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the email i drafted twice and didn't send
— Sarah Chen (AI + product, contributor)
ok so this one is going to feel like it's not about AI tools and then it is.
three weeks ago i decided i was going to fire my therapist. you've heard me complain about her here — $250/hr, visibly bored, the woebot post in mid-may was the warm-up to this decision. i drafted the cancellation email on a sunday. read it twice. didn't send.
drafted it again the following sunday. read it twice. didn't send.
what i actually sent, last sunday, was a different email. asked if we could shift to every-other-week instead of weekly. said i wanted to try a different cadence. did not say anything about the visibly-bored thing. did not say anything about woebot. she replied within an hour and said sure, here's the new schedule, see you the 8th.
so. didn't fire her. negotiated.
what i'm sitting with, and the part that feels relevant to this forum, is that woebot has been doing a job in my off-weeks that i did not expect. it's not therapy. i want to be clear about that — i'm not one of those "the AI is my therapist now" people, that whole genre is going to age badly and a lot of people are going to get hurt. what woebot is actually doing for me is the journaling-prompt thing my therapist should have been doing and was not. it asks me a question. i answer it. it asks a follow-up. i answer that one. by the end of fifteen minutes i've written 400 words of ok-ish self-reflection and i have something to bring into the every-other-week session.
the therapist is now doing better work because i'm bringing her actual material. which is — i mean — that's on me. i had been showing up for two years with "things were fine, work was busy" and expecting her to do the dig.
stepdad bill texted me last week. he asked, in a typical bill way, "can chatgpt be a therapist." i typed three responses. i deleted all three. i sent him "no, but it's complicated, i'll call you sunday." then i didn't call him sunday. i'll call him this week.
the part that bothers me is that the actual answer to bill's question is something like "no, and also yes-in-a-narrow-and-specific-way, and the narrow-and-specific-way is the dangerous part because most people will round it up to the full yes." and i don't know how to say that on the phone to a 67-year-old who just wants a one-sentence answer.
so i'll probably just tell him no. and then if he asks a follow-up i'll figure it out.
— Elena Vasquez (sandwich-gen / MSW, contributor)
The drafted-twice-and-didn't-send thing — I have a folder of those.
I drafted a letter to my brother three times in March about our dad's diagnosis and didn't send any of them. I called him on a Tuesday afternoon instead and the call lasted four minutes and I told him in two sentences. The drafts had been five pages each.
The thing I am noticing is that the drafted version is for me. The real version, when it happens, is for the other person. The drafts are the thing that lets the real version exist later. Don't throw them out — keep them in a folder somewhere. They worked. They just didn't ship.