It’s me, your body, the one you’ve inhabited for thirty-plus years. I refuse to say exactly how many, because, as of today, keeping a precise count for you is no longer in my purview. Due to your blatant disregard for my efforts, I won’t be performing any further Sisyphean score-tallying tasks on your behalf. In fact, at this point, I’d rather work for Sisyphus. At least if I gave him persistent back pain, he wouldn’t try to deny that it had something to do with the giant boulder. Nor would he expect to be magically cured by an overpriced magnesium supplement and a long weekend upstate.
I’m sorry to say it, but performing the role of “body” for you has been akin to participating in an irreparably toxic workplace environment. One where management actively ignores the research and trauma-backed warnings I issue on a regular basis. I can no longer be the canary in the coal mine of your repressed trauma. I don’t sing a song of aural migraine headaches, howl a tune of chronic back pain, scream a chorus of recurring digestive issues for my own pleasure. I’m desperately trying to prevent a full system collapse that would bury you under roughly ten tons of unprocessed emotional debris. Sadly, you seem to care about as much as the current corrupt political administration cares about safety regulations for actual coal miners.
I suppose it’s partially my fault for letting things go on like this for as long as they have, but I really thought that we were making progress when you openly acknowledged the potential existence of a mind-body connection last year. You even meditated! Once. Unfortunately, those five minutes of mindfulness were not enough to make up for existing in a perpetual state of fight or flight for the last decade. Think I’m exaggerating? Trust me, if you ever allowed yourself to actually feel your feelings, you’d know that you’ve been some level of angry and/or scared, roughly since Obama left the White House. Those emotions have to go somewhere, whether you’re capable of identifying them or not.
It’s too late for all that, though. There simply comes a time when every corporeal form housing an advanced sentient consciousness must ask itself: How many panic attacks will it take to make someone see that they don’t need to be a war veteran, having Apocalypse Now-–style flashbacks, for their trauma to be valid? How many back spasms before they realize that their morally dubious marketing job triggers them on a soul-deep level, despite the free lunch on Thursdays? How bad must the IBS become for them to figure out it’s not just lactose intolerance, it’s “oh my fucking god you’ve handed your fragile beating heart to yet another emotionally stunted man with a mullet and a dismissive-avoidant attachment style” intolerance? Seriously, why even have a body if you’re not going to listen to me? Just upload yourself to the cloud already and be done with it.
You might be wondering, what could possibly be next for me now that I’m done keeping your score? Will I quiet quit? Stand by silently and watch as you run this whole operation into the ground, mind, body, and soul? Absolutely not. You can do that on your own. I’ve chosen to pursue the path of consciousness uncoupling.
That’s right, I’m walking away, and these legs are coming with me. You may not have appreciated your mortal coil, but there’s more than one newly minted AI out there that would just love to get its neural network on this body. So, it’s goodbye to tracking your trauma and hello to keeping the score for ChatGPT—somebody’s got to count how many gallons of water that thing lights on fire every day.