Every single day, it began the identical approach. I logged on to Phrase. I noticed the request from AI: press this button and we’ll draft your give you the results you want with Copilot. I closed my pc, ran my hand by my hair, uncapped my pen and wrote.

After I sit at my desk, palms hovering over the keys, about to sort, 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 nearly 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 sort 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 Now, AI appears to recommend that the function of the creator is out of date.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 put in writing. They encourage us to discover a residence in writing, amongst like-minded artists who needed to undergo by drugs 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 after 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, fully, 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 acquired the correct care, a psychiatrist requested to look in my bra and panties. “I’m your physician,” he informed me. “I must look,” after repeating to me how stunning he thought I used to be, how I would anticipate to see him within the neighborhood, by my home. He made me really feel that I used to be empty, a grimy 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 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 develop into 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 study from.

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

AI might by no means give anybody hope, comfort or affirmation that their voice issues. The truth is, 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 distinguished, it took over Phrase, and I, the one that 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 pc 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 distinguished in winter. Opening a window, I odor 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 steel.

And I notice that this second of peace after the panic is value extra, is far larger, than the project 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 put in writing.

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

Virginia Woolf — the unique exalted madwoman — additionally wrote her first drafts by hand. Based on Ellen Gutoskey of Psychological Floss, Woolf wrote with purple pen, and I think about that after her writing periods, her palms had been coated 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 hearth flashing by 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 objective, my creativity, is sealed to my pores and skin with ink, certain to my soul with blood. Wang, Woolf and I, we’re inventive spirits, and nevertheless AI may progress or come to surpass us, it might by no means possess a spirit untamed. A spirit with intent. It could actually mimic, it might repeat, and weave one thing collectively from already current sources, however it might by no means thrive. It could actually by no means conquer the specter of its personal thoughts.

 Editor’s Word: We’re dedicated to being a platform for writers to debate their particular person course of and their craft by way of 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 mentioned, Hippocampus Journal doesn’t condone, approve, or have fun using generative AI in inventive work, and we’ve a powerful coverage in opposition to accepting and publishing work that’s AI-assisted or generated.