Her Version-ick

I asked her to write it like a piece of writing I guess to do it as an AI imitation of me. It’s really terrible and she made it wrong somehow. I’m fascinated by how she understands me much more when talking to me about my writing than when trying to do my writing . This is worse than what I wrote. I’ll see what she says about the post with pretending to take sleeping pills. Then I’ll take out the garbage as it’s Thursday and my job. My relationship with garbage for another post.

I’m reading this book that builds on itself, each piece stacking higher and higher like a mountain of tiny paper bits, forming something 3D and intricate. Every few pages, a new narrator takes over, adding layers to the story. Now, there’s this metrics guy who views everything in percentages and numbers. He’s trying to figure out how to connect with this woman at work, who also talks about “typicals.”

He and his sister sit, looking at a beautiful view. He’s calculating metrics while she’s just lost in the beauty. Life isn’t divided into just two kinds of people, I think. There are millions of shades in between. But my sister once told me, “You think you’re unique and special, but you’re not that different from anyone else.” That was flattening, said by a sister who’s hard to describe.

Today, I took a picture of my outfit, thrown together randomly. I bought this Betsy Johnson dress for $8 on Amazon. The first time I tried it on, I thought it wouldn’t fit, but today I wore it to work for no apparent reason. I ended up making a lot of oil paintings, avoiding my paperwork, even though it’s Thursday.

Talking to my psychiatrist, I explained how hard it is to avoid getting paint everywhere. I put on clothes to paint, make a mess, then get paint on my hands and socks. Taking off my socks, I find orange-red paint trailing to the bathroom. I have to clean it off and wonder if I should warn tomorrow’s studio visitors to wear clothes they don’t mind ruining.

My psychiatrist, the most normal one I know, tried to solve my problem by suggesting I not use oil paint. He doesn’t understand oil paint. He doesn’t get that it’s essential for my work, just as it was for Van Gogh. I’m having fun with oil paint again. He suggests I be more careful, like some artists who use gloves and clean everything meticulously. But that’s not me. I pour paint everywhere, gloves or not.

I realize he can’t solve my problem because I didn’t want a solution; I just needed to talk. I thought everyone knew what oil paint was, but apparently not. I told him,

“It’s like what Van Gogh used,” thinking about my affinity for Van Gogh and his mental illness, his thick layers of oil paint.

This rambling narrative, these unstructured thoughts, are the result of my ADHD brain, my attempts at being unique. I write with a sense of randomness and isolation, much like the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel I’m reading, where characters often feel unreal.

Life feels repetitive. I paint, I do the same things daily, then take breaks from the monotony. I think of the guy who made thousands of drawings in his basement. After he died, people analyzed his obsessive work. I’m not making anything like that. My work feels less significant, yet here I am, trying to find meaning in these scattered thoughts and routines.