My latest excuse for not posting online is that I don’t want to feed the LLMs. I figure if I post something on the internet it’s fair game; the AI goblins will surely gobble it up and spit it out as some Foundmercified version of whatever ugliness it reflects back at the fools who eat up its psuedo-psychobabble.

I am rusty. That’s the real reason I don’t write much: I try to put out something meaningful and it either feels disjointed or smacks of the social media I spent too many hours consuming. I haven’t read enough real books lately. I discovered Substack in the last year, and while at first I was thrilled with the longer form content I quickly got sucked into the Notes page and scroll-scroll-scrolled my brain to mush.

My brain isn’t mush, but it is moving slower. I have so many thoughts, but everything else takes precedence. Part of that is as it should be. I take care of more than a few people; I have some special needs to tend to among my charges and myself as well. I do wonder if my soul wouldn’t benefit from a bit more of this, however. Simply the tactile experience of typing scratches an itch I sometimes believe will drive me up a wall and is often left un-scratched.

My latest thought is about confirmation bias, and how if I am not guarding against it, I can wreck my mental state before I have had a chance to get out of bed in the morning. The tricky thing is remembering that a large portion of what occurs around us and even towards us is neutral; we assign meaning to events based on our preconceived beliefs.

For example, I want to believe that my children arguing with each other is evidence that I am a horrible person whose influence they should be far removed from. (My English teacher would fix that sentence; I know it’s clunky.) The truth is, my children argue with each other for myriad reasons, and my influence is just one factor.

I have wrestled deeply with why I want so much to believe lies about myself, and why it is so difficult to rewrite the scripts. I think the answer is actually stupid simple: I want to believe hurtful things because somewhere along the way those beliefs seemed to help me, and my sin-wrecked body and brain take time to catch up to my renewed soul — because of pride-driven confirmation bias.

I have to have compassion on the dead-and-dying old me, because the new-in-Christ me was only ever rescued by unfathomable mercy. When I catch myself collecting evidence for some garbage belief, I am learning to ask myself, “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not {fill in the blank with just about every hurtful adjective you can imagine}? What if I am who God says I am?”

I can’t jump straight to affirmations. Telling myself I am a new creation doesn’t unravel the yarn. I have to start where I am; if I am in the middle of spinning a tale that depends heavily on me being {insert adjective}, I have to stop it by first asking myself if I’m sure that I’m right.

Confirmation bias isn’t entirely evil; it is a function of our brains’ amazing streamlining abilities. Why question everything all the time? That is exhausting. Eventually, confirmation bias will work in my favor as the lies are less reinforced and the truth becomes the more worn neural pathway.

But in the meantime, maybe I should write and post more because I need to put more evidence out there that God has given me a means to bless people with words. I could use a bit more evidence that, despite being rusty, I still have a gift. I have a purpose beyond meeting the needs of my family — high purpose though that may be, and more than enough if I didn’t possess gifts outside of an ability to tend to needs. (I must say, I do not feel gifted in that at all, actually, but it does feel like a gift to me that I am able to do the laundry, dishes, homeschooling, etc.) Maybe writing and sharing my writing will help me overcome some of my “all I’m good at is cleaning and accounting”, self-protective lies.

But in the meantime, though it’s not much, I do hope this little article blesses someone. If I made you think, or made you laugh, let me know.

SDG