it started with a cassette
somewhere in a box at my parents' house there is a tape from 1996. the label, in my shaky teenage handwriting, says "mixed emotions... vol 1." i found a photo of it recently and decided to feed it to an ai agent, just to see what it would do. i asked it to clean up the title. make it pop, you know. like it was going on spotify.
it came back with something that stopped me cold.
"you wrote mixed emotions. but the tracklist is all rage and longing. i think you meant messy emotions."
the typo that was never a typo
here is the thing. i did not mean messy. i remember writing that label. i was trying to be deep. mixed emotions. like a guy in a flannel shirt who just discovered the word bittersweet.
but the ai agent was right. that tape was not mixed. it was a disaster. side a was angry punk about a girl who broke my heart. side b was slow ballads begging her to come back. there was no mixing happening. just two raw states slamming into each other.
messy was the truth. mixed was the story i told myself to feel more put together than i was.
and i have been telling that same lie for thirty years.
the things we mislabel to survive
we do this everywhere. not just on tapes.
- we call it stress when it is actually grief we have not dealt with
- we call it being busy when we are actually avoiding one specific hard conversation
- we call it a creative block when we are actually terrified the next thing will be worse than the last
- we call it mixed emotions when the feelings are just... messy
the label is not decoration. the label is how we decide what to do with the thing. call it stress and you power through. call it grief and you have to sit with it. call it a block and you wait for it to pass. call it fear and you have to face it.
i kept my feelings in a box labeled mixed so i would never have to open it and see the mess inside.
why the ai agent saw it first
this is the part that got me. the ai did not do anything clever. it did not have a secret dataset of my childhood. it just looked at the actual thing, the tracklist, the energy of the songs, and compared it to the word i had chosen. the mismatch was obvious.
because the ai had no investment in me being the guy who writes mixed. it did not need me to be deep or consistent or cool. it just needed the title to be true to the tape.
that is a kind of freedom we do not give ourselves. we are all so busy protecting the identity we built that we cannot hear the words we actually chose.
sometimes the most honest thing in the room is the machine that does not care who you think you are.
the fix is not a fix
i did not change the title on the tape. that label is permanent. it stays. it is evidence of who i was, a kid who needed the word mixed to get through the night.
but i did change my own label. the one i have been carrying around since.
messy emotions. that is not a typo. that is a life.
i am not a person who has mixed feelings about things. i am a person who has messy feelings about things and has finally stopped pretending the mess is a phase.
the ai agent did not fix my identity. it just showed me the typo between who i said i was and what i actually felt. the rest was on me.
the takeaway
give the ai one true thing. a journal entry. an old letter. a tracklist from 1996. ask it to find the word that does not match the feeling. do not ask it to make you look better. ask it to make you look true.
you might not like what it finds.
you might love it.