What if?

What if your understanding of the world was shaped by the environment your family created around you?

What if a lot of what you believe about people, relationships, safety, conflict, love, disappointment, and what you can expect from life didn’t come from the world itself, but from the particular world your family created inside of your home?

When you grow up inside of a family system, that system becomes your first model for how life works. Your brain doesn’t know that this is just one household, one group of people, and one set of dynamics. It takes what’s happening around you and begins to build expectations from it.

So if certain things happened over and over again in your family, you may have started to believe that this was simply how people behaved. This was how relationships worked. This was what happened when you spoke up. This was what happened when you needed something. This was what love felt like. This was what you had to prepare yourself for.

Then you move out into the world carrying those expectations with you.

And when you keep running into similar situations, similar people, or similar challenges, it may feel like proof that what you believed was true all along. But what if those situations kept presenting themselves because there was something in you that needed the opportunity to finally stand up, confront the pattern, and respond in a way that you weren’t able to respond when you were still inside of the original family system?

What if the repetition wasn’t there to punish you or prove that the whole world was the same? What if it was giving you opportunities to break the hold that the original pattern still had on you?

Because as long as your family system remains the model your brain is using to understand the whole world, you’re going to keep interpreting life through the limits of that structure. You may continue expecting certain outcomes because those were the outcomes you were trained to expect.

But once you begin to recognize that your family’s way of operating was not the way the whole world operates, something opens up.

You begin to understand that what happened in your family was one system. It was one environment. It was one version of reality.

When you stop using that family system as the blueprint for what life has to be, you become open to possibilities that your brain may never have been trained to imagine. You become open to different types of relationships, different responses, different outcomes, and different ways of being treated. You begin to make room for a world that is much larger than the one you were raised inside of.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it!

I was Anti-AI. Then I had a medical crisis.

When artificial intelligence became available to people outside of the IT world, I had already decided it wasn’t something I was going to explore. I spent seven and a half years in the Army during the 1990s working in information technology, and felt comfortable with what I knew. Computers have always made sense to me. If I wanted to accomplish something on one, I either knew how to do it or could figure it out.

Then I had a medical crisis that changed my life overnight.

I became septic, and my body started shutting down different functions in order to keep me alive. First I collapsed and couldn’t stand back up. Then my hearing was affected. I could hear sounds, but I couldn’t identify what they were. It sounded like there was a giant refrigerator running somewhere inside my head, mixed with the sound of water rushing through the walls. I could see people’s mouths moving, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I couldn’t hear my own voice either. The people around me told me I was talking loudly, but I couldn’t hear myself, and that was terrifying. Eventually I lost the use of my hands, and slipped in and out of delirium for months.

When I woke up from the delirium, I was told that I had suffered significant brain damage and that recovery would take time. The first estimate I received was between two and four years. So I got to work. Physical therapy, occupational therapy and learning to read lips became my job. People used whiteboards to communicate with me until I became good enough at reading lips to carry on conversations again. As my hands have gotten stronger and I’ve been able to walk farther, my hearing has slowly improved as well. My ENT believes they’re all connected to the same neurological injury, so every improvement gives me hope that more recovery is still ahead of me.

When I woke up, I also realized that every hobby I loved depended on abilities I didn’t have anymore.

I’ve always been a writer. I couldn’t hold a pen. I couldn’t comfortably use the touchscreen on my phone or tablet because the sensation overwhelmed me. Typing on a keyboard required dexterity that my hands simply didn’t have. The only thing I could really use was the microphone on my phone, so I started journaling by speaking into the Notes app. It was painfully slow. The speech recognition constantly misunderstood what I was saying, and every paragraph required corrections before I could move on to the next one. Between August of 2023 and July of 2024, I think I managed to write two blog posts. I felt like I was moving through molasses.

Writing wasn’t the only thing I lost. Music has always been a huge part of my life. After my illness, music sounded like noise and static. I couldn’t separate the instruments or enjoy the melodies. It was emotionally devastating because music has always been one of the ways I process life. Hiking disappeared. Singing disappeared. Dancing disappeared. Many days I sat wondering what I was supposed to do with myself because the activities that had helped me cope with stress, recover from trauma, and simply enjoy being alive were suddenly unavailable to me.

Sometime during all of that, I saw an article online about a program that could create images from a written description. I remember reading it and thinking that it sounded interesting, and then I realized they were talking about artificial intelligence. I closed the page and went on with my day because I still wasn’t interested.

A little while later I came across another article, and curiosity finally won. I downloaded OpenArt AI and typed something completely ridiculous. I asked it to create an elephant wearing a pretty dress while dancing in the parking lot of Walmart. A few seconds later there it was. It made me laugh. I spent some time creating funny pictures and eventually used it to make character sketches for a short story I was working on. That was enough to convince me that AI could be entertaining, but writing was still the thing I cared about most, so I put it aside.

Then I heard about ChatGPT. I downloaded the app in June of 2024 and decided I was going to spend a month seeing what it could actually do. People were talking about using it for coding, writing reports, homework assignments, and business tasks. My interests were completely different. I wanted to talk about dreams, psychology, philosophy, religion, tarot, creativity, and all the random thoughts that constantly bounce around in my head. I think in stories, symbols, and images, so I was curious whether a program like this could actually work with someone whose mind naturally moves in that direction.

The first thing I did was speak everything I wanted to say about a particular topic into my tablet. I organized it as well as I could, just like I used to do before I lost functioning, and then I asked ChatGPT to edit it for grammar and flow. When I read the result, I cried. It felt like I had gotten a piece of myself back. The thoughts were mine. The experiences were mine. Every opinion belonged to me. The program helped me shape everything into the version I would have created if I still had the same physical and cognitive abilities I had before my illness. It did in a few seconds what would have taken me hours, and seeing that happen was incredibly emotional.

That’s how I still use AI today. I’m speaking this entire article into the microphone on my iPad. At the top of this conversation, I gave ChatGPT instructions to organize everything I say into a rough draft. The stories are mine. The ideas are mine. The experiences belong to me. AI helps me bridge the gap between the way my mind still works and the limitations my body continues to recover from.

The old Army computer specialist in me eventually became curious about how far these programs could go, so I started stress testing them. I pushed them in every direction I could think of. I wanted to know what they handled well, where they struggled, and where they simply fell apart. I still do that today because understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a tool has always been part of the fun for me.

Over the past two years, AI has become one of the most valuable tools in my recovery. It has given me a place to organize my thoughts, work through ideas, develop creative projects, discuss philosophy, explore psychology, and reconnect with the parts of myself that felt so distant after my illness. I genuinely believe it has helped me strengthen cognitive pathways that needed exercise while giving me an outlet for all the ideas that were piling up in my head.

That experience is the reason I wanted to write this post. I know there are strong opinions about generative AI, and I understand why. I also know that there are people whose lives have been made better because these tools exist. My perspective comes from living through a neurological injury that changed almost everything about the way I moved through the world. AI became one of the bridges that helped me find my way back to writing, creating, and participating in conversations that matter to me.

I also think AI is going to change the workforce in very real ways. Some job functions will disappear because software will perform them more efficiently. I expect that to happen, just as technology has changed jobs throughout history. I also think people who learn how to use these tools will have an advantage because they are already becoming part of everyday work. We’re seeing them in business writing, product descriptions, research, customer service, marketing, and countless other industries.

The creative side excites me just as much. I can create original artwork for a blog post instead of searching for stock photos. I can generate music specifically for a project instead of worrying about copyright claims or licensing fees. I can write my own lyrics, choose the style, choose the instruments, and create something that supports the story I’m trying to tell. That opens doors for independent creators who simply want to share their work with the world.

Three years ago I woke up in a body that could no longer do many of the things I had always taken for granted. Today I’m still recovering, and every month I notice another small improvement. Alongside the therapists, doctors, nurses, and countless hours of rehabilitation, generative AI has become one of the tools that helped me reclaim my voice. For someone who has always loved writing, storytelling, and sharing ideas, that gift has been immeasurable.

And look, I understand that there are serious issues concerning the operation and maintenance of these massive AI systems. Keeping these computers online and operational uses large amounts of freshwater for cooling, along with enormous amounts of electricity. Those concerns are real, and I think they’re worth paying attention to. At the same time, AI isn’t the only technology that depends on huge data centers. Cloud computing, streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, online gaming, cryptocurrency, search engines, social media platforms, and countless business services all run inside facilities that consume significant amounts of electricity and water to keep thousands of servers operating around the clock. As our reliance on technology continues to grow, improving the efficiency of these systems becomes a high priority across the board. I hope the companies building AI, cloud services, and the next generation of computing continue investing in better cooling systems, renewable energy, water recycling, and other innovations that reduce the impact on natural resources.

I hope this post gives people another perspective to consider. My experience with AI has been deeply personal, and it has become one of the most meaningful tools I’ve used during my recovery. I have every intention of continuing to learn alongside it, and I’m excited to see where this technology goes over the next ten years.