Aren't You Worried?

Thoughts, as a writer, on whether or not we'll stick around. (We will.)

No one knows the thread connecting one word to another is the steam from your grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, straight from her cast-iron Dutch oven onto the trivet you painted in the third grade; meant to look like a tiger, but slightly resembling an orange lemur with too long a nose. The paragraphs are held together by that translucent, gray thread- ephemeral and wispy.

No one knows the prick of a finger taught you that there was no such thing as tiny pain- that pain was pain all over, and it was unfortunately, something you would learn over and over again and in new and different ways. When you watched others you loved suffer, and you somehow felt it in your own body. The reverberation of a voo-doo alarm, a pin in the cotton stitching, an ache in your own side. Wounds are felt twice when humans bear witness. Wounds are twice as wide and twice as likely to heal, too.

No one knows the cadence of your exposition was to the rhythm of the first 16 measures of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor- passionate, staccato, unpredictable. No one knows you were as unsure as the coda- of where to take the plot next. Until, all of a sudden, you were. And it played itself. Like it was always going to. Because it was.

“Aren’t you worried?

Aren’t you worried AI will take over your job?

Your art?

Aren’t you worried writers will become obsolete?”

I cannot answer all of the other questions; like how data centers are killing Mother Earth one root at a time. Or how hundreds of beautifully crafted sentences were stolen and regurgitated to draw a neat bow at the end of every declarative sentence. That “we” have ironed out the “formula” to effective writing, and it is always a question sandwiched by a declarative. What it is not. What it could be? What it is.

What I can tell you is this:

Not a single large language model has ever made me phantomly catch the scent of mirepoix on the stove in the middle of February- when it was the middle of June, and the passage I was reading wasn’t even about food. There is nothing that such unnamed platforms have pumped out that has made me feel pain in a limb that was whole. Because there is nothing to discover. There is no secret. No scandal. No lost love. No myth. No betrayal. No redemption. There is no death- and if there is no death, well, we already know it was never alive to begin with.

And who wants to read something that was never alive? Something that was alive once, and now dead? Well, that is something.

But never alive at all?

No, no.

I am worried about everything.

About how my insurance went up hundreds of dollars a month and our American healthcare system doesn’t seem to think that teeth are connected to one’s body. I am worried about the ever-growing rot in my side porch that has now provided shelter for an entire neighborhood of chipmunks who sound like they are bowling in my rafters will grow to a Dr. Strange-sized portal in my living room. I am worried about the thousands of millennials dying from colon cancer and that there are LBGTQIA+ children still afraid to tell their parents who they are and that the earth might be so hot by the time my children have children that they will never know the cool waters of a deep lake in the middle of an August day.

But I am not worried that anything will replace the art of reaching a finger through a page across continents and centuries to hold another, human, heart.

We belong to each other, after all.

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One of the best ways I know to ensure we never forget that is to support the ones showing up to do the work. Buy a theater ticket. Order the print. Download the EP on Spotify. Pick up the roadside floral bouquet. Pay your neighbor to bake the sourdough. Pre-order the book.

Subscribe to one of the millions here who show up every week to reach out a hand with a human heart attached. Make someone’s day and subscribe (paid subscriptions are always welcome.) Make someone’s life and connect them with your agent.

As long as we continue to connect our words with our hearts and extend them- as long as we stay curious about the grief and the joy and the pain and the satisfaction-

As long as we stay alive.

I’m not worried a bit.