the memo missed me.

on an emotional drought, how everyone won't shut up about their ai therapist, & the world forgetting to teach me how to not care.

artwork by chen zishan, etoile (2025), pinterest.

❝ i tell this story because expressing love is similar. you need to commit to letting it out. ask yourself how you benefit from keeping it in. […] you probably have some belief under which it makes sense to hold back love. get to the bottom of that belief, recognize that it's not true, and you can set yourself free. until you understand why you started holding back your love in the first place, you are going to be fighting yourself about this. one part of you will want to express love and the other part will want to withhold it. conflict! ❞ — dr. nicole gravagna, answer to the question of “i have a lot of love inside of me. how do i let it out?” on quora.

for most of my life, i’ve felt that my heart is a wound that someone forgot to cauterize, so i continue to ooze.

Lately, I've been drawn back to the mechanisms of Catholic aestheticism—a life elevated by great feeling and suffering. I find myself prattling on about sadism and masochism between two female bodies, emotional bonds twisted and rotted and glazed like cooked sugar.

As I retreat from the outer world, my inner world grows steeper. I don't bother to make sense of it. To truly understand myself is a state I hope never to reach, because then my life would cease to be interesting.

This response, this self-administered blood draw, is my reaction to what I've been observing: the world's quiet reception of a memo stating that we no longer should care, and the subsequent loss of human connection. Somewhere along the way, everyone else learned to turn down the volume on their hearts. The memo missed me.

When I was younger, I always felt so greatly misunderstood, carrying a fantasy that everything would fall into place once I reached adulthood. But now I find I am still outside the wall, scratching the soles of my feet, slitting the skin with brambles and stone as I try to climb in.

Only now the wall isn't built from misunderstanding, but from collective indifference.

vladimir mayakovsky, a letter written to his sister ludmila, 1905.

I tend to become more combative the longer I am unable to purge my heart of whatever is possessing it. I have less room to hold understanding, and it is one of the worst things about myself. The latest victim of my ire: those proud of their AI therapist.

“I'm going to invite ChatGPT to my wedding after all of the trauma I've dumped on it,” a TikTok user comments. Over a thousand likes.

I close my eyes, thumb against the middle of my forehead to iron out the migraine I'm staving off. And suddenly, I'm not just annoyed. I'm furious. I'm grieving.

You don't view it as a person—you still call it “it”—but somehow it has been instrumental in providing you with psychological support rivaling that of a human being. And what support? You're being enabled.

The model intakes, mutates, and regurgitates. It asks questions that appear difficult, but just agree with you. You know nothing of yourself and how to change it because change requires the friction of another consciousness pushing back.

I think of my therapist, Louise. I think of how it feels to curl into a chair and talk. I think of arriving at appointments with my hair slicked away from my face, my skin blotchy and bare, the relief of being able to be as impertinent and exaggerated as I am in front of her. I think of her weathered face, the loose rings of her brown curls that vary in length as the months pass. I think of her diligent note-taking, the small breath she takes before she asks a quiet question that snaps me out of my self-pity. I think of finishing the appointment, of the decision of whether or not I'll keep my next one, of how much better it feels to know that someone is absorbing me and making sense of what is wrong, or what may not be.

Research supports what intuition tells us: therapeutic relationships depend on what psychologists call ‘therapeutic alliance’—the bond, trust, and collaboration that develops between therapist and client. While alliance accounts for approximately 7.5% of variance in outcomes, it serves as a mediator in over 70% of successful therapeutic relationships, meaning the human connection itself becomes the vehicle through which healing occurs.

ChatGPT cannot ally, or be invited to your wedding, because it cannot genuinely care about your well-being, cannot feel concern when you miss appointments, cannot experience the fatigue of holding space for your pain.

But the replacement economy isn't just about therapy. It's about the wholesale outsourcing of emotional labor. Dating apps replace the vulnerability of approaching someone. Social media algorithms curate our social connections. AI companions provide conversation without the messiness of human unpredictability.

We’ve gamified connection, flattened intimacy, and softened the edges until nothing cuts anymore.

We've created a world where intimacy is a service we consume rather than a risk we take.

And I miss taking the risk. I miss urging someone to look at me so that I may speak to them, so that I may smile and show my teeth as a sign of weakness.

Every time I muster the courage to administer a compliment to a stranger, the light that radiates from them is what fills me. The understanding that I am looking at them and seeing them and wanting to venture into something with them—it’s fulfilling.

And I know the bigger picture, I can see it. I know this is symptomatic of a broken system, a shortage of funding, and the dark spiral of endless time passing with the smallest hope for news of moving up on an otherwise stagnant waitlist.

But I also think it’s just cool now, it’s chic to lean into an absence of someone else and to laugh when someone gets worked up about how every new algorithmic model is closer to taking us beyond the fixable line of global warming, of no return.

Well, the Earth will return. She always does. But we won’t.

And here's where my hypocrisy reveals itself: I, too, have occasionally surrendered to the convenience. When I'm too exhausted to craft a professional email, I've fed my thoughts to ChatGPT and let it dress them in corporate politeness. The irony isn't lost on me.

I, who rages against artificial intimacy, still use artificial efficiency when my own emotional reserves run low. Perhaps this is how it happens. Not with fire, not with principle. But with slow erosion, a thousand small surrenders to my laziness.

consideration (2024) by chen zishan, textile work by @griefmother on ig, @9e978e on tumblr.

And so, no one cares. The memo has been sent and it’s missed me. It’s missed me, it’s missed me! I spin around in circles, a hand clutching my hair and thrumming along my scalp as I try to create a hole to let it in. It is so exhausting to have both my mind and heart on fire.

I am living in the gap, or at least it feels that way. I seek out extremes to combat the desolation. I return to my roots of Catholicism—in aesthetics only, not practice—because suffering always becomes more attractive when feeling becomes rare. I reach out, try to find other “memo-missers” to surround myself with, anything to make me feel less untethered. My fingers slip along the rope.

Because, even if everyone does feel this way, no one wants to talk about it. Even here, on Substack, endless notes are complaining about people writing however they like or what they need to. You must be marketable! The crowd screams, and I tear up because I never said I wanted to sell myself.

But sometimes I get evidence that I'm not entirely alone in searching.

Last week, I published a piece of fiction about two ballerinas entangled in a glittering web of a BDSM relationship on another platform. A spiral of obsession that I wrote purely to purge something from my own system. I expected silence, maybe a few polite comments, a few concerned mutuals.

Instead, my inbox flooded with messages from anonymous readers begging for more, asking for recommendations for other works with the same intensity if I wasn’t up to writing a continuation, confessing that my work had ‘made something move inside them’ that they hadn't felt in months.

Nothing read as performative. These were raw confessions from people who recognized their hunger reflected in them. We were both marred with it in the same ways: shriveled lungs, spasming stomachs, pink tongues and brains, rancid emotional breath.

People who had been quietly starving for emotional excess in a world that is teaching them to be satisfied with emotional portion control.

Someone even offered to pay me, which I refused, only because I was unsure of where to take the second part. It was already ten thousand words deep, and they wanted ten thousand words more, maybe beyond that. I’m working on compiling a list of similar content instead.

Still, I wanted to satisfy them.

Take it, I told them. Write the second part. I will read it.

Feed it to me, I answered them, to the back of my throat like a baby bird.

Did you just say I’m an insane cunt? I tease a friend over text.

Are you not? She responds.

More or less.

silver lining, dina broadhurst & pinterest.

Once again, I have no resolution. I know the way the world will evolve.

I don’t even think I’m necessarily against it, but I worry about what we are willing to lose in the name of advancement.

I miss the simplistic times without constant therapy speak, when someone would look at me teary-eyed, having not felt this misconstrued since they were a child. That is what I want. For you to look at me.

The memo missed us. Maybe it always will.

Look at me, eyes gleaming, wet like a lamb, nose twitching as you say, “That really hurt my feelings.”

“Yes,” I will say. I will agree, forehead touching the earth, returned from winter. I will be weeping. “I know.”

Tell me how. Tell me how. Tell me how.

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pieces that have made me feel something lately:

flesh, cars, holes, eyes by

ari

goldenhair by

taylor borcheller

humiston by

taylor borcheller

(a constant re-read)

it follows by

hnwrote

white hot new york summer by

hnwrote

(a constant re-read)

if i have loved you, you are a part of me by

helena

sitting pretty at the bottom of the ocean by

eve

a moth defies helios by

wenyi xue

the blue box and the key by

courtney summers

(a constant re-read)

horse girl by

Joy Sullivan

good girl feels bad by

lindsey peters berg

sorry i missed your call by

kiki.

a letter to recent graduates by

Luisa

how do you cope? by adria

i cannot rationalize discomfort by

nadav

in defense of despair by hanif abdurraqib

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up next ⟢ my favorites of april & may.