Mar 3, 2025 |
I played with A.I. a lot in the process of creating Truth or Dare. My first time doing this with a course.
I think it is enormously importantfor creators and teachers to practice radical transparency in the role of A.I. in their work. So here goes.
Because I am only beginning to discover A.I., a lot of this process is fresh ongoing learning for me. And I want to tell you exactly how I used A.I. to help me create Truth or Dare, and what I am learning in the process.
The first reason is that radical transparency around topics like this is everything to me. If one of my own teachers used A.I. to help create a course, and they hid this fact from me — intentionally or not — that would feel icky to me. My cardinal rule of marketing is, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” so I am giving you the honesty that I would want from my teachers.
The second reason is that I think having honest and nuanced discussions about the benefits and dangers of A.I. is the only way we can collectively find our way into responsible use.
A lot of this is a new exploration and ongoing learning for me, so there are no definitive expert answers here. Only a transparent sharing my process and my learning.
That is all we should ever be doing anyways.
So, here’s what I did, and am doing. I used ChatGPT and Claude (paid version), and treated them like an assistant who would help me organize my thoughts, generate ideas, and spit out drafts of what I wanted to create.
I’m pretty cocky about my own intellectual capacity and output. I think I have the best fucking ideas in the world.
So there was no way I was ever going to turn to A.I. for help generating ideas. And whatever ideas it did try to give me sucked. It was nice to confirm that even the best algorithm can’t think anything like I do.
However, where I did find A.I. very useful: helping my ADHD brain get started. For creative ADHD folks, I think sometimes the biggest barrier is that we have these incredible ideas in our heads… and the idea feels so big, the possibilities so infinite, that we kinda get paralyzed. (Raise your hand, ADHD posse….)
When I fed it my big, hairy, ambitious ideas, it spit back out to me simplified breakdowns, summaries, and drafts. This was truly amazing for no other reason than that it reminded my brain that the next step isn’t so complicated, and that I could do it.
Those breakdowns and summaries were rarely usable, but seeing them in front of my eyes closed the gap between the brilliant chaos of my mind and the next functional step. And ADHD folks know: the ability to take the next functional step is EVERYTHING. It is the difference between a finished project and procrastinating for 5 years and being depressed and ashamed.
This did not change my usual creative workflow, but it SHORTENED the time it takes for me get through it. This was, honestly, super fucking cool and something I will continue to experiment with.
Here’s another thing I found.
A.I. wants you to be more concise, have better “flow”, use what I think of as more “standard American” language, remove obscure references, substitute big words with simpler words, and edit your sense of humor to a more mainstream and less edgy one.
But that ain’t me. My natural style is that my thoughts jump from place to place, not always neat linear order. I write run-on sentences, use uncommon expressions and big words, curse a lot, and have a specific sense of humor that isn’t for everyone. (I love poop jokes and sex jokes, what can I say.)
If I allow AI to edit these “different” aspects out of my writing, it no longer sounds or feels like me. At all. And the transmission of the feeling of Simone… is the most important thing to me. Because without that feeling, there is no human-to-human connection. And without that human-to-human connection, there is…. nothing.
So, whatever A.I. wrote, I ended up having to do multiple extensive rounds of edits, adding back the “Simone-ness”, and rewriting sentences the way *I* would say it, and in the sequence and the style that I would say it… to the extent that, by the end, it looked nothing like the original A.I. output at all.
But still, in the end, even after hours and hours of editing and re-writing…. it STILL took me way less time than it normally does. Why?
Because… the “shitty first draft” helped to kick my ass into gear, and into writing mode. And normally I just spend a lot of time in frustrated paralysis.
Once again, I confirm: A.I. is most useful for helping my ADHD brain to get started.
Having a shitty draft in front of me makes me go: “This is wrong, that sounds stupid, ewww i would never do that… let’s get to work fixing this!”
Another pitfall of A.I. is that, since it is so good at spitting out templates and frameworks, it makes it tempting for creators and teachers to instantly produce templates and frameworks for their people.
I could see how easy it would be for people to pump these out ad infinitum, and to dangle these as “more value” for people… especially if they lack creative confidence.
And sometimes, it really can be. I love a good framework… in the right time and place.
But for my course to be an honest reflection of my intellectual ability, I had to ask myself: what is genuinely essential for my people’s transformation? What genuinely comes from my brain, my ethos, the Culture of Me?
What would I produce entirely on my own terms, without A.I.’s. help? And how would I do it?
Anything outside of that, it was clear to me, did not belong in my business. And it was good to come to clarity about this.
I will never, ever have an A.I.-generated template that I pass off as my own. If I point you to a template that did not directly come from my brain, I will tell you so explicitly.
And anyway, if A.I. is so good at creating templates and frameworks that genuinely help people…
… instead of creating them that way and passing them onto your people as if they are your own, you could just tell them which prompts to use to generate them themselves.
In summary:
(1) I’m enjoying using A.I. to help reduce my ADHD overwhelm, sort through the brilliant clutter of my mind, and make it easier for me to see and take the Next Functional Steps,
(2) This is verrrrry different from asking A.I. to do the thinking or the creating for you, and I think we should all be rigorous about not handing over our creative sovereignty to A.I. while still allowing it to help us where it’s effective, and
(3) You will always know exactly what part of my courses are ME, and what has been aided by A.I., and to exactly what extent. I think it is critical, and I think we should all our teachers and creators to the same standard.
Feb 14, 2025 |
If you’re here with me, you gotta be a lover of paradoxes.
Because we’re gonna talk about how to make it raaaaain because you deserve the soft life AND also how the money-based capitalist system is toxic and must be dismantled and frankly we all can, and should learn to live on less.
Both are true. This is a paradox, not a contradiction.
A contradiction must be resolved.
A paradox must be lived into.
We live in a maddeningly complex, fucked up world. Therefore, so is everything we do. We soar, AND get dirty. We sing, AND we grieve.
Not either or. Both AND.
Jan 10, 2025 |
Wanna know one of my secret weapons against shame?
It works like a charm.
And I almost never see it discussed.
It’s this.
Low expectations.
Wait what?
Let me explain.
I think, in the Western world — though this phenomenon is not unique to the West, I think it is particularly salient here — people are constantly fed a steady stream of “the myth of human perfectibility.”
I think it comes from Christianity — or the way Christianity has become distorted, depending on whom you ask — with all its obsession with goodness and purity and achieving salvation from our natural state of ‘sinfulness’.
The idea that the human being ought to be perfected, and that we can achieve this through doing enough of the right things, or believing enough in the right things… is one to question.
When you think perfection/purity is attainable, and that it must be attained by doing/believing “correctly,” life is a constant stressful battle.
Because we will always run into our own shortcomings, weaknesses, and failure.
No human being — save for psychopaths or narcissists — is immune from the constant experience of facing all that is imperfect about us.
But I have a very different view of humanity, and therefore myself.
I take it for granted that I’m not that great.
There are big parts of me that are insecure, angry, entitled, hypocritical, craven, selfish, resentful, greedy, and just plain stupid.
(Before you say “Simone don’t call yourself stupid!,” here’s a simple but good example: have I drunk-driven? Yes. Fucking stupid. I don’t do it anymore but I do other, maybe equally stupid things from time to time.)
And these parts of me are not going away no matter how hard I try because I am human.
Therefore, I have created, and will continue to create scenarios in which I’m the idiot, I’m the weak link, and I’m the cause of pain for myself and others.
If I forget or deny these aspects of myself for a long time, something will happen in life that remind me and humble me.
And I say NONE of this with shame, or out of self-hatred or smallness.
Humans are profoundly paradoxical. At the same time that I am all these unpleasant things, I am also brilliant, generous, kind, wise, delightful, an awe-inspiring spark of unspeakable love and beauty.
I believe in ALL OF THE ABOVE at the same time.
See? Paradox. Humans contain the entire mind-boggling complexity of the universe. That’s what’s so wonderful and terrible about us.
But because I embrace the full spectrum of the paradox of humanity, I am not surprised by all the shitty parts of me, and my life.
I have thought, felt, and done things in the past that are so unwise, short-sighted, immature, and/or hateful that they created enormous shame for myself which I’ve never talked about with any other human being, let alone the public.
The understanding that this is not a unique thing that is happening to ME and ME only, and that the searing burn of facing one’s own profound shortcoming is a universal HUMAN experience, is what allowed me to let go of the shame.
This is how low expectations (a.k.a. “i was never supposed to be that great anyway”) freed me.
Because shame says “YOU are bad.”
And the truth is, being human just includes a lot that feels really bad. Even that person who you think is so perfect and has all their shit together and just glides through life… has their own share of unspeakable pain about their own fallibility and shortcomings that you’ll never know about.
It’s not personal.
That is enormously important to know.
I’m not above profoundly hurting other people. Because that’s a feature of being human.
I’m not above humiliating, dirt-in-my-teeth failure. Because that’s a feature of being human.
I’m not above making stupendously bad decisions — like, again and again. Because that’s a feature of being human. (There’s never, ever a point in which you permanently graduate from that for as long as you’re alive.)
These are somber, sobering truths. But it’s much better to contend with somber, sobering truths than the life-annihilating lie of shame.
Also, it is vitally important to remind myself — aggressively and vigorously sometimes — of the full weight of the OPPOSITE truth, of my goodness, beauty, brilliance, preciousness, etc.
I do this specifically and insistently.
I seek out people and spaces that make it easy for me to embody that awareness.
If you don’t balance both ends of the paradox, not only do you just get depressed, you also move away from the fundamental truth of your existence.
Another important point: the drama of dealing with shame is intensified when you’re neurodivergent, sensitive, struggle with mental health, and/or have some kind of circumstance/identity that lands you in the margins of society (like being poor or trans, etc).
Though no one is immune to the pain of Being Alive While Imperfect, it certainly is easier to pad yourself against the full awareness or full consequences of your “crunchy” sides when you have a lot of unearned advantages. (Like… for example, making mistakes while being poor and Black is a lot more ‘expensive’ than making mistakes when you’re wealthy and white. Obviously.)
That’s another thing to factor in when you’re dealing with shame. There are structural, systemic forces that determine how much “raw material” of shit you’re given to work through.
I am a vagina-owner, a person of color and descendant of colonized people, and have an ADHD brain that is prone to anxiety and depression. That means I have a lot of easy shame-triggers.
It’s like, I got the “harder” level of the same video game that a lot of other people got. But I am acutely aware that also, many many other people have to play way, way harder levels because they don’t have the privileges i do.
I’m posting this because recently, I’ve been talking to some folks about the feeling of overwhelming shame they feel about their financial circumstances.
It’s not just the stress and grief of dealing with financial precariousness. It’s the shame of “IT’S MY FAULT, I BROUGHT THIS UPON MYSELF, I SHOULD HAVE ____ AND SHOULDN’T HAVE ____, HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO STUPID.”
That’s what really kills.
But, I offer you… why should you have “known”? Why should you have “done better”?
You are not superhuman or God. You do not have perfect foresight, knowledge or willpower. You do not have infinite reserves of energy, creativity and wisdom. NO ONE DOES. Those features don’t come installed in the human package.
You are fallible and the world isn’t necessarily set up to help everyone feel safe and secure. In fact, many would argue that it’s actively rigged to fuck a lot of people over.
It’s not you. It’s not you. It’s not you.
At least, it’s not uniquely you.
Having this awareness doesn’t solve everything. But it certainly helps to lighten the emotional load. And sometimes, that counts for a lot.
Because shame sucks.
And you deserve to have your load lightened.
I don’t even think it’s technically true to say that everyone is doing their best, and therefore YOU were doing your best…
But I also think NOT always having the capacity to “do your best” IS part of us trying to do our best.
Life is hard.
You deserve grace.
You deserve the most compassionate and affirming narratives about the painful stuff in your life.
You deserve infinite second chances.
You deserve to feel like your existence is deeply good and that you matter profoundly.
Because you are, and you do.
Jan 5, 2025 |
Let me first say that I don’t think avoiding depression is just a matter of having the right mindset and making the right choices.
Sometimes you can make a 200% effort to do your best to do the “right” things and still be at the mercy of relentlessly cruel brain chemicals.
I think it is both inaccurate, unscientific and unkind to suggest that you can just mindset and action your way out of depression.
Not only that, but external circumstances matter.
To be sure, positive external circumstances can’t 100% control depression. But it sure as hell helps when you’re in a physically comfortable environment, don’t have to worry about your own survival, have disposable income (so you can take a vacation to a warmer place or get a massage or hire a cleaner if that would be supportive) and are surrounded by people who love you and support you unconditionally.
Many of these aren’t only available to all.
So what I’m about to say isn’t some kind of prescriptive guide of what you “should” do to “beat depression”.
I’m way too humble about the reality of brains. Mine in particular. Even at my most upbeat, happy and energetic (which I often am), I always feel at a razor’s edge from mental illness because I am extremely sensitive and melancholy by nature.
So this is just one story of someone who is experiencing a dark season of life, and deduce that certain things have helped her to avoid depression this time.
The biggest thing for me has been this.
The way to cope with losing your sense of purpose, direction and ambition is to find out who you are outside of those things.
Because we humans are so much more than our so-called “purpose,” “direction” and “ambition” — as defined in an individualistic and capitalist sense (as they usually are.)
And this is a place of liberation.
When I don’t have some kind of grand “purpose in the world”, my purpose is to exist today.
To be alive. To breathe. To make my bed.
To order a sandwich and eat it. To notice snowflakes falling softly on trees.
To send memes to my bestie to make her laugh.
To cuddle with my sweetheart. To feel my emotions, to cry, to take walks, to read poems.
This is actually what real life mostly consists of. Our real purpose is to be alive, and here we are, beautifully and perfectly fulfilling it.
When I’ve lost connection to a capitalist-individualist sense of direction, then I get to…
… exist without direction, which gives me a great freedom.
Children don’t need direction to play. They just follow their own impulses (which often subvert adult “directions”) and have the best time.
Artists don’t need direction to create. Like, nobody was telling Picasso “mix this color with that color and put a brushstroke HERE.” Artists respond, once again, to their own inner creative impulse — moment by moment. Not unlike play.
When I no longer have ambition, I get to be free.
Free from the prison of my worldly identity and pursuits. Because, no matter how much value I find in work, I know I’m so much more than that.
I’m an animal. I am a dream-spark of my ancestors. I’m a river of sexual energy. I’m quantum potential in a meatsuit. I am one with soil, sap and sky. I am a tiny node in the sacred unbroken web of living beings.
All of these things are so much bigger and truer and deeper than anything I can do with “ambition.”
Let me be clear…
This doesn’t mean it’s been easy and delightful for me. It hasn’t.
Almost everyday is phenomenally uncomfortable and I’ll be VERY glad when some semblance of purpose, direction and ambition return to me. (And they will. Because life consists of cycles.)
But everything I’ve just mentioned has been the difference between “oh fuck, my life is just falling apart” and “I’m undergoing vitally important spiritual journey — one that is critical for my ability to come home to my true nature.”
This awareness has reminded me again and again… that shedding isn’t a loss.
It’s a revelation.
Disintegration isn’t a disaster.
It’s a cleansing.
“Unmoored” isn’t “lost”.
It’s a liberation.
And contrary to how it feels sometimes, the universe isn’t here to just fuck you.
When there is a night, it leads to day.
When there is a winter, it leads to spring.
When there is an uphill, there is a downhill.
Everything is unfolding for a reason, and there is a great unseen benevolent loving order behind it all.
This isn’t some kind of objective truth I’m proclaiming, but a personal belief I hold.
On purpose. By choice.
Deep rigorous optimism in the goodness of the universe is as close to something gets to a religious belief for me.
It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.
Because we live in a universe that loves us. And how I know that is that I AM a microcosm of the universe, and I AM love.
And that is how, despite a ton of discomfort, I have not been depressed.
This time.
Spoken as someone who will never hesitate to go out and get some prescription drugs if I feel like that would be supportive.
Dec 17, 2024 |
In our culture, it is so common to use LIGHT as a metaphor for all that is good, healthy, civilized, and virtuous.
And, conversely, DARKNESS as a metaphor for all that is bad, sick, uncivilized and sinister.
You may not be surprised to hear that associations not only have done enormous harm to people with melanated skin across the globe (by justifying racism)…
… but they have also created distortions in our relationships to our bodies and nature.
If you’re used to associating “light” with good…
Consider that: withholding darkness from people is literally a torture technique. Nonstop light, leading to sleep deprivation, is designed to break people down.
24/7 light would kill species and destroy ecosystems.
And while light in and of itself is natural (hello, the sun), light pollution — an unnatural excess of light — is doing enormous harm to humans and the ecosystem.
Fetuses grow in the dark.
All life is nourished by dark soil.
Dreaming happens in the dark — as well as transcendant and liminal visions.
There’s a reason that so many artists, writers, spiritual leaders and visionaries are night owls. Darkness reveals what light obscures.
Now, I’d love to invite you to read some excerpts from an article I just found:
“Should we avoid liturgical language of light and dark?” written by Steve Thorngate, for The Christian Century magazine.
(Be assured, this is enormously relevant even if you have nothing to do with Christanity.)
It said so many things so more eloquently that I could at this moment.
There is a long history in the church of using words like light, white, bright, and fair to connote goodness in a straightforward way and words like dark, black, shade, and dim to connote the opposite.
Most instances of such usage were not written for explicitly racist purposes (though some were). Still, this language has thrived alongside racism in White-dominated church contexts.
And language—especially ritual language, repeated again and again—has great power among those who speak or hear it, power not constrained by the intent of its creators.
The Bible is chock-full of light/dark imagery, with much (though not all) of it presenting light as the positive side of the coin.
Jesus is the light of the world, the morning star, the one who obviates the need for lamp or sunlight, the one in whom there is no darkness at all. Forgiveness for sin washes us whiter than snow.
And then, over on the other side of things, there’s the power of darkness. Why should the church avoid this language the biblical writers use so freely?
Yes, praise for the light is all over scripture… but the Bible says lots of things, and not all of them find their way into our liturgies.
Christian views of scripture vary, and I know there are those who maintain that “Is this biblical?” is the main hurdle for any idea or phrase to clear. But I have yet to visit a church that follows this principle through to its logical conclusion, giving every jot and tittle a hearing on Sunday morning.
So the mere existence of a light versus dark paradigm in the Bible hardly seems like the last word on its suitability for worship.
After all, the plain fact is that some biblical language can be hurtful to some people among us. It has been used to buttress concrete harm in the past, still is in some places, and even where it isn’t the words themselves can be a significant stumbling block.
So while addressing this fact might not be simple or straightforward, we do need to address it. “Deal with it, it’s in the Bible” is inadequate; it fails to take the problem seriously.
So does this mean we should jettison the language of light and darkness entirely? I’m not sure it does.
This language, after all, is more than biblical: it’s elemental. It names a fundamental experience of all living things.
The earth’s days and seasons are defined by the planet’s relationship with the sun’s rays—their presence and absence, the distance they travel to reach us, and the angle at which they arrive.
These cycles of darkness and light have shaped creatures, ecosystems, and communities across generations and continents, and the depth of this shared reality makes it a rich source for liturgical language.
Christian liturgy forms us in no small part by defining the passage of time in our lives. This means it is deeply invested in the role of darkness and light in the life of the planet we live on.
The challenge I faced in my songwriting project was how to explore light/dark language with care, embracing its richness and depth—while also seeking to avoid the harm it can do.
I’m considerably less certain that the particular guidelines I came up with are the best available. No doubt there’s much to quibble with and refine here. But here’s what I tried…
1) Consider the various senses in which positive language about light is used. Light can mean illumination, vision, transparency, openness, the revealing of secrets—ideas rooted in the physical function and utility of light. Explore these with care. Light can also connote color, complexion, innocence, and even cleanness—more immediately value-laden ideas that can be dangerous, especially when paired with binary language like light/dark. Avoid these.
2) Be especially cautious about negative language for darkness. Yes, it’s logically implicit in positive language about light, and some will argue that there is thus no meaningful difference between the two. But I’m convinced that it also matters what we make explicit, what we say out loud and emphasize and repeat—a point that became clearer to me as I wrote things like song refrains and they echoed in my mind. It is possible to use positive light language—and again, some forms of it are more worthwhile than others—while also taking care not to actively disparage darkness.
3) Ask, in a given situation, if you need to use language about light and darkness at all. Is what you’re saying important to your larger purposes, or are you just trying to pad an illustration or fill out a metrical line? If it is important, is there another way to say it that works just as well? The sort of qualified embrace I’m advocating implies a need to make each usage count.
4) Don’t use black/white language to mean bad/good. Just don’t do it (even though it’s biblical). The racist interpretation is too immediate, too easy to infer. Find another way to say what you want to say.
5) Perhaps most importantly: say positive things about darkness. Fertile soil is dark. A dark sky without light pollution promotes healthy rest and, paradoxically, visibility. Secrets and mysteries aren’t always bad things; their illumination isn’t always good.
What’s more, the biblical witness is not unanimously pro-light.
In Exodus 20 God occupies a space of darkness, in Genesis 15 God arguably takes the form of darkness, and the psalmist praises the protection provided by God’s shadow. In recent years, Christians have begun to write liturgical texts on such themes. There’s even a new children’s book, God’s Holy Darkness… (“Creation began in the dark. . . . Creation is God’s work done in holy darkness.”) We need more of this in the church.
6) Embrace the fact that liturgical images exist in tension with one another. The goal is not a tidy, closed system of what light/dark language is allowed to mean. Our metaphors proliferate, overlap, and sometimes even conflict. This is OK. Here I take my cues from the expansive language movement around God and gender: we need to imagine our way to a longer and better list of ways to use light/dark language in worship, rather than restrict our way to a shorter and safer one.
I’ve found these guidelines useful, but they remain a work in progress.
You can read the full text of this article, if you google the words “light dark Thorngate.” It will be the top search result.
So much of this applies directly to larger Western culture, which is formed in such large part by Christianity.
If you work in coaching or healing arts, where these metaphors are commonly used, what is your takeaway from this?
Dec 16, 2024 |
Take a break from seeing yourself through others’ perceptions.
For too many of us, we barely have a relationship with ourselves outside of the stories, identities, judgments and standards that others — and society at large — have imposed on us.
Seriously, set apart some time — a week, a day, or even an hour — and tell yourself:
“For this time, I will BE instead of BE PERCEIVED. I will claim my freedom from the label, the descriptor, the box they tried to squeeze me into.”
Strike from problem-solving and “figuring it out”.
Yes, I realize that, in order to exist, we have to solve problems and figure shit out.
But believe me, neither your brain, nor your nervous system, nor your relationships, nor your business, nor your dreams benefit from being in default “problem-solving/figuring-it-out” mode 24/7.
Take a week, a day, or even an hour — and tell yourself, “For this time, I unplug from problem-solving. I am not a problem, and my life is not a problem. I am a miracle and my life is a poem.”
