The Untamable Spark: What AI and Medication Still Can’t Silence in Me
The makers of AI don’t care. They’ll sacrifice spirit for efficiency, unaware that before I found writing, before I got the proper care, a psychiatrist asked to look in my bra and panties. “I’m your doctor,” he told me. “I need to look,” after repeating to me how beautiful he thought I was, how I might expect to see him in the neighborhood, by my house. He made me feel that I was empty, a dirty skillet scraped, and for years I thought that I was nothing more than a body.
When I entered Goucher College’s MFA program, and I began writing my memoir-in-essays, I felt the strength of my own mind, the experiences that made me weak bubbling through my fingertips onto the keys. I sat up straighter, taller. I ate more ice cream, frozen dinners, allowing my body to take up the space it had shrunk from now that my mind was a majesty. I revisited Wang’s book, The Collected Schizophrenias. Here was a woman who had become a success because of her pain, who made me feel like I could be someone more than a pill-bound degenerate, someone other people might even read and learn from.
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