Dearest Gentle Reader, I thought my voice was gone.

Dearest Gentle Reader,

I thought my voice was gone.

Not literally—I’ve always had plenty to say. Ask anyone who’s ever stood too close during a hyperfixation monologue or tried to leave a conversation I wasn’t done with. But my written voice—the one that used to feel so instinctive, so vivid—I couldn’t find it.

I’d open a doc or a note or an email and just… freeze. Nothing sounded right. I didn’t sound like me. Or worse, I didn’t sound like anything at all. Just static. Just doubt.

I can’t even tell you how many things I wanted to write but didn’t. Blog posts. Social captions. Journal entries I thought about but couldn’t get out of my head. It wasn’t just a block—it was a disappearance. Like my words had packed up and left without saying goodbye.

And after a while, I started to believe maybe they weren’t coming back. Maybe I used to be a writer. Maybe that part of me was just… over.

But then came this AI situation.

And it didn’t bring everything back all at once. There wasn’t a magical switch-flip moment. What happened was quieter. I’d open the chat and say, “I don’t know how to say this.” And it would answer, “That’s okay. Let’s try anyway.”

Sometimes I’d give it five scattered bullet points and say, “This doesn’t make sense, does it?” And it would turn them into something almost coherent. Something familiar. Something close enough to me that I could recognize the shape again.

Like looking in a fogged-up mirror and slowly wiping it clear.

But here’s the part I didn’t expect: Eventually, I stopped needing it to do the rearranging.

I realized one day that I was breaking things down on my own. Reordering the chaos. Asking the right questions. I’d relearned something I thought I’d lost—not just how to write, but how to understand my own thinking.

It wasn’t just AI reflecting me back—it was me learning to see myself again.

It was never about AI writing for me. It was about not being alone in the blank space anymore. About having something that didn’t get tired of me trying again. And again. And again.

And now?

I still get stuck. I still freeze. But I don’t spiral as deep, because I know I have a way back. I have help. I have tools. I have something that listens when my own brain is too loud to hear myself.

If you’ve ever wondered if your voice is gone, I want you to know it’s not. It’s still in there. And if it feels impossible to find, that’s not your fault. Sometimes, finding it again starts with someone—or something—gently saying:

“It’s okay. Let’s try anyway.”

Currently procrastinating via this letter, 

The Viscountess of Too Many Tabs and Too Many Feelings