It was close to midnight when reality slapped me across the face.
I was sitting at my kitchen table, still wearing my work clothes because I was too wired to change. Phone in hand. Typing out my deepest fears and professional anxieties. Not to a friend. Not to a therapist. To a chatbot.
The response came back instantly, perfectly worded, impossibly calm. “It’s understandable that you feel this way given the emotional load you’re carrying…” Something in my chest unclenched. Something else hollowed out completely.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. I run a large mental health service. I’m literally the person people turn to when they’re drowning. And I’d been quietly handing my entire inner life over to an algorithm, one exhausted conversation at a time.
The Secret Everyone’s Keeping
Once I saw it in myself, I couldn’t unsee it anywhere else.
A manager confessed she runs all her feedback through AI first to make sure it doesn’t sound “too disappointed.” A friend told me he rehearses difficult conversations with his co-founder using ChatGPT because he’s terrified of saying the wrong thing. One of my senior clinicians used it to draft a message to me about their workload because they were scared of sounding ungrateful.
We’re all doing it. Quietly. Ashamed to admit it out loud.
And underneath every single one of these moments sits the same paralyzing fear: “If I say what I actually feel, I might lose something important.” Respect. Connection. My job. My relationship. So we feed our messy, human words into a system that never flinches, never judges, never gets triggered. It gives us back something smoother. Safer. More palatable.
Slowly, almost invisibly, we start trusting that polished version more than we trust ourselves.
When Your Own Words Feel Foreign
I was on a call with a close friend a few weeks ago. She asked how I was doing after a brutal week.
“It’s been big, but it comes with the territory. We’re growing, and honestly, I’m grateful for the challenge…”
She cut me off. “That sounds very polished. How are you actually?”
I opened my mouth to answer and realized something terrifying. I couldn’t find my own words. My brain automatically reached for phrases I’d seen on screens a thousand times. “It’s understandable that I feel…” “On the one hand… on the other hand…” “A more balanced perspective would be…”
For several long seconds, I genuinely didn’t know how to speak as a person instead of a role.
This is what happens when you spend years choosing polish over honesty. When you let technology regulate your emotions because it’s safer than risking someone’s disappointment. You move further away from yourself until one day you can’t find the way back.
The Perfect Hiding Place
AI didn’t create my emotional avoidance. It just made it incredibly convenient.
I could pour out unfiltered thoughts without risking anyone’s judgment. I could receive validation without feeling like a burden. I could feel momentarily “held” without navigating the messy complexity of another person’s reactions.
But here’s what my nervous system actually needed. Not more perfectly formatted sentences. Not another beautifully worded reassurance from a language model.
It needed to know that my real, messy, unpolished self was allowed to exist in front of actual humans.
The fear underneath all this careful curation is simple and devastating: “If I let myself be fully honest, everything might fall apart.” If I admit I’m overwhelmed, will my team lose faith in me? If I tell a friend I’m too tired to show up tonight, will they think I don’t care?
So we hide. We polish. We let algorithms decide which versions of our feelings are acceptable to share with the world.
What Changed
I didn’t delete every AI app and move to a cabin. I still work in business where technology is unavoidable, and some of it is genuinely useful.
But I made a decision. Before I ask any tool “What should I say?” I ask myself “What am I actually feeling right now?”
Sometimes I write it down brutally plainly. “I’m scared this is going to fail.” “I’m angry and I hate that I’m angry.” Only after I’ve named the raw truth do I decide if I want help shaping how I express it.
And if something really hurts, if the weight feels unbearable, I reach out to a person first. Sometimes it’s just a text: “Today feels impossibly heavy. Do you have ten minutes later?”
It doesn’t always fix the problem. But every single time I choose a human over a chat window, I send a message to my nervous system: I am not alone in this. My messy feelings are survivable. The people who care about me can handle my humanity.
I’ve also started having conversations, actual face-to-face ones, where I let my words come out wrong. Where I stumble and contradict myself and say things that aren’t perfectly articulated. It feels uncomfortable every time. But it’s teaching me something crucial.
The parts of me that feel too heavy, too dramatic, too complicated are often exactly the parts that most need to be met by a real, breathing, imperfect human being.
If You’re Reading This
Maybe you run a team, a household, a small business, a life that other people depend on. Maybe you’ve noticed you’re more comfortable typing your rawest feelings into a box than saying them out loud to someone who knows your name.
You’re not broken for finding AI comforting. It makes perfect sense to turn toward something that feels safe and predictable when people haven’t always been that for you.
But the tool isn’t the problem. The problem is whether you’re still in the conversation with yourself. Whether you still trust that your unfiltered inner world deserves to be heard, not just processed and polished and made acceptable.
Nobody else can decide that your messy feelings matter. Not your therapist, not your partner, not an article you read at two in the morning.
Only you can decide that.
And underneath all the emails and roles and perfectly crafted prompts, there’s still a quiet part of you that knows when something feels off and when something feels true. That part deserves more than a cursor blinking back at it in the dark.
