No Filter, No AI, No Adderall, Just Me

Haven’t even brushed my teeth yet. No coffee in my brain. This is the messy spill of my mind as it turns on for the day.

The Cavs lost last night. I’ve never been a sports fan. Growing up in New York, I watched baseball and loved the Yankees because on Staten Island, Yankee fandom is heritage. Kris, however, grew up in Cleveland. The land of second chances. Believeland. Watching his team lose touches something tender in him, and maybe I’ll never understand it fully, but I’ll sit in the ache with him.

I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot recently. For cooking dinner, helping me organize my day, giving me writing prompts, helping me brainstorm. I plug everything I write into it to see what it says. I let it play editor, but it steals my voice out of it. Sure, there are some spelling and grammatical improvements that I wouldn’t have seen, but there’s a big part of human writing that it doesn’t understand. There’s a humanness in imperfection. Yet here I am, backspacing sentence after sentence because I want the next line to make sense. To fit just right. To be perfect. It’s ironic.

Maybe that’s the X factor, though. The struggle. What comes with backspace after backspace, words forged in fire. AI can’t hate itself into greatness the way I can.

Before I got sober, I had to battle against Adderall-tinged writing. Adderall was my secret weapon, the way I got all of my As. Maybe there was a time period where AI was that for some college student. I don’t mean they were using it out of laziness. I never used Adderall out of laziness. But they’re using it because they hate what comes out when it’s just them, just me, alone with a blank page, free of any game-enhancing substances.

I don’t crave alcohol that much, rarely ever. A few times here and there over the past eight years, of course. But what I struggle against most is the drugs. I loved Adderall. It made me feel as though all of my shortcomings were filled in, and for a while, I was a whole person worth talking to, an author worth reading.

When does someone become an author? Is it a job title bestowed once you’re published? Or am I an author today just because I write? I can hear some snide published writer speaking under his breath at a party. “He’s not really an author. He self-published, after all.”

Sometimes I wonder if we’d have fewer people getting through medical school and law school if they tested students for Adderall usage without a prescription. That’s tough too, though. I literally Googled “Adderall doctor NYC” and got myself a prescription that way. Staff doctors? There has to be a way to test. I’m just being petty now. Jealous that my Adderall usage didn’t get me into or through law school, but wound me up in a tech startup sales role. What’s interesting is I crushed it as an SDR when I was using, but I remember my first sales call as an Account Executive that I took solo. It was a mess. I rambled on and on. I had no direction, no idea what I was doing. The Adderall made it all worse. So much worse. I got sober just a couple of weeks after that, and most of the training and experience I’ve had as an Account Executive has, thankfully, been earned as a sober woman.

I excel with soft skills. I owe a lot of my sales career to that. Countless times, managers and interviewers have told me I have “what can’t be taught.” I’m in the right spot. Sales is where I’m meant to be, even if it doesn’t feel that way all the time. Sometimes it feels like torture. Imagine someone like me, with as much self-doubt as I have, being put into a role where my ability to communicate and be nice to people directly determines how much money I bring home. There are a lot of uncontrollable variables in sales. Sometimes it’s just not going to happen. I joke, the only other thing I can do at this point is apply for a job and sign the contract myself. It still hurts, though. Upper management doesn’t like that. So I have to sell internally what happened, what went wrong, what I’m doing to fix it. In order to get through all of that, I have to sell to myself that I’m doing my best, and that’s all I can offer. What a crock. It’s not, though. I love making money. I love going on nice vacations, being able to buy nice gifts for my family, and now, being able to give my daughter the best childhood possible and all the advantages that I possibly can.

She’s crying now. Just woke up from her morning nap. It’s sunny today. From here, I’ll take her on a walk. I’ll brainstorm some ideas for how we can spend the rest of the day, spending time together between my projects. The bookcases. Baking scones for the neighbor. Doing her laundry. Preparing for my parents to come visit this weekend. I miss sales. I miss working. Don’t get me wrong. If our financial situation could stay the way it is without me working, I’d stay home with her every day in a heartbeat. That isn’t our reality, though. It would be selfish of me to cut our income in half just to fulfill a dream I had for years she won’t remember. So the plan is to work on creating passive revenue streams over the next 10 to 12 years that would allow me to stay home with the kids for a couple of years at that point. Because what teenager doesn’t want to spend time with their mom?

Dreams are absolutely necessary. They are the stars we reach for, and in the stretch, something close sometimes falls out. So even though my fingertips are grazing the corona, I will take the version of this life that makes the most sense for my family. Flexibility doesn’t mean giving up. It means I am not God. I cannot rearrange the stars. I’m close enough. I’m in the neighborhood. And for me, that is enough.

I’ll still bust my ass to bring in the big checks and get there faster. But I won’t take this slight delay as failure. It’s just a different version of the dream. And who knows, maybe they’ll need me more then than they do now.