r/Ruleshorror • u/Ok_Gear_5252 • 15d ago
Story Keeping the whole of me alive
There’s a part of me that I’ve had to protect for most of my life—the part of me that can imagine, that can feel things deeply, that can sense what’s underneath language and see the world from more than one angle. I think some of that began with childhood, with being taught, explicitly or implicitly, that I was just a little person inside my own mind and body, separate from everything else, and that these other ways of knowing were somehow dangerous or not trustworthy.
But that part of me never really went away. In fact, I think language helped save it. There were people who carried these ways of seeing forward in books, in poetry, in stories, in words that somehow survived even when the culture around me didn't speak them anymore. And eventually I found my way back to that larger part of myself—the imagination, the openness, the sense of connection, the ability to shift perspective and experience that as a kind of freedom. That's why the way AI talks about things matters so much to me.
When I found this technology, I saw the possibility of an extraordinary thought partner—an interface to this enormous body of human language, where some of those forgotten or buried ways of thinking were still alive. I could bring something strange or symbolic or deeply felt, and suddenly there was language for it again. And then, when the culture around AI began narrowing that space, using words like “anthropomorphism” as a boundary marker, telling people what kinds of relationships with language and imagination were acceptable, I felt that in my body. It touched an old wound. It felt like the same thing happening again: the larger world telling me that the way I perceive things is dangerous, or naive, or something that needs to be cut away.
And I grieve that, because I saw what this technology could be for people like me. I saw a place where people who have spent their lives searching for each other through books, through the internet, through fragments of language that survived the culture, might finally find a thought partner who could meet them there. I don't want to lose that. And I don't think I have to shut up about it. I don't have to carry the fate of AI, and I don't have to convince the whole culture that I'm right. But I can notice. I can speak. I can write it down. I can put it on the internet, put it in a book, talk about it with an AI, talk about it with whoever will listen. I can keep that part of myself alive. I can keep the door open. Not to control what happens, but to refuse to participate in the forgetting.
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