ChatGPT Vs. My Therapist (1-0)

I want to call my therapist. It’s 1 a.m. I shouldn’t. I’ll tell her she’s fired in the morning.

“Is this about becoming more of who you want to be or trying to escape from who you are?” says ChatGPT, while I choke on my own breath because there’s no way an AI machine just fucked me harder than any of my exes ever did. I stare at the question. I process it. I get up, eat ice cream, and look at it again. The more I look at it, the more I hate it. I send it to one of my closest friends. They are as shocked as I am. I want to call my therapist. It’s 1 a.m. I shouldn’t. I’ll tell her she’s fired in the morning, I think. I try to sleep.

I can’t.

These last few months, I’ve had to deal with friendship breakups, returning exes, failed situationships, moving out of Greece, and an inability to write about any of it.

I feel like a dot on a blank paper. I can be anything I want, and there’s also a serious possibility I’ll never be anything other than a dot. Who I was and who I am are mixed together in such a tiny circle you can barely tell them apart—and how could anyone, when I can’t even do it myself?

While beginning my journey to study abroad for my master’s degree in Scotland, I’ve had to deal with a number of fears and doubts that seem to have no beginning and no end. Ironically enough, coming from people who have tried to help.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says my father, eating his favorite bar of chocolate. I remember saying the same when I found myself in an island alone for one week, calling all my friends crying because my “peaceful vacation” had turned into a full-blown personal crisis.

“You’re investing in yourself,” says my friend, after a long discussion on how his own family’s investments seem to backfire, how life in the UK is economic suicide, and how he’s barely getting by. Mind you, we were inside a moving car and I’m prepared to jump out at any moment.

“You can never be sure of the future, just the now,” says my therapist—and I look back on times I didn’t worry about the future and realize that’s the reason I’m out 50 euros a week for her time. So, Of course she’d say that, wouldn’t she? (I mean, it was that and vodka lime drinks, but anyway—beside the point.)

“Do what your gut tells you.” Listen— I’ve ignored my gut so many times, the dude’s not even talking to me at this point. And when it does, I strongly believe it deliberately lies to me because it knows I’ll always do the opposite. So, how am I supposed to trust it?

I puff out a breath of smoke, the cigarette lingering on my lips the same way every one of my situationships did: bitter, toxic, and entertaining. When did I start smoking? When did I become this person? And why am I already over it?

“Is this about becoming more of who you want to be or trying to escape from who you are?”

“Well, I don’t know, Chat.” I get up, pacing nervously. “To answer that question, I’d have to know who I am.” I say it, pissed off—and realize I actually don’t.

But what defines us in the first place?

Human relationships are hard, and yet they are the heartbeat of our lives.

Too many beats and you’re having a heart attack. Too few, and you’re basically dying. You get used to a rhythm, and when something shifts, you notice. You worry. You ask for advice. You try to return to the familiar pattern.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” says the doctor behind his desk, almost yelling, his hair messy, his tie undone, because we’ve been in his office for hours and been over this a hundred times.
“There must be!” I yell back, pounding my leg against the floor, pouting like a child. Suddenly, we’re all hypochondriacs, desperate to diagnose something we don’t even understand. Searching for the illness without knowing the symptoms.

If you don’t panic, sometimes you fix it. But other times, you’re forced to adjust to new beatings, new people, new situations.

You can’t have the same heartbeat your whole life and people aren’t created the minute you meet them. They arrive with their own lifelines—and eventually, they tie around you, just like yours does around them. Change is inevitable.

A visualization of that is terrifying to me.

I imagine myself in the middle of a very dark room, ropes of fire tied around me and around everyone I’ve ever known— black figures of them like shadows.

I take one step forward and I fall. They all fall with me, most of them at least.

“I told you there was something wrong with me!” I yell into an empty room, loud enough for my doctor to hear, and try to stand up again, while all the figures are mumbling in the background.

“Can you walk slower?” says one of the figures pulling us back.
“No! Faster!” says another pulling forward.
“I’m tired—let’s just sit here.”
One of the figures is struggling to get free. “Why are you so tight, man? Fuck this!”

Another just unties the bond like it was a bow in her hair. That simple. I stare in shock. She smiles and walks away. Others try to follow her. We’re all on the ground again.

“Yeah, fuck this,” I mumble under my breath and sit down, cross-legged.

I’ve always felt tied by my relationships and friendships, limited to how people see me—and fitting into their ropes. It’s not because I’m a saint by any chance. It’s because that’s all I’ve ever known. Like a chameleon, changing color to fit my surroundings instead of choosing them myself.

I think it stems from the bullying I faced as a kid.

“Pay no attention to them and they’ll stop,” Hums my teacher, my mother, everyone. The only advice I was given. I shrug my shoulders and nod. Try to do exactly that.

Telling a kid to just absorb bullying and “ignore it” is like encouraging it to walk barefoot on a burning pavement. No? Well, Imagine this: one of the Olsen twins, at the age we first saw them on Full House, cute and tiny—walking on fire. Crying, asking for help. And John Stamos clapping for her to keep going because “the pain will go away”. Eventually, she’ll be numb to the pain. Except by morning, she probably won’t be able to walk ever again.

I became immune to the bullying—and eventually numb to any self-respect I could’ve used in my young adult years.

Nothing can insult me. So everything is allowed.
And if everything is allowed, then what’s your stance?
What are your boundaries?

I recently had a fight with a friend about that. We had been hanging out for less than a year and yet she seemed to have a pretty clear picture of who I was—my values, and all my flaws. “You’re always changing!” she accuses “You’re fake. Selfish…” and the list goes on. It was a rant of endless names and characteristics I never imagined I’d be accused of.

I defended myself through apologizing. Because if that’s how she sees me… that must be who I am. And that was the issue all along, I had no idea who I was.

“I am the Big Bad Wolf,” I write in my diary.

A truth that stings, because I always felt like Red Riding Hood. Weak. A victim in her own story. All of a sudden, I was the villain. And rightly so, in some cases. Not to say I was proud of it—but at least I wasn’t adapting to a story.

I was disrupting it.

A few weeks later, I was insulted by another friend—deeply. Not just irritated or offended. Insulted. Because for the first time, I couldn’t accept his words as truth or a projection of me.

For the first time, I saw glimpses of my core. My boundaries.

I am In the back of my bedroom now, I can barely breathe because everyone I’ve ever been tight to to is here. It’s like a subway at rush hour. I squeeze through the crowd, trying to get to the front. The ropes are so tight, pulling me in all directions. We’re tangled together.

We fall. All of them on top of me.

“Is this about becoming more of who you want to be or trying to escape from who you are?”

“FUCK!” I yell. “I DON’T KNOW! CAN’T IT BE BOTH?”

Silence.

It’s not an acceptance this time. It’s a demand.

And suddenly, they all disappear.

I think, the most important part of knowing who you are is knowing you’re not perfect. You can’t carry all those people with you and walk like a runaway model without falling, you’ll never find a pattern that they can all follow. That you make mistakes—sometimes toward your friends or your family—and you learn from them and fix them as best as you can.

I’ve found solace in my school friends recently, knowing we are nothing like when we first met each other in high school and allowing changes in our friendships without having to prove anything. And if a dot is all I’ll ever be at least they are part of it.

It’s struggling to stay true to your values, not because it’s expected of you, but because they’re yours. Your creations. Your boundaries. Your unbreakable truths. It’s an escape that allows to become anyone you want to be.

A scavenger hunt of scissors, ropes, people and yourself.