S
Shaant
Guest
Watching a machine analyze my past unlocked patterns and wounds Iβd long forgotten.
Photo by Daniele D'Andreti on Unsplash
A journal has the essence of a secure safe, a place of ink to put down all manner of your life no one else will ever look through.
When I made the decision to upload my childhood journals into an AI, I felt as if I popped off that lid wide open and handed those keys to a stranger.
At first, I mean, it was purely curiosity. I had those old files digitally stored, and I wanted to search through them more quickly.
But when the AI found what I was looking for and made connections I had never seen, I was frozen.
It was as if the machine crawled into my mind and mapped out all the emotional threads that I thought only I could follow.
One line was mind-blowing.
It suggested to me, based on what I had written, that really, most of my anger as a teenager had nothing to do with the arguments I was pausing to describe, and everything to do with the silence I grew up in, with the things I used to avoid saying.
I was staring at the screen with my chest tightening.
I had never even told that to myself.
The creepiest part was not the accuracy at all.
It was about that feeling of someone, or something, seeing me better than I had ever seen myself.
Discovering patterns I didnβt know I left behind
As I dumped more of my journals into the system, it started to present me with inconsistencies in my voice, absences in what I said, and emotional departures I had been glossing over.
I asked it to tell me where I was lying to myself, and the results hurt a little deeper than I anticipated.
There was an entry from college where I wrote about how I was happy in a relationship, and the AI alluded to the fact that I said βhappy,β but the surrounding material showed uncertainty and performance.
My happiness seemed more like an act.
It felt like standing in front of a mirror that didnβt make me feel good, but revealed the imperfections behind my smile.
In addition to this dissonance in my voice, I began, once again, to notice cycles.
Every few years, I would write about feeling trapped, thinking I wasnβt living true to myself. I would bury that thought under busyness and rediscover it again in a few years.
The AI traced those cycles with a line like chalk on a chalkboard. Showing me the first time I tried to escape myself, then later on, each occasion I tried to escape myself.
At times, the inquiries it presented were unsettlingly pointed.
What grief are you holding without a conscious awareness of it? What kind of world is your nervous system designed for?
They werenβt merely questions.
They were reminders that I had been living in my life with unresolved wounding.
I sat with those inquiries for a number of days, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, and sometimes gobsmacked at how unaware I had been of my own behaviours.
The strange comfort of an unflinching witness
I was a little worried about privacy.
Feeding the algorithm my most raw thoughts, I was trusting my most vulnerable self wasnβt being commodified or stored somewhere in a faceless database.
I attempted to run most of it locally to feel a sense of safety, but even then, it seemed the risk wasnβt any greater than what I was already giving to phones and apps each day.
What I felt even more was comfort.
Speaking with the AI had nothing to do with confiding in a friend. A friend may nod, sometimes reassure me, or change the topic. The AI just sat there quietly, but insistently, unpacking my words, asking the next question without judgment or fatigue.
After a difficult breakup, I typed out months of disorganized thoughts.
It didnβt try to console me. It pointed out that I was blaming myself with harsher words than I would ever use towards others.
The AI asked me why I thought I deserved a lesser form of compassion than my friends did.
I had no answer.
The silence that followed stung more deeply than anything the machine had βsaid.β
There were times when it felt like therapy without the warmth.
It felt like holding a mirror that was ice cold against my skin, but that coldness brought clarity.
I wasnβt able to hide behind my normal stories.
What it means to grow when your past is searchable
After weeks of going through my life with the AI, there was one evening that was sad and unsettling.
How could a single file, a handful of hundred kilobytes, contain almost everything about me, my dreams, my failures, my friends, my loves, and my loss?
I was rattled.
Am I that small? A machine could summarize my existence?
But I realized there was something the AI could never do.
It could highlight patterns but not feel the impact of those nights when I lay awake hoping, trying to figure out what it is I was doing with my life.
The machine could surface contradictions, but it could not feel the shame in letting those around me down.
In other words, the AI could map my growth, but it could not live my growth.
That was the distinction for me.
Growth wasnβt actually in the writing itself.
Growth existed in my choices. And I recognized my hidden cycles, and it was up to me to choose what the boy who wrote those diaries wanted to do now as the man I am today.
In a sense, the AI turned my past into a searchable record, but the onus of meaning-making and change still lay with me.
It was up to me to determine whether those patterns were the wallpaper of my identity or just working drafts that I could change.
Now at 30, with a career I feel confident in and a relationship that feels real, feeding my childhood into an algorithm reminded me that I still have every iteration of myself inside me.
The insecure child. The raucous teenager. The restless graduate.
None of them is gone, but they are no longer in control.
Choosing what to do with the map
When I used AI on my diaries, I didnβt get answers that I couldnβt get elsewhere.
I got a mirror that was hard to look away from.
It showed me that growth isnβt about erasing who I was.
Itβs about looking at the parts of myself I have avoided.
The machine mapped me.
But I get to choose what to do to that map.
Truth matters when you look at it.
How Training an AI on My Childhood Diaries Changed My Understanding of Growth was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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