tell me how to be human

a one-sided conversation between me, the audience, and me (again)

night and her daughter sleep - mary l macomber

Let’s begin with an anecdote: there was a year when I was a kid where I thought I had been built in a lab. This is the story I invented: when my parents were still working for the government, I was the first attempt at creating artificial intelligence. The result was unsuccessful and my parents took me home with them and pretended I was their child. There’s a good metaphor in there somewhere, I’m sure.

At some point, other kids stopped believing in Santa and I stopped believing I was some super advanced robot. The metaphor stopped being a metaphor and now I use it as a way to avoid saying the words people don’t like hearing. We live in a time where different is no longer synonymous with bad, but the clear division between the “good different” and “bad different” remains. It’s not hard to learn which side of the line I stand on.

Set aside the words for a second. Set aside the need to say “good is subjective.” The things that should be mean nothing in the face of the way things are. You are not bad-different is a separate sentence than the world has told you that you were born wrong. To a built-in-a-lab-child, the difference is a canyon, but the allure of saying “I was born bad-different” remains.

I don’t feel things correctly. (Set aside the need to say “there is no correct way to feel things.”) Grief stopped being an emotion at some point and became a word instead. The word stopped being language and became scientific. The science dictated that grief was a number and the computer-child could only know 0’s and 1’s. There is no gray area between 0 and 1 when you are a computer and if you resist the urge to ask about decimals, you’ll find even those are broken down into binary.

There is a diagnosis for feeling in 1’s and 0’s in the same way there is a diagnosis for everything these days. The doctors create a label and the label finds an identity attached to the patient it is given to. The label finds an identity in all of the patients it is given to. The label begins to lose its identity when the patients take the identity back from it. Sometimes romanticization is a way to survive and sometimes romanticization is theft, but these are also things that aren’t always black and white and I know better than to assign values to emotions outside my range of sight.

I view myself with separation. I am telling a story about myself, but the “about myself” gets lost in quotations. I am telling a story (about myself). The government-experiment-child is fictional, the story grew from a feeling, the feeling becomes fictional alongside the story. This line of logic only works when you remember the experiment was a failure. In memories, I am watching myself from behind. I wonder why it is so hard for me to romanticize and realize it is because I am trying to rewrite, instead. The doctor creates a label and I scribble over it.

A robot can only subsist on the data it is fed in the same way it can only build itself from a blueprint. I am asking you how I can be a person, but my words are a hollow mimicry based on the words that I am fed. A metal-and-wires-child knows repetition in place of innovation and if the right words are said enough, the other children learn to ignore the static. There are ways to hide the metal, there are ways to hide the screws, but if my ribcage becomes exposed, I do not know how to shape the wires into a heart without a manual.

Electricity and blood become equivalent in the metaphor. I tell the same story with one word changed and the story stays the same. We echo the same sentiment when the words are stripped down. I think the story of being a government experiment was more hope than delusion. Give me a reason for this disconnect in translation. When I say “I thought I was built in a lab”, I mean there is a line drawn between me and you. When I say “tell me how to be human”, I mean please say you see it, too.

---