Hello Amethyst Angel š¼   . Thank you for entering this month's contest.
As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Talk to Me"  . You finished second in this month's contest.
 Did you answer the question?
Your answer was very personal and showed how it was difficult for you to communicate with others. You identified and shared the obstacles between you and a real conversation.
Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?
This was a very unique and soulful response that evoked empathy and feeling in the reader. You spoke from your heart.
How consistent was your argument?
Since you are the person communicating, sharing the walls within yourself seemed like a sincere and authentic way to tackle the question. I did not feel you arrived at a conversation with God in this piece. It was more like a conversation about the possibility of doing that, shared with a therapist, with an AI, or with the readers of this contest in a piece of writing.
My thoughts on the substance of what you said
This was a very personal response to the question, and my immediate response was a flashback to an experience I had last week. I was talking with some German colleagues at work over lunch in German. My German is far from perfect, and I am culturally British. I often think in English and simply translate my thoughts into German, but sometimes the linguistic structures and culture do not allow for that, so there is considerable room for misunderstanding. I shared the fact that I did not have a car right now and did all my shopping by bicycle. There was a pause, dead silence and everyone stared at me like I was oversharing, a moron and culturally inept all at the same time. I am pretty thick-skinned, and so I continued babbling on and even had them laughing at some of my jokes, but afterwards I reflected on the experience and realised that they found what I said immensely awkward. I live in a car culture. Germans make some of the best cars in the world, and my colleagues all use cars to see customers. I do not need a car - they do. Much of my work experience is with remote connections, and public transport here is excellent. Maybe also the way I had said it made it too much for the Germans. British guys share their hearts on their sleeves with total strangers whose names they do not remember the following day. It is a friendly culture where you can make jokes with strangers and then move on to someone else. But Germans have a stricter work-life separation, and at work, they talk about personal stuff differently and are more reluctant to share with people who will repeat their stories. I have found them more cliquey with clearly defined sets of friends, often a group they have had all their lives. I find that too restrictive and a little stuffy; it is something I have never adjusted to and will probably never completely understand or respect. That said, it infringes on the possibility of genuine communication. Your essay felt to me like a British person talking and was a refreshing breath of air after too many German conversations last week.
Concretely, I analysed your essay based on its identification of the communication barriers and looked to find the solutions you seemed to propose to that. As I went through these, I was waiting for you to provide the answers, but you never articulated any. So my response to your thoughts is to provide some Christian-oriented answers to the questions you posed. The difficulties were:
1) Fear of speaking based on a feeling that your voice may sound silly, and being afraid of people's reactions.
Both love and arrogance can overcome fear. Pride struts into conversations like a bull in a China shop and tramples on everyone else in it. Love listens and speaks to the other person. If you love someone, you will talk to them, listen to their ways, and learn from them. I have been both an arrogant bull and a lover in my time - love is the better way.
2) The yearning to be understood and to connect with another human being. Someone who gets you, hears you, and likes you.
3) Going with the flow rather than genuine sharing. Being what others want in the conversation rather than being you.
4) A rich inner life and a love of writing, which allows you to build your inner cities and to live off their stories.
5) A more profound outlook than many of your peers. What you blurt is only a tiny part of a much larger worldview that would take time to explain to another. You don't think in soundbites.
Maybe you need to choose a better audience. You are quite intelligent and a profound thinker. Shallow people will never get you so why hang around with them? A book club, a bible group, or a discussion group might be a better place to learn to talk again. Or indeed a writer's forum like this one, where your thoughts are gratefully appreciated and your writing accepted as the best kind of communication.
6) Trouble hearing and seeing the other person. Too much of yourself gets in the way.
There was zero evidence in your essay that you ever really listened to anyone else, except maybe your mother, but the stories you shared from her were also about you. Maybe you could experiment with more dialogues in your stories between characters that are incompatible, with divergent world views, and where the miracle is that any words can be shared at all. The stories are then not monologues from an introverted mind but rather dialogues with different kinds of possibility and people, a clash of inner universes in a storm of explosive exchanges. Also, reviewing other people's work is a good way to consider an alternative perspective on reality.
When it comes to God, He utterly transcends all of us. Speaking with Him will always be a trip into an alien world (and I am not just talking German levels of strangeness here!). His otherness is disturbing and awkward in a way that overthrows our confidence in ourselves and leads us to trust Him and His ways. His presence, power and personality can all be overwhelming if we forget His love for us and His profound understanding of all our ways. Knowing what He has commanded, doing what He says is a key to developing a personal relationship with Him. First, we obey and then we love as we grow deeper into the mystery of the Divine. Using the Lord's prayer, the creeds and liturgies that Christians have developed over millennia are a good way to begin this conversation as we relearn what is important and learn a different language than our own with which to communicate.
I was interested in your perspective on ChatGPT. The AI would have given you structure and pertinent points to focus on, and a summary of the human approaches to the question. But all that seems abstract compared to the approach you took here. The AI way would not have engaged with your struggles in coming out of your cave in the first place to speak, it would not have given you a reason to share, nor a reason to believe that the other person cared at all about what you said.
I am truly grateful for your sharing, but it seems to be only a first step in the right direction. The direction is another person and God, and real conversation is not possible without them. I would hope that you would not hide this item but develop it to complete the story it tells. That story is waiting for real-life choices to be completed.
Mechanical issues
Very well written.
Thanks again for entering.
LightinMind 
"My Philosophy of Rating and Reviewing"
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