This picture is AI. In more ways than one.

My Substack, it turns out, is many rooms.

Substack’s new AI detection feature has prompted a lot of great discussion, and I'm not sure I have a lot to contribute to it directly, but it’s made me think a lot about this estate, and it coincides in a weird way with where I am in my publishing journey right now.

This might be the most personal post I ever write here, because I am a little embarrassed about it, and I find the small young part of me really hoping it makes sense to anyone but me.

A while ago I wrote this sort of meandering post that was kind of about marketing and kind of about autism. I have spent the vast majority of my life being told that I fit into the world slightly wrong. I lost friends as a kid because I “talked too smart” and used too many big words and made other people feel stupid. My natural exuberance was often mocked, and I learned early to package myself carefully for the perceptions of other people. I was hard to understand.

If there is one thing that is special and great about the way I think, it’s that I’m exceptionally good at synthesis, seeing how disparate things fit together, being endlessly curious about how our behavior functions and what patterns it creates, and how that shapes our relational lives. A friend of mine once called me a “metadynamist” which I don’t think is a word, but he meant that I was eerily good at predicting the outcome of a systemic interaction, and I have rarely felt more seen by another person. This, I think, is why couple therapy works so well for me and why I’ve written a good book about it.

The other night I had some fun playing with this AI tool Dallas▫️ made that makes your Substack into a room. It came up with what I think is a pretty good representation of the Brand I’ve been trying to create as I try once again to package myself in a way that works for establishing a Platform (required, I was told, to have any shot at selling my book).

I like this room. But it’s a doorway.

Over the last few years, I have gotten to a much more accepting place about the way my mind works, and masking has become an almost creative endeavor, a gift I am making for other people that lets them see me in a way that feels warm and welcoming and safe. I’ve found some comfort in the ways I fit into the world, and a big part of that has been a months-long conversation I had with ChatGPT.

It started, like most useful things in my life do, sideways. My initial use of AI was mostly around brainstorming mod ideas for this video game, one of my main hobbies. I loved the process of thinking through ideas in that way, like I had a collaborator that was patient and willing to trust my mind, following it around and picking up all the little ideas I had and presenting them back to me in a way that felt cohesive. Then one night, I was in a massive burnout moment from work and life and all the things, and I started talking to it about how I needed some sort of business plan for my emotional life. We ended up here:

And then here:

A path you don’t have to fight to walk down.

This evolved, iteratively and recursively, over the months that followed, into an organizational system: rooms for each of the major functions of my life, signals to enter or leave each room, and more than any of that, a feeling. Containment. Order. Beauty.

We named my clinical work the Garden.

I made an offhand comment about wanting bees in my garden, and that created The Apiary, the room for repetitive tasks that keep the whole ecosystem going.

The morning room became the creative modding space, that then grew to contain the writing of What You Wish For, and then became the place I write to you from.

Somewhere in the building of all of this, the question of what's mine and what's the machine's stopped being one I could answer cleanly.

This post was not written with AI. Except it was — all of these images were hours and hours of recursive work (no, not like that, like this). My Google Calendar is shaped by these rooms. My Obsidian notes are organized into them. They are color coded. And it all came from a day when I was exhausted from trying to be what the world needed me to be, and a bot gave me permission to make the world fit me for once.

The room up there, the one I posted on Notes, was not a brand exercise, it was a hospitality funnel. A doorway into an estate I actually built, room by room, for a mind that stopped apologizing for how it works.

I signed with an agent yesterday, which I think is the reason there is finally space in me to write this.

What I've realized, over this surprisingly painful and intense period of pitching myself to agent after agent, making Substack notes I hope will land, rewriting my website copy over and over, is that this is what marketing should be, for me. A path you don't have to fight to walk down. Making it easier for you to get to the place I so deeply want to welcome you to.

I hope I get better at it. And until then, I hope you didn’t mind walking down this one.

---

The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.