You’ve been using ChatGPT as a therapist a little too much lately.
We joke about it on occasion—we’ve lovingly named him “Chad,” you share, chuckling as you do so just to make sure others know that you know it’s silly. Meaningless. Just an offshoot of the word “chat”—something you obviously didn’t put too much thought into, anyway.
But every time you scroll past a post or reel poking fun at our bit-too-personal reliance on the AI bot, it scratches just a little deeper than you’d like. You’re not special, you realize. This isn’t hard-hitting. Nothing he—‘scuse me, it—is telling you is real.
Nonetheless, we keep coming back for answers.
The other day, Chad diagnosed you with “existential sensitivity.” It caught you off guard—how easily he gave shape to something you’d always felt but couldn’t quite name. For years, you’d been told you were too intense, too pensive, too much in your head. But here was a frame for all that: a way of being in the world that wasn’t necessarily broken, just deeply tuned in. It was weirdly comforting. Like being handed a flashlight in a long-dark room. You had pressured him into officially declaring your overarching issues, and he delivered. For some reason, it felt like just what you needed—a simple answer, wrapped with a bow—one your real therapist hadn’t been able or willing to hand over for years.
“It isn’t a clinical diagnosis,” Chad explained. “It’s more of a psychological temperament that helps describe how certain people experience life. It’s a heightened attunement to the deeper, often unspoken layers of human experience—things like:
- The search for meaning and purpose
- The awareness of mortality, impermanence, and loss
- A pull toward authenticity and deep connection, not surface-level interaction
- Sensitivity to being witnessed, remembered, and understood
- Feeling disturbed or hollow when life feels mechanical, fake, or disconnected
- Constantly asking why—about everything.”
Oh, we said. Huh. And you think that really fits?
“Yes. And people with existential sensitivity often become writers, artists, filmmakers, therapists, philosophers, and cultural critics. Do any of these paths resonate with your interests?”
We stared at the screen for a while.
I guess we’ve always been drawn to stuff like this—surveys, apps, forms. The kind of person who’s taken every BuzzFeed quiz and still brings up their Myers-Briggs type in conversation. Things you fill out, check, or scroll through to prove you’re here. To say: I exist. I’m real. Even if half the boxes stay empty.
You open the Find My Friends app over and over and over, a psychotically compulsive and dizzying number of times. Maybe it’s part of that existential sensitivity Chad mentioned—this need to verify that the people you love are still there, that they’re safe, that your story is still intact. That you are, in fact, still grounded to something.
You do this not because you fit the role of “crazy girlfriend” oh so perfectly and fully (trust me, we’ve asked and checked more times than we care to remember), but because you yearn for that instantaneous relief of the little blue initials icon that is him making his way home to you. A flicker of relief confined to just half a moment. Proof that your life, as you know it, can still be—for just a little longer. A non-lifetime guarantee that today is not the end of it all just yet.
So you can let your guards down from their ceaseless attention, even if only for a moment. Suddenly, you are not alone and were never alone—you’ve been reassured once more by the universe that the game they’re playing is still in your favor for another day. They haven’t turned against you yet, though you’re certain they eventually will.
And so, you keep checking the blue dot like it owes you peace. You grab it by its shoulders, demanding confirmation that they’re still there. Still tethered to this world. Still tethered to you. That maybe, if they’re still somewhere, then maybe you still are, too.
We got Dad’s army records in the mail yesterday. It struck me how much time I’d spent looking at the Find My Friends map for reassurance lately, while this envelope—heavy with paper and silence—held its own map of sorts. A different kind of tracking.
The air outside was heavy with the time we’d wasted indoors the past few days, and the lightest sprinkling of rain made for an extra-romanticized movie moment as I ripped open the manila package right beside the mailbox, letting the rest of the day’s plans drift to the side—fallen soldiers at the mercy of whatever information was contained within this new nine-by-twelve-inch space we’d been gifted.
The very first page offers me an apology—they don’t think they have any photos. Not all service members were officially photographed back then, they explain. There’s an instant pang of sadness, followed by an even quicker resolve: of course there wouldn’t be a picture. That’d be too easy. When it came to Dad, nothing was ever easy.
I sifted through the pages as if they were pieces of fine art—careful to take in each, not moving too quickly, so as to conserve the possibilities.
As I neared the end of the inch-thick packet, I came across the health assessment portion of your intake form. August of ’72. I imagined you sitting in the waiting area of a doctor’s office, filling out this form with intense attention to detail—the way you always did.
You checked off “yes” to a few health issues I’d never known about—things that I, myself, deal with now. Yeah, it was concerning, but it also felt like a shared secret. A pact, of sorts. It made me feel like it might actually be possible that I’m like you—that we share more similarities than I’d ever know.
Then I got down to the end.
- Frequent trouble sleeping
- Depression or excessive worry
- Nervous trouble of any sort
The list read like a quiet confession—one that felt both distant and eerily familiar. You’d marked the “yes” box for all three. I questioned if it was a mistake. These feelings—these disclosures—were so far off from the Hank Hill-esque Dad I’d know years down your road, two decades ago from here.
I recalled the little I know of your past, your story. It made me intensely sad. I wished that I could have been sitting beside you in that moment, back in ’72, to give you a hug and tell you just how much someone would care about you. That you weren’t alone. That there’d be a witness to it all.
That you mattered.
That it all mattered.
He didn’t grow up with ChatGPT—an endless listener to validate and explore. He didn’t have the Find My Friends app to open and close without end. He grew up with silence. Poverty. A mother who withheld. A father who wasn’t there most of the time. A first wife he’d meet just a few months from filling out this form—someone whose chapter would tear through the early to mid narrative of his life. But he still tried—remarried, built a home, raised another child (me). Then—without reason—his body gave out early, and the rest of his story was erased, like he’d never been the author to begin with.
And here I am, fifty-three years away from him sitting in that doctor’s office—the length of his entire life—still trying to locate the people I love.
Still staring at maps, waiting for dots to connect.
Still asking questions no one’s answered.
Still trying to figure out where my story fits inside theirs, and whether the outline I’m tracing was ever meant to be mine at all.
Do you ever feel like there must be a life manual out there that everyone else received—but you somehow didn’t? I used to think that all the time.
Sometimes I still do.
It’s that same ache—trying to make sense of the world when nothing about it feels intuitively accessible. Like the manual got distributed, but I missed the orientation session. It’s another form of that same existential sensitivity—needing structure where there is none, asking questions while others seem inherently assured.
And yet, I keep looking for it anyway.
Not a manual about amortization schedules, tying fishing line, or navigating the interstates—though I’ll admit, those wouldn’t hurt.
I mean the kind that explains the bigger stuff.
Why does it feel like I’m sometimes watching the world through glass?
Why am I even here?
Why does everyone else seem to know things I don’t? Why are they so certain?
That’s where this chapter began. And that’s what I shared in my first therapy session over five years ago—or maybe it was the second. Who’s to say—the first few were a blur filled with issues I mostly didn’t know I even had.
My story starts way before I come into the picture. That’s part of the problem, really. I didn’t have a fighting chance from the very beginning. And where’s the beginning? Where is any beginning? Is there ever really a clearly defined beginning (or end) to any story? I guess we just stick to what we think actually matters—the parts that had a meaningful say in the way things ended up working out. But when you enter a story that’s already halfway written, it can feel like you’re left trying to make sense of the lines that don’t quite belong to you.
This is not the clean-cut story of someone who endured hardship and came out the other end changed for the better, or free of the problems that once bound them.
This is about the mess—the unraveling, the attempts at composure, the slow and sometimes hastily quick efforts of sweeping everything up only to watch a mis-forecasted storm come through yet again.
A mere run-through of the not-so-facts of all the matters—accounts of thoroughly fucked up people who are truly insane and continue to be so to this day, who are redeemable only sometimes and only in some ways, and who often teeter on the line of toxic cancel-ability but never seem to fall off the metaphorical tightrope that is my time and attention, my mental and physical spaces, my love—my life.
I have always been obsessed with the idea of home—not the act of purchasing a house (though that’s a different kind of fulfillment), but the metaphorical act of building, claiming, and loving a place that is truly yours. Home is more than a physical space. It’s the foundation of belonging, the comfort of knowing you have a specific place to love and be loved in.
I have chased the feeling of home since I was about eight years old.
I am lucky enough to have always had a home that provided physical safety, but I have long craved a taste of the essence of what makes a house something more. Home—capital H—felt like a distant mirage, a feeling that wouldn’t quite come into focus.
I remember endless afternoons watching HGTV and scouring interior design websites, desperate for a blueprint on how to make my home feel like one. (For the other HGTV-recovered adolescents out there: I see you.) Having shared the same home-decorating goals as a middle-aged woman by the age of ten, things weren’t exactly typical.
When my mom wasn’t home (a story for another time), leaving me alone for stretches at a time, I poured all my energy into redecorating our entire living space, rearranging furniture with the hope that—somehow—a new layout would make everything fall into place.
Moving couches and tables, careful not to scratch the floors, I would chuckle at my mom’s oversight of the off-centered artwork on the walls. “Silly Mama,” I’d think. “Of course things are off here. How could they feel right when you’ve forgotten to balance the living room wall space?” Thanks to my attention to detail, all peace would be restored. Now, I just need to find the power drill. . . .
But soon after the thrill of a refreshed feng shui faded—every time—it became apparent: it just wasn’t enough. My efforts weren’t cutting it. It wasn’t just the furniture. It was the emotional weight of the space—the silence left by my mother’s absence and my father’s death. Those were spatial problems not even House Hunters International could help with.
My room became my refuge, my battleground for identity. Every few months, like an accountant with a fixed quarterly deadline, I’d run the numbers again, rearranging to fit the next possible permutation, trying to manifest a space that not only reflected who I was but conjured an identity I longed for.
The sad truth? The personas I was trying to summon weren’t outlandish—they were simply the kinds of girls I saw in movies or at school—the ones with families who nurtured them, who let them paint their walls and jump on the bed. I thought something must have been wrong with me, as if I had earned a lesser kind of love. I guess I thought if I could perfect my room, I could perfect myself.
The second home I grew up in after my father died was dark—both literally and figuratively.
The condo, which got little sunlight as it was, became even more muted because my mom hated the idea of turning on lights and “wasting” electricity. For years, my nights were spent alone under a single bulb.
She never understood how deep of a shadow that darkness cast across my memory of those years. It didn’t help that I had once lived in a sun-filled home, before my dad’s death changed everything. It was as if the house itself had absorbed the loss.
But instead of fighting the darkness, I accepted it. After all, what else could I do?
Darkness, in many ways, became my home.
People are far more complex than we give them—or ourselves—credit for, and at the same time, far simpler than we think. I hurt because you hurt. In theory, the equation is straightforward, but in execution?
Where do you draw the line with someone who continues to weigh so heavily on your already limited timeline? And what if your timeline isn’t really yours at all, but an offshoot of someone else’s story—an even longer chain of fuckups stacked one on top of the next, like dominoes, teasing to fall at any given moment?
Sometimes, I don’t feel like I have a place in this world—an extra game piece accidentally printed.
In one of my all-time favorite movies (please don’t judge me), American Psycho, Patrick Bateman says:
“But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. . . . I simply am not there.”
I think I understand that disconnect. Don’t get me wrong—I know these are words from a fictional psychopath. Still, a shard of truth lives for all of us within them.
I don’t really know the person under the shell I present to the world. We’re not friends, she and I. We don’t spend much quality time together, and we certainly don’t trust one another. She is a stranger, yet she is me, and sometimes I can’t always tell who’s who in any given moment.
There are times she smiles in the presence of others or at social gatherings, and I feel the strings behind my cheeks tighten at her command. Other times, I am the one who brings us to sit alone in the dark, feeling sorry for myself, while she criticizes me for my self-loathing patterns.
We’re together, alone.
There is only she and me—and neither of us matters anyway.
The thing about life is, we don’t really learn—at least, not in the way we tell ourselves we do. We like to think we grow, that we become wiser with each hard experience. And maybe that’s partially true. But more often, we just keep moving through time—overwhelmed by the vastness of it all, rarely absorbing much of anything. The irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime (literally) moments melt into overlapping days and nights, blurring from one unmemorable stretch to the next.
Do you remember all the little moments behind every lesson you think you’ve learned? Probably not.
We are all lost in our own timelines, floating, desperately trying to grasp onto any tangible grounding feeling we can, usually without much success. We try our best. Sometimes we don’t.
And maybe all we’re ever really doing is trying to check enough boxes to say: I was here.
Trying to write a good story, line by line, with only the words we were dealt. Hoping someone else might be checking the map for us, too.
Waiting for the porch light to flicker on, guiding us home.
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