AI Summary
5 min readIn 1983, when Song was eight years old and living in Atlanta with his father, he attended a strict Muslim school for one year. One day during mosque, a teacher brought three girls to the front of the school to perform a song they had written praising Allah. Song and two friends noticed one of the girls had a nervous tick—rapid eye blinking—and they started laughing and imitating her. A teacher caught them and, as punishment, made them stand up and perform the song themselves while imitating the girl’s tick in front of the entire school. “I remember looking at her and she was crying,” Song says. “And she was crying while we were singing it.” Afterward, the boys were beaten with a large paddle that had holes drilled into it “so that there would be less wind reduction.”
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:13) **Episode Opening & Song’s Karmic Setup** - Stevie Lane introduces Song, who believes his life is ruled by cause and effect and that his fate was sealed by a single event in 1983.
- 2 (08:00) **The Onset of Tourette’s Syndrome** - Song reveals he has severe Tourette’s syndrome, and his first tics—facial twitches and eye-blinking—began right after the incident in 1983.
- 3 (13:22) **The Unshakable Guilt** - As an adult, Song is haunted by the belief that his Tourette’s is karmic punishment for mocking the girl, despite knowing it’s irrational.
- 4 (17:03) **The Search Begins** - Stevie Lane takes on the seemingly impossible task of finding the “singing girl” after 40 years, with only the name of the school: Sister Clara Mohammed.
- 5 (23:36) **A Two-Year Dead End** - Despite reaching the close-knit community of the tiny school, no one—not even the Imam—remembers the incident or the girl.
- 6 (30:27) **The Memory Distortion Theory** - A psychologist explains that people often warp memories to make sense of trauma, suggesting Song may have invented parts of the story to explain his Tourette’s.
- 7 (31:21) **The Stand-In Solution** - Inspired by the film *Rental Family*, Stevie proposes finding a stand-in—someone with Tourette’s—so Song can make his apology by proxy.
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Show Notes
When Songe was 8 years old, he made fun of a girl with a facial tic. Just months later, he developed tics of his own—the first signs of the Tourette Syndrome he still lives with today. It felt like cosmic punishment. Songe has wanted to apologize to the girl ever since.
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