a child doesn’t yet fully understand the world. Without giving away too many plot details, here is my synopsis and impression.

Slayton earns the nickname Stunt Mole through childhood play and harmless mischief. He quickly discovers the social value of performing daring, mildly mischievous feats. Wanting to live up to this reputation, he eventually finds himself pressured by older neighborhood children into situations that cross the threshold of childhood innocence. This culminates in a traumatic incident that instills a deep sense of shame. When he later opens up to his parents about what happened, he experiences even greater feelings of shame and discomfort.

Without a healthy outlet to process these emotions, they remain buried and eventually manifest as panic attacks. Despite carrying this hidden burden, a new version of the Stunt Mole begins to emerge through creative expression. Leatherworking, music, choir, and sports become therapeutic outlets that help him build confidence and meaningful social connections. Yet beneath these accomplishments, the unresolved shame continues to shape his life, making him hesitant to pursue romantic relationships.

It is not until a profound spiritual experience during a school break trip to Hawaii that he begins confronting the deeper roots of this shame. Through meditation, mindfulness, and an evolving spiritual perspective, Slayton gradually learns to integrate these painful experiences rather than remain defined by them. As a result, he eventually becomes capable of entering a healthy and meaningful romantic relationship during the latter part of his undergraduate years.

One aspect I would have enjoyed exploring further is Slayton’s internal process of healing. While the memoir introduces meditation and reflective practice as important turning points, it would be fascinating to hear him discuss in greater depth exactly how those practices helped him dismantle years of shame. Likewise, I would be interested to know how these same practices continue to serve him today in the emotionally demanding field of pediatric oncology. I believe those reflections could make for an excellent follow-up article—or perhaps even another book.

Overall, Stunt Mole offers a raw and deeply personal look at how early childhood experiences can profoundly shape the developing psyche. It also serves as an important reminder to parents of the value of teaching healthy boundaries and emotional openness from an early age. More broadly, it is a thoughtful memoir for anyone seeking to better understand—and ultimately overcome—feelings of shame, fear, or unworthiness through creativity, mindfulness, and personal growth.

If you’re interested in reading Stunt Mole, you can find it here:
https://www.amazon.com/STUNT-MOLE-Midwestern-Mindfulness-Depression/dp/B0GFDHCZ5G

If you enjoy the book, consider subscribing to William Slayton’s writing to follow his continuing journey and future work.

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One in six men are assaulted or abused.
We both were. We are the one in six. This collaborative haiku is about the process of victim to survivor to victor. It ends with sovereignty.

Fresh laughter pours forth,

from the hearts untouched by guilt,

free from all remorse.

Apathy, empty,

no reason to even care,

when they destroy lives

My feeble psyche,

caught in utter disbelief,

insane requiem.

Just what happened to…

How could it occur like this?

I thought I was safe

My naivety,

the glaring wound now revealed,

the heart of a child

All my trust and hope,

my young, childlike beliefs,

devastated me.

Held to what standards,

I keep chasing some phantoms,

that offer no peace.

Moment redefines,

my thoughts, brain, faith, and body —

it’s been long enough.

Reckoning my soul,

no longer will idle,

purpose now brought forth

Know what I must do,

so it won’t happen again,

and keep others safe.

Wrath knows no such bounds,

silent no more; I rise up,

in true sovereignty.

You will hear me now,

I’ve got a speaker and mic,

and keyboard as well.

Truth negates my fear,

not cowering in shadows,

my words will remain.

It won’t be easy,

for any of us,

no more men in shame

Worthy of my voice,

my remaining story shows,

I won’t play your game.

I’ll tell what I know,

I won’t make it easy either,

only all the facts.

My life is my own,

not your projection of lies,

I write my own acts.

This is a difficult topic to write about. Please leave a comment and restack.

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I’m published. Please consider buying my book. I wrote it in real time from my phone while I was in Colombia, while my marriage and life were falling apart, and while I was so ill I wasn’t sure I would make it.

Too Soon et pero Too Late: French Grace. American Collapse. Colombian Care.

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