Finding My Voice in Unexpected Places

Dear Rick,

Remember that Saturday morning in your story gym when I sat frozen, unable to think of a single story? Nancy was overflowing with memories while I drew a complete blank. You pushed me to tell a story of betrayal, no prep time, and suddenly a 25 year old memory surfaced. My startup getting funded, the venture capitalist trying to bribe my partner behind my back. Details I hadn't thought of in decades came flooding back, so vivid that listeners could feel the pain through their screens.

Your story gym helped this emotionally blocked engineer become more honestly human. Which is why your essay "Artificial Intelligence Ended My First Marriage" struck me in unexpected ways.

I've had similar breakthroughs with Claude and other AI tools. Just as your spreadsheet helped me mine for stories I didn't know I had, AI helps me excavate thoughts my "synthesizing abstractions" brain struggles to articulate. The same engineer who couldn't access emotions in your workshop now uses AI to untangle what my abstract thinking glosses over.

Your ex-wife's insight, "Your story precedes you," was brilliant. But maybe there's a different story preceding you now? One about AI that mirrors those defensive patterns you've worked to overcome. In your essay, you walked away from difficult conversations with your partner when they triggered you. Now you're walking away from AI because it triggers something else. Perhaps the fear that if everyone can access eloquent expression through technology, your hard-won mastery loses its edge?

You know how orchestras started using curtains during auditions to combat gender bias? Before the curtain, evaluators believed they needed to see the whole performer to assess authentic musicianship. After the curtain, when only the music could be heard, women's participation increased dramatically. What they thought was musical judgment was actually bias.

Maybe we're having that silicon curtain moment with writing. When we don't know whether words come from solitary struggle or collaboration with AI, what's left is the truth of the expression.

I hear your deeper concern though. AI as a buffer against true intimacy. A way to perform empathy without feeling it. To smooth over conflicts without truly engaging. You're right: discovering your partner used AI to craft an apology would feel like betrayal. The struggle to find words IS part of how we show we care. In those sacred moments between two people, the inefficiency matters. The vulnerability of fumbling for expression might be the whole point.

But you're conflating two different uses: avoidance versus articulation.

Using AI to dodge emotional work, to win arguments, to perform feelings we don't have? That's the digital equivalent of walking out the door when triggered. Another escape route. But using AI as a mirror to see our own thoughts more clearly? To excavate feelings we genuinely have but can't express? That's different.

Photography didn't kill painting. It freed painting from the burden of replication. AI doesn't have to kill authentic expression either. It can free us from the burden of perfect eloquence. Let us focus on genuine understanding instead.

Every new technology shifts creative control. Oral poets mastered memory and rhythm. Writers mastered structure and permanence. You've mastered the craft of solitary struggle with words. But maybe the next generation's authenticity won't be measured by that particular struggle. Maybe they'll master dialogue with AI. Not to hide, but to reveal what was always there, waiting to be articulated.

Your gyms run on Zoom. You use spreadsheets and quizzes to systematize authenticity. None of that is "natural." Yet it works. The tool isn't the point. The vulnerability is.

AI helps me the same way. Not with prefab answers but with unexpected connections. Like realizing, as I write this, how you ended your essay with Rumi, borrowing 13th century words for 21st century insights. I've always loved that about your writing. How is this different from what I do with AI? Maybe just our comfort with the source.

I still struggle with 'poetic license.' My engineering brain resists embellishment. But through your story gym, and yes, through AI, I'm learning that authentic details emerge through dialogue and iteration, not through solitary invention.

Our story gyms only exist because of screens. My breakthrough that morning happened not in spite of the framework but was helped by it. Maybe our tools, whether Zoom, spreadsheets, or AI, aren't barriers at all.

I'm not asking you to embrace AI. But some of us are finding our way to honest humanity through it, just as I did through your workshop. The story that precedes AI doesn't have to be fear. For me, it's discovery. Not unlike the one you helped me begin that Saturday morning.

With gratitude,
Chao

p.s. this letter generated by AI em-dash of course!

Thanks to

Rick Lewis

for being such a sport and

Christin Chong, PhD

for your AI odor detector