AI did not give me my writing voice.
It just helped me finally hear it clearly.

People assume the hardest part of writing is the words.
It is not.

The hardest part is the quiet humiliation of thinking something deeply, believing it matters, writing it down… and then being too afraid to share it.

For most of my life, that fear won.

I have always had ideas. Not trendy ideas or manufactured ideas, but the kind of thoughts that stay with you for years because they refuse to leave. Evergreen thoughts. Stable beliefs. Recurring frustrations. Things I have been turning over in my head since I was a teenager.

And I have tried to write them down. Many times.
I have folders full of half-finished essays, half-rants, half-formed arguments.

I would get into a flow, feel like I was circling something important, and then the whole thing would collapse under its own weight. The structure would fall apart. The pacing would get sloppy. My sentences would stretch into run-ons. I would skip words because my brain moved faster than my hands.

So I would quit.
Close the tab.
Tell myself I would “come back later.”

Which really meant: I did not trust myself enough to finish.

I did not stop because I ran out of things to say.
I stopped because I did not believe anyone would want to hear them, or that if they did, they would think less of me for how poorly I expressed them.

I thought that meant I was not a writer.

The truth is simpler, and more embarrassing:

I just did not have an editor.

Not an editor—because who has an editor? Not a friend who wants to review a five-paragraph brain dump. Not a mentor with an hour to untangle my thinking.

You remember the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark—the endless warehouse full of crates? That’s my drafts folder.

Not a warehouse of hidden treasures. A warehouse of half-ideas, false starts, and things I’ll never publish.

Enter AI—not as a writer, but as a mirror

I did not start using AI to “write posts faster.”
I started using it because I finally admitted something:

If I do not get help, I am never going to share any of this.

So I opened a window and dumped a chaotic blob of text: paragraphs, fragments, arguments, confessions.

And something unexpected happened.

AI did not rewrite my thoughts.
It did not flatten them.
It did not replace my voice.

It did something far more useful:

It reflected my ideas back to me with clarity I could not yet give them.

It showed me:

  • “This part matters. Slow down.”
  • “You are mixing two ideas here. Separate them.”
  • “This section is a rant. Do you want to keep that energy or redirect it?”
  • “These two paragraphs contradict each other.”
  • “You are hiding the real point behind disclaimers.”
  • “You are holding back something you clearly want to say.”

It asked questions I was not asking myself.
It made me articulate what I actually meant, not the emotional residue around it.

And most importantly:

It made writing feel safe.

Not easy. Never easy.
But safe.

Safe to explore thoughts without judging them.
Safe to write imperfectly because imperfection was not the final step.
Safe to say things I believed but was afraid to publish.

The biggest blocker was not skill.
It was fear.

And fear loses half its power the moment someone, or something, is willing to sit with you in the mess without flinching.

My real process (not the sanitized version)

I never say “Write me a post about X.”
I do not want shortcuts.

My real process looks like this:

  1. Brain dump.
    A mess. Total chaos. Emotional, unstructured, raw.

  2. Talk it through.
    I explain the idea in conversation. AI pushes, questions, challenges.

  3. Find the thread.
    Together we figure out what the piece is actually about.

  4. Outline.
    Real structure. Real bones. No filler.

  5. Rewrite the outline.
    I replace everything with my own pacing, my own emphasis.

  6. First pass.
    AI generates a draft in my voice, based only on my ideas.

  7. Tear it apart.
    I rewrite huge sections, sharpen arguments, add nuance.

  8. Let it sit.
    Days. Weeks. Sometimes forever.

  9. Rewrite again.
    Cut fluff. Add honesty. Remove defensiveness.

  10. Final test.
    One question: “Is this me?”
    If yes, I publish. If no, I go back in.

This is not “AI writes my posts.”
This is “AI keeps me from abandoning the parts of myself I have ignored for years.”

This is also about my mom

I should say this plainly:

I only became a decent writer because my mom forced it onto me.

She was an English teacher.
She cared about writing the way engineers care about correctness.
And sometimes that meant real fights.

But she was right.

I didn’t understand why it mattered then.
To me it was homework—just another bar to jump over.
I never realized she was trying to raise it.

But to her, it was a skill that carried weight.
Writing mattered. Reading mattered.
Being able to say something clearly mattered.

It would take me years to understand that.

Now, every time I reread a draft and see the idea shining through the sloppy execution, I hear her in the back of my mind, nudging me to try again.

AI did not replace her.
It just pushed me again.
Pushed me to think.
Pushed me to write.

Back then, my writing didn’t have meaning—it was just assignments.
She wasn’t there to interrogate ideas.
She made sure I cared enough to do the work well.
That was her contribution.

And now, it feels like picking up a conversation I fought so hard against twenty-five years ago.

The part that actually changed everything

Here’s the part I don’t like admitting:

I didn’t publish for years because I was afraid of looking stupid.

Not wrong.
Not ignorant.
Just… sloppy. Inarticulate.

The guy with good ideas and bad sentences.

I’ve seen that version of me in the mirror more times than I’d like.

AI didn’t erase that fear.
It just made it manageable.

Because everything that matters is still mine:

  • the ideas
  • the voice
  • the structure
  • the edits
  • the judgment

AI just catches the pieces my brain skips when I’m moving too fast.

It took the judgment out of writing. Not the responsibility—the judgment.

And it didn’t give me permission.
I never needed that.

what it gave me was something smaller, but somehow more important:

something that let me think.

A little space.
A little clarity.
Enough to stay with the idea instead of abandoning it.

That’s why I use AI.
Not to write for me.

To make it possible to write as me.