It's AIght
When your spirit guides bring you face to face with AI.
“We’ve completed the medical exam early…” the very kind nurse practitioner moved from behind her computer towards me.
I was still wiping away tears.
“It’s exhilarating to work in this space, there is no greater feeling than the joy of building,” I confessed, “but look at me… I’m not well. I managed to get shingles not even 6 weeks in… it’s my head, I’m always anxious. I thought I was meant for growth stage companies, but clearly I’m not.”
The pattern had resurfaced.
I had followed my joy, my yearning, the synchronicities, my tarot spreads, my inner knowing…
And yet, here I was again. Sick and in tech.
I felt panicked. After all this time, was I still hearing my guides wrong?
(FWIW, if there was ever a mindset to get someone sick, I think it’s this sense of self-doubt, of “I’m in the wrong place again” right when the journey gets murky).
Back to the nurse’s office…
“May I offer you some advice? I hate to do that, but in this case, I feel compelled…”
I nodded hungrily.
“You’re not too old. I’ve been a nurse my whole career. I’ve had to get certified and re-certified tons of times. Every time they invent new stuff for us nurses to learn. And at some point, all the doctors I work for have become younger.”
Just like that, I felt I understood.
This nurse had re-tuned me.
It’s just a setback, not a sign.
I took her advice and prescription for the shingles, notified my team (who seemed fine with it), and rested in bed.
Rest and recovery was also hard.
My husband missed hanging out with me. I missed the fresh air.
My job still asked that I work some hours, even if from bed.
The first weekend, feeling so restless, I took a 10-minute walk with my husband to the T-Mobile.
The fresh air will be good for us. Plus, I want to see the phone in-person before getting it.
“We don’t carry Motorolas in this location,” the apathetic salesperson told us, as we dripped rain on the linoleum floors. He couldn’t check inventory at other locations either.
The rain felt colder on the walk back.
Stuck in bed, I considered the counterfactual: What if I was meant to take on a quieter life? Be just a practicing psychic?
The very next reading I had was my absolute worst one.
The person wanted me to convince them of my ability.
No, tell me more. That could be anything.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I offered.
“I’m not disappointed, I just want you to be more specific,” They chortled. Some people buy front row seats, just so they can point out the imperfections.
I restated what I saw, firmly; soon enough the reading ended. I asked my guides to remember the tone of that person’s energy, and never let it back in my space again.
The snow continued its chaotic dance with the wind, banging up against my window from time to time, through the night.
Days later, I was on a call with another friend, “chin up… when I joined early facebook… those kids were all younger, too, and I made it.”
It’s interesting who ends up available to me during a crisis, and what they have to say.
When I started the bad work weeks, I never once thought the thing that made them bad was my own mindset.
Yes, I guess this is what aging feels like… one day, everyone gets younger. It’s not the end of the world.
Displacement and loneliness show up sometimes, the dance doesn’t have to be permanent.
I received whatever phone calls, overdue catch-ups, coffee dates came my way that week.
Encouragement breadcrumbs eventually led to practical breadcrumbs.
“Listen,” an exec friend said, “you need to be taking AI seriously… not for editing copy. Consider this: What if there was AI doing work for you 24/7 while you got rest and sleep?”
Bingo. A stirring in my belly.
Huh. What an interesting thought.
Until then I had only ever heard friends rant about slop, and random use-cases myself.
My lived in experience was the opposite: When a survey needs to be shipped to help make decisions the next day, it’s my 11pm brain that’s creating slop.
By the weekend, my husband (an engineer) had taught me how to train custom GPTs. Imagine, mini robot Oras, trained on my own past work, that can spin up surveys, roadmaps, interview guides, in exactly my style, tone and preferences, on the spot.
In an instant, I crushed those 11pm survey slop scaries.
Next up, I may look into agents.
I did wonder if this was the correct nudge from the invisible side…
By Monday, I had a breakthrough.
My boss loved my gpt-crafted updates to her, far better than my human updates.
How remarkable.
More than that, I was able to ship studies in real time, and help my teams make decisions in days. For the past 20+ years, this used to take weeks, months, what felt like centuries.
It dawned on me by that Wednesday that I had been the one who wanted to move at this pace my whole career.
This is what I’ve been waiting for…
I started sleeping again. The shingles is in recovery.
The negative mindset is still there, but I’m composting it faster each day.
All I know is that I am enjoying myself and getting caught up in it again…
