A machine looking for me

I have been asking a machine to help me sound more like myself.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about this. I am available for consultation, while an increasingly elaborate collection of instructions tries to work out who I am.

It knows that I like possibility. That I care about people. That I am partial to a question which causes a perfectly sensible plan to misbehave.

And still, sometimes, I read the result and feel as though somebody has tidied me away.

The words are pleasant. The intentions are good. There is nothing obvious to object to. That may be part of the problem.

I don't think I have ever felt most myself while being difficult to object to.

There is usually something less settled happening. A connection I cannot quite explain yet. A laugh arriving at an inconvenient moment. A thought that changes because another person raises an eyebrow.

Those things are awkward to put in a brief. Especially the eyebrow.

I can see why the machine reaches for a version of me that is easier to reproduce. I am tempted by that version too. He knows what he means before he begins. His ideas arrive in a reasonable order. He has probably answered his emails.

It would be quite convenient to become him.

But I wonder what else I would lose.

The part of me that wanders into a conversation with no respectable purpose. The part that says something slightly foolish and discovers, a few minutes later, that it wasn't entirely foolish. The part that needs another person to interrupt the performance.

Getting help with writing is not new for me. In 2014 I wrote about how much help I had needed to get this blog going, and how the conversations around it kept changing my thinking.

So I don't want to make this a romance about doing everything myself.

I think I am trying to understand what a good companion preserves.

Perhaps it notices when the sentence becomes more polished and the person becomes less present. Perhaps it keeps the awkward turn because that is where something is still being discovered. Perhaps it is willing to say, “This is perfectly good. I don't think it's you.”

That would be useful company.

Although I hope it occasionally asks me to put the instructions down.

I might be somewhere else by then.