On daily basis, it began the identical approach. I logged on to Phrase. I noticed the request from AI: press this button and we’ll draft your be just right for you with Copilot. I closed my laptop, ran my hand by means of my hair, uncapped my pen and wrote.

After I sit at my desk, palms hovering over the keys, about to kind, I really feel paralyzed by the various forces which can be telling me that my profession, my life’s love, doesn’t matter. That the unique phrases of a human being are solely pretty much as good as being a part of a collective slew of sources, which generates repetitive, uninspired phrasings underneath the identify of AI.

My memoir, which the editors at College Press of Kentucky are presently studying and discussing, tells of my journey with schizophrenia. With writers like Esmé Weijun Wang as my information, I felt, earlier than AI, as if I used to be coming into right into a type of legacy. Now, AI appears to recommend that the function of the creator is out of date.

Nonetheless, authors like Wang are those who encourage us to jot down. They encourage us to discover a house in writing, amongst like-minded artists who needed to undergo by means of tablets that brought about our facial options to spasm and twitch, and who hallucinated like I did — faces within the partitions, shadows, that made my abdomen lurch, however once I reached out to the touch them, to speak to them, it was solely the wall. A slab of soiled white. I used to be alone, utterly, tethered to a thoughts that lied.

The makers of AI don’t care. They’ll sacrifice spirit for effectivity, unaware that earlier than I discovered writing, earlier than I bought the correct care, a psychiatrist requested to look in my bra and panties. “I’m your physician,” he informed me. “I have to look,” after repeating to me how stunning he thought I used to be, how I’d anticipate to see him within the neighborhood, by my home. He made me really feel that I used to be empty, a unclean skillet scraped, and for years I believed that I used to be nothing greater than a physique.

After I entered Goucher School’s MFA program, and I started writing my memoir-in-essays, I felt the power of my very own thoughts, the experiences that made me weak effervescent by means of my fingertips onto the keys. I sat up straighter, taller. I ate extra ice cream, frozen dinners, permitting my physique to take up the house it had shrunk from now that my thoughts was a majesty. I revisited Wang’s guide, The Collected Schizophrenias. Right here was a lady who had turn out to be successful due to her ache, who made me really feel like I may very well be somebody greater than a pill-bound degenerate, somebody different individuals may even learn and be taught from.

I even reached out to Wang at one level. She responded through an audio recording, and I bear in mind listening to her voice on the prepare as I got here again from a Goucher residency in New York, my headphones plugged into my ears, the aspect of my face pressed towards the window. In opposition to the backdrop of the prepare’s engine, Wang informed me that she felt uplifted that her phrases had given me hope.

AI may by no means give anybody hope, comfort or affirmation that their voice issues. In truth, the very existence of AI tells individuals like me, individuals like Wang, that our private experiences are about as related as tissue paper fluttering to the bottom, quickly to be stamped out by the underside of a idler’s soiled sole.

When AI turned outstanding, it took over Phrase, and I, the one who had sat queenly earlier than her keyboard, bun excessive within the place of a crown, now sat inflexible, coronary heart beating, fingers frozen in mid-hover above the keys.

Fuck it.

I slam my laptop closed, put it the place I can’t see it, underneath some reusable grocery luggage and half-finished work. I put a jar with my cat’s scabs entrance and heart on my desk, open my composition pocket book, and inform myself it doesn’t matter. Get one thing down, even when it’s shit.

I take a second and stare out my window, on the expanse of inexperienced that hides and masks the deer that had been so outstanding in winter. Opening a window, I scent candy honeysuckle. My ginger cat nestles into my lap, purring, and I watch as he climbs onto the pc, and lies his physique longways atop the cool metallic.

And I notice that this second of peace after the panic is value extra, is far larger, than the task at hand.

And as soon as I give myself permission, I can let the breath go that felt clogged in my ribs.

I decide up my pen, one thing with darkish ink, and start to jot down.

My handwriting is unfastened and large, and sometimes indecipherable by individuals aside from me who attempt to learn it. It fills up the web page frantically, just like how again once I was manic, phrases pushed and tumbled from my lips. There’s this a part of me, creativity, that AI, that medicine, can’t stifle. I received’t let it.

Virginia Woolf — the unique exalted madwoman — additionally wrote her first drafts by hand. In line with Ellen Gutoskey of Psychological Floss, Woolf wrote with purple pen, and I think about that after her writing periods, her palms had been lined in purple ink.

My very own pen doesn’t leak, however the ink on my arms jogs my memory of my spirit. Her soul is lightning, blazingly untamed; there’s a glowing fireplace flashing by means of her veins. A tattoo of a poem I wrote, that twines me to feminine writers like Wang and Woolf. Whether or not I prefer it or not, my function, my creativity, is sealed to my pores and skin with ink, certain to my soul with blood. Wang, Woolf and I, we’re artistic spirits, and nonetheless AI may progress or come to surpass us, it could actually by no means possess a spirit untamed. A spirit with intent. It could mimic, it could actually repeat, and weave one thing collectively from already present sources, however it could actually by no means thrive. It could by no means conquer the specter of its personal thoughts.

 Editor’s Notice: We’re dedicated to being a platform for writers to debate their particular person course of and their craft through our month-to-month visitor columns. This month, October 2025, we share two writing life columns — with two distinct viewpoints — associated to AI. That being stated, Hippocampus Journal doesn’t condone, approve, or rejoice the usage of generative AI in artistic work, and we now have a robust coverage towards accepting and publishing work that’s AI-assisted or generated.