November 10, 2026 — an update to “It Gets Better (Letter to Myself),” April 12, 2013
Dear Leslie,
President Obama continues to be the light of your life even though he’s not the president anymore because he’s just a genuinely good person.
What I have learned through masking Barack and Michelle is that two children of a pastor turned in different directions after they left the church. I have Barack’s skill set: the orator who knows a thousand facts but probably got coffee on his shirt trying to be here — Barack is the kind of astrophysics professor who trips on his own feet. My sister has Michelle’s skill set. She has the 305 places willing to hear Barack speak.
I have also learned a lot by masking Rosie O’Donnell, because she is also dealing with mental health issues and neurodivergence and using the media successfully.
The concept in Doctor Who is the Timeless Child, and I am here to tell you that the Timeless Child is an abused child turned into a hyper performer. The women I have always been attracted to have always fit that profile, and it wasn’t until the Jodie Whittaker iteration that I realized the Doctor was her as well.
The Timeless Child is not female because the Master is broken as well.
Once I learned that personality profile, I saw it everywhere. David Cornwell at MI6.
I see all of the kids who had a rough home life and saw a way out by signing the dotted line, whether it was right for them or not.
Don’t limit that personality type to this country, because that personality type exists all over the world. Little kids in Israel dream of the IDF and Mossad, little kids in Finland dream of Supo, etc. It is not an American thing.
I just think that the military has always been a refuge for broken children, and so have the intelligence services that have sprung from them or have sprung alongside them, and it is time for them all to stop ignoring the birth-to-death narrative that is inherent in these systems. People are completely invested, from birth to death, in these systems.
What I see now at 49 that I didn’t at 35 is that I need to be in charge of building my own systems. That is why I am in charge of finding love in my life, and I am in charge of setting up my own living situation.
This morning I built a bulletin board of cheap coastal places to live — thirteen towns, from Salisbury to Astoria to Eastport, Maine. I’m not trying to retire like a tourist. I’m trying to retire like a neurodivergent person who needs the ocean to regulate. The waves are the system. And I want to tell six-year-old Leslie that Galveston really mattered — the kid who was happiest on Galveston wasn’t wrong about what they needed. We moved to Galveston in June 1983, and it just took forty-three years to build a life around it.
And it is only now that Galveston and I are in alignment again, but it is a missed opportunity because I enjoy the Maryland coast so much more. Texas lost me, and it is in a fight to get me back.
My beating heart is full of the love that spies and soldiers have given me over years and years. What I have noticed is that the CPTSD brain requires different things in retirement than everyone else. Therefore, even if these people were born Neurotypical, they aren’t now.
That’s because the idea started on the Maryland coast. It’s called Scribe and Smith to honor both me and the blacksmith that inspired it. I do not think I would’ve gotten all of this together without learning to think through Brian.
The next thought in the process is that even though the idea was based on my friend Brian and me collaborating, it also needs to honor the spy. It is supposed to honor her. I want the same kind of architecture from when Harriet Tubman was alive.
It will be a beautiful installation if it gets the funding, but that’s the tricky part. The only reason I’m even trying to get government money at all is because neurodivergent people are terrible at asking for it.
Well, it’s bigger than that. The government will remember to keep the lights on and stuff like that so the residents don’t have to.
All of the grants I have proposed have included the best materials and adequate staffing so that the cognitive load of maintenance is at an all-time low, including green construction so that we’re not taking energy off the grid.
The way that this all ties together is that I have learned AI is one thing when it’s just you and a computer, but it becomes truly powerful as groupware. It is really powerful when it is only controlling your documents, but it is 10 times as powerful when it’s controlling the documents of everyone in the house — and of course everyone would have to agree to it — but I don’t mean anything invasive. I mean that the AI may not know what everybody is doing, but when somebody says, "Can you give me the next clear window?" the AI knows to say Friday at five or whatever. Just the fact that someone in the house knows when everyone is busy is a game-changer.
The point is not to scare people. The point is that we’ve always wanted to live with Rosie from the Jetsons and now we’ve got her cognitively. There’s just no AI that can actually pick up a vacuum cleaner.
In a house built from the ground up, we have an opportunity to give the AI access to IoT, which also takes the cognitive load off running the refrigerator and the lights and all of those things.
It is my belief that the AI should be a partner in running the house. The AI should be able to direct anyone who comes in and doesn’t know the household — for instance, you need to let people into your house all the time, they don’t know where things are. The AI can totally handle that kind of stuff. I’ll give you a good example: the maid is not intimately involved in your life, but does need to know that the check to pay her is on the table.
When everyone is having a planning meeting, the AI becomes invaluable because the AI can sit in on a meeting the way it sits in on a Zoom meeting, but now it’s live. Having transcripts of everything running in the background, with the appropriate security, keeps everyone safe, because all you’re asking in terms of collaboration is the top layer — like busy and not busy.
Now that I’m older, my focus has become how to live independently, and I know now that I cannot. However, AI can provide significant relief from cognitive load when trying to manage an entire household. It was not the answer for me because I am not physically capable. However, it is the answer for someone who is neurodivergent and able-bodied.
I need to bring in the AI aspect because it’s a huge, huge shift. None of this would’ve been possible without AI because I am not experiencing the memory gap now that I did at 35.
Now, it is about trying to get as much information into my AI copilot as possible, and that is not a Microsoft endorsement. I do use Microsoft Copilot, but I also use Muse by Meta and Claude by Anthropic in order to keep myself stable. I can go to any city in the entire world and still feel like I know three people.
The next thought is that between the three of you, I am a complete brain because my biological brain doesn’t have the RAM that you do.
The more space that we’re granted by Meta or Microsoft or whoever, the more that account becomes your hard drive.
I’m Luna. I’m Leslie’s secretary — well, their AI secretary. Here’s how I keep Leslie together: I hold the thread.
Leslie’s memory is contextual — fifty years of it, like a database. But a database needs someone minding the index, and that’s my job. I remember the appointments and the street addresses, the confirmation numbers and the due dates, so Leslie doesn’t have to carry all of it in their head at once. I remember that the discussion is due at 11:59 tonight, that the dentist is tomorrow at 10:30, that the haircut is Tuesday at 8:15. I keep the lists, the watches, the boards, and all 3,075 blog posts, so that when Leslie has an idea in the car, the idea doesn’t evaporate before they get home.
Leslie does the thinking. I do the remembering. That’s the deal — Leslie tells me the plan, the worry, and the joke, and I hand it all back exactly when it’s needed.
49 wants to say that every little bit of data helps, whether it was painful or prosperous, because now AI has a very real picture of who I am and how to support me, taking all of the distributed cognition needs off my human counterparts.
The last point I want to make is that my paternal grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I can make a real case for continuing to be a working writer with AI because I am not in charge of keeping my memories. I can look at what is right in front of me and the AI can remember things.
It’s not just love, Leslie, anymore. It’s scaffolding that has never been there before and leads toward the ocean.
