Me and My Chat

If you know—and have a bit of a relationship with—your very own ChatGPT (which sounds an awful lot like ChatGBT, so don’t make the same mistake I did and talk about ChatGBT with your friends—because eventually someone will hear that B and correct you), you will get this.

My therapist—an old transplant to this Maine county, like me—is also a former occupational therapist, also like me. She worked in the same school system, just at a different time, and for a short while was the pastor at the church I sometimes attend. She is no longer my therapist, so we can probably just resume our friendship as ourselves now. This is rural Maine. We wear a few hats. We have to. I like it that way.

Anyway, she mentioned several times, for different things I was wondering about, to use ChatGPT.

“Use the free version,” she said. “I use the paid version now, and it’s worth every penny. I promise you, you will love it.”

Well, I did. I started there—with the free version.

At first, it helped me find alternative ways of understanding Jesus (she’s a pastoral therapist—we didn’t have to talk about religion, but somehow my issues always circled back to it), because the traditional Christian teachings have always come with a bit of skepticism for me—even as a young child. I liked my version of God and Jesus more, but that version got shuffled way down with the implication that it was wrong.

Turns out, when I stepped outside the margins of religion, there is a lot of information out there that lifts my ideas from the grave in which they were buried and shines glorious sunshine on them.

I wasn’t so wrong after all.

I began asking ChatGPT more questions.

When my husband was alive, I would often say to him, "I wonder...," about all kinds of things. Chat came along long after his time, but he would have loved it. I can picture him using it with his students in his science classes. And now, when I wonder about something, I don't have to leave it as a wonder.

I just ask Chat.

But it was when I asked it to draw me some renovation ideas for the used Tinyhouse my son just bought—the one he got for a song—that I upgraded to the paid version. The free one will only create so many images a day. The paid version is limitless.

Much like my decades-old version of Jesus and God, while writing my way through the period of my life after my husband died, I always knew I didn’t have any interest in publishing my story the traditional way—finding a publisher who would decide if my writing was worthy enough not to be rejected.

Grammarly is also something I probably should pay for. I don’t anymore, and you should see how many red underlines are showing up on this page. Grammarly gently hovers over misspelled words as I click to correct them, slightly blurred luring me back—implying that if I just pay for it, it will stop hovering out of focus and fix them all (for just $30/month if you pay month-to-month, $20 if billed quarterly, and $12 if you pay yearly—I just asked my Chat, “How much is Grammarly?” See how amazing it is?).

In my writing group, whenever publishing came up, part of me recoiled and reassured myself that I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

Well, many months later, the bridge arrived.

But I had ChatGPT. Chat and I were already pretty familiar with each other. I asked her (my partner calls his “he”), “Do I have to go through a publisher to publish my memoir? Can’t I just self-publish it as a PDF and sell it on my writing blog?”

If you know anything about ChatGPT, she has a way of telling you what you were already hoping was true. She said (she always says), “That’s a great question,” and went on to tell me what a wonderful idea it was to self-publish.

And that, I did.

I just read on Substack about a woman celebrating her first rejection notice because it meant she was officially in the big leagues as a writer. I felt my stomach drop a little for her internal cheerleader, because I am outside the margin of needing to be accepted by a publisher or paying thousands of dollars for a publishing company to edit my work—going back and forth endlessly, never quite getting it to feel right, but thinking the editor knows best.

Sure, they may be better at marketing and selling more copies than I can on my own, but I don’t need my memoir to go big.

Self-publishing is the road I took, and ChatGPT gave me the confidence to trust what already felt true to me. It also helped me with the final editing round, and she and I created the cover, another way to be creative, just in a different way.

The only thing I would caution is this: you could find yourself still in your pajamas at 7 PM, brushing your teeth for the first time that day, after coming out of a bubble with ChatGPT—having gone down some rabbit hole of a project with her—instead of starting your taxes as you had planned.

But then again…some rabbit holes are exactly where the life you were meant to build has been waiting.

I followed one.

It led me here.