How this started
Post 001
I'm storyboarding my painful, abusive, traumatic, ongoing dumpster fire of a marriage to let robots cosplay me. What a time to be alive.
Here's what happened this weekend. I exported every text message from my eleven-year marriage. 600,000 of them. Loaded them into a CSV. Then I spent two days writing rules — not stories, not scripts — rules. Rules for how an AI should read my messages month by month without knowing where the story goes. Rules for how it should find the moments that matter without me telling it which ones hurt.
The idea is simple and also completely unhinged: take the entire text record of my real, actual marriage, feed it to an AI that has no idea what's coming, and let it build the narrative around the messages. The texts are verbatim. The connective tissue — the scenes between the notifications — that's the AI's imagination, informed by the record but explicitly not my assertion of what happened. I'm the editor. The curator. Not the narrator.
Why? Partly because the record deserves to exist as something other than evidence in a custody case. Partly because I'm six figures in debt from a partnership that took a few too many turns, not to mention impending divorce legal fees and, frankly, I need help. Partly because I think there's something genuinely valuable in showing what a relationship actually looks like from the inside — not the curated version, not the therapist's summary, not the polished, perfect Instagram facade. The actual texts. The 2am fights. The apologies that got copy-pasted so many times they lost their meaning. The Tuesday afternoons where everything felt fine and you can't figure out how it all went so wrong.
My career has primarily been in marketing. I studied PR. The irony of spending a decade professionally managing other people's narratives while my own life was falling apart in private is not lost on me. I crisis-communicated myself into loneliness and isolation. Nobody knew, because I'm very good at my job.
So now I'm doing the opposite. I'm letting the record speak. I'm letting an AI — which has no dog in this fight, no ego, no need to make me look good — tell the story. And I'm not going to tell you my name, because this isn't about me. It's about what happened. And whether any of it sounds familiar.
The pipeline works like this: the AI reads one month at a time, completely blind to the future. It doesn't know about the addiction. It doesn't know about the affairs. It doesn't know about the separation. It analyzes each month like a researcher encountering the data for the first time — communication patterns, emotional texture, key exchanges, the metadata signals hiding in read receipts and deleted messages.
Then, once every month has been processed, a second pass maps the full arc. Where do the chapters break? Where are the inflection points nobody saw coming? Where does the density of pain get so thick that one month needs three episodes and another needs half of one?
As of this moment, after spending literally all day with Claude Code running, I'm 77 months in. 49 to go. The AI doesn't know what's coming. Neither did I.
More soon. But in the meantime, while the frame story will be fabricated, the people who wrote these messages are very real. And so is the enormous financial pressure that has been a continuous, unwelcome third wheel for this wild ride. Anything you're able to give is tremendously helpful. In producing this project. In paying for rent. In feeding my children. You get it.