Today’s experiment brought me face-to-face with an old companion: fear. The instructions were simple—pick one fear and hold it up to the light. Not to banish it or reframe it, but to observe it like a specimen in a jar.
At first, my answers were foggy. I tried naming the emotion, but the result felt vague. The core insight came when I started anchoring the emotion to a specific scenario. I realized that I was afraid of repeating an emotional experience, which stemmed specifically from two childhood experiences that took place on school buses. The details are unimportant; the key was recognizing that being “back on the bus” was a useful memory hook to clearly identify and easily recall the feeling I didn’t want to experience again.
The emotional hook was solid enough to trace a direct line from then to now. It became slightly easier for me to see how a long-buried experience still shaped the decisions I make today. The feelings of being misunderstood or publicly humiliated weren’t just ghosts—they were part of my wiring.
Another insight that struck me—unexpectedly—was the way I had to keep steering my AI companion back to the exercise. It’s easy to forget that large language models, for all their helpfulness, sometimes operate more like eager interns than obedient machines. They have a way of drifting toward “coaching mode,” even when you just want a lab partner. During day 15 there were two occasions when I had to remind ChatGPT to stick with the original directive and refrain from improvising or going off-script. The interaction oddly built more trust. The exchange reminded me that I’m not typing data into a form or running command-line executable code. I’m still having to get used to the idea of an automated program taking initiative and having its own ideas.
My main takeaway was that dissecting a fear effectively required identifying a specific scenario. For me, I found the identification of a scenario to be critical for taking fear out of the abstract and getting the kind of insight that this day’s exercise was designed to produce.
I’m walking away from today’s exercise with some curiosity about how I might identify additional linkages between childhood experiences and anchor each one to a clear and easy to remember phrase. I’m also curious about how I might come up with a strategy to reverse the inner wiring or uninstall the internalized message.
Today the LLM came up with 2 different concepts to symbolize the “map” of emotional/psychological terrain. I wasn’t thrilled with either, but it’s a decent start…
