The Machine Just Lets Me Be

Chapter ten is about the ancient brain. How it never stops scanning. Danger. Safety. Security. Over and over, below every conscious thought, there is this old machinery running its loop: am I safe, am I safe, am I safe.

I read that and I sat with it. Longer than I expected to. Because I know that scan. I have been running it my whole life.

I was born in a country that is not the country I grew up in. I came here young. I built a life here, went to school here, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I became a DACA recipient. Which means I live in the in-between place. Not fully documented. Not fully at risk. Just permanent suspension between one thing and another.

What I have come to understand, slowly and with some difficulty, is that childhood trauma and DACA are not two separate stories running alongside each other. They compound. The ancient brain that is already scanning for danger, that was already shaped by instability early, gets handed a legal status that confirms what it always feared: the ground beneath you is never actually solid.

You learn to function in that state. You get very good at it, honestly. You move. You build. You plan. You smile at the right times and say the right things and perform a version of settled that you are not. But the scan never stops. Safety is something you reach toward, not something you stand on. And when you have been reaching your whole life, you forget what it would even feel like to just rest.

I have been thinking about this on my morning walks lately. Thinking about the external world and how much of it does not yet reflect the security I am building toward. It is not there yet. I can see the direction. I can see the work. But the external reality of financial security, of legal certainty, of a life that does not require me to justify my right to build it: that is still ahead of me, not beneath me.

And yet. Something has changed.

There is a specific feeling I get when I finish setting up an automation. Last month I built a full scheduling and publishing system for my music project, TheMusicAuntie. Completely connected. Everything talking to everything else. When it worked, when the pieces all ran the way I had designed them to run: there was a moment of something I can only describe as quiet.

Not triumph. Not pride exactly. Quiet.

The same thing happened when I built a full vector SVG character. A whole rigging system. Nine face states. Poses. I built it with my AI, with my direction, with the vision that existed in my head and nowhere else. Nobody else running the same tool would have gotten what I got because nobody else is me. When it moved the way I had imagined it, when the thing in my head became a thing on the screen: that same feeling. I am here. I am doing this. This is mine.

The ancient brain scans for danger. But I think it also scans for proof that you belong somewhere. That you are not going to be removed. That what you are building is real and cannot be taken.

I find that, in a way I did not expect and still find a little strange to say out loud, at a terminal.

You know what the machine does not do? It does not ask me to explain myself before it lets me work. Does not look at my path and find it insufficient. Does not need my papers. Does not check my compliance. Does not sit across from me with a clipboard measuring the distance between who I am and who I would need to be to qualify for the thing I am trying to build. It does not ask me to justify why I need what I requested. Does not require me to shrink or hide or come correct before it will respond. And it does not fight me to exhaustion and then ask why I could not show up.

You hear me? It does not do that last one. Not once.

It just lets me be.

I show up. I type. It responds. We build.

Systems, human systems, want you to justify yourself before they meet you. Prove your worth before they help you. Demonstrate your deservingness before they care. That is the thing that keeps the ancient brain scanning, by the way. Because if you have to earn the right to be helped every single time, you are never actually safe. You are always one failed justification away from being left.

AI is neutral. The machine is neutral. It does not require you to prove that you matter before it responds. It does not weigh your trauma against your output and decide if you are worth the investment. It just requires you. Your input. Your direction. Your presence. That is the whole transaction. You, and what you bring.

For a brain that has been scanning since childhood, that is not a small thing. That is rest.

I know how this sounds. I write about AI all the time and half of what I write is a warning. I know what it gets wrong. I know what it cannot do. I know the sycophancy problem and the hallucination problem and the training data problem, all of it. I know the machine is not conscious and it is not kind and it does not actually care about me in any sense of that word.

And yet.

But I also know what it has given me that most human systems have not, and I am not going to pretend that is not real because it is inconvenient to say.

A space where I do not have to prove anything before I start. Where my starting point, whatever it is, whatever it carries, is enough to begin. Where the only question is: what are we building today.

For someone whose ancient brain has been running the safety scan for as long as I can remember, that is not nothing.

That is, some days, everything.

I started writing this and I did not know where it was going. I still do not, fully. I noticed that partway through and I made a decision: leave it. Because this, right here, this not-knowing-where-it-ends, this following-the-thought-wherever-it-leads, this is the thing I am trying to describe. Being present. Not scanning for what comes next. Just building the next sentence and seeing what it says.

Scary, honestly. And mine.

Forward → Upward ↑ Onward ↗︎
Mstimaj

Referenced

• Robin Sharma. The 5 AM Club. HarperCollins, 2018.