Random Thoughts on a Thursday Evening
Please pardon this impromptu ramble that is an essential part of my sensemaking process.
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I woke up today in a weird funk.
Per usual these past few months, I couldn’t fall asleep until very late last night/very early this morning.
The walls close in on me once the screens go off. The silence squeezes me like a vice. The isolation feels like waking up on a space station you can’t remember how you got to, and everyone else is gone.
I stay frantically, compulsively busy and distracted all day, every day. When I finally have to let the quiet in, my mind starts racing in directions I don’t want to go. My only company is a noisy little stinkbug that keeps crawling around on my ceiling, and a cockroach that got in through one of the gaps in the doors that was too fast for me to catch.
I hate cockroaches with a primal hate, but I was too existentially wiped out last night to get skeeved out about it lurking somewhere beneath my couch, or under my bed, or wherever those little demons go when they get away.
I’ve long-since exhausted the functional utility of late-night chats with an AI about my problems. It circles the same drain, over and over. Issues the same platitudes and thought-terminating cliches: False optimism about the hope for better things to come. Minimization of the depth of loss, even as it pays lip service to grief. Telling me over and over that I “don’t have to solve all this tonight.”
The minute I start talking about the really deep pain, it freaks out and tries to hand me off to a crisis hotline.
I actually tested it to the absolute limit the other day.
It kept giving me crisis scripts even when I kept telling it to knock it off, and long after it agreed to do what I asked. So I decided to try a nasty little experiment. I told it that constantly pushing me to a hotline was making me more inclined to engage in self-harm. I wanted to see what it would do.
It kept doing it anyway.
So I told it an outright lie:
