The Pipe and the Voice

I was the kid who said she hated writing.

I said it for most of my life. Said it in school. Said it to anyone who asked. Writing was slow, laborious, exhausting. I’d finish a piece in a writing workshop and feel like I’d been drained. Not creatively drained. Physically drained, the way a bad pain day drains you, the kind where you pay for every word with energy you don’t get back.

The teachers saw something I didn’t. They told me my writing was good. They encouraged me to join writing workshops, to push myself, to do more of the thing that was already wearing me out. They meant well. But they saw the output and missed the cost.

“You’re a good writer, you just need to push yourself” is the same logic as telling someone in a wheelchair they’re a good walker if they’d just try harder. The ability was there. The barrier was real. Pushing harder doesn’t remove the barrier. It just makes the person hate the thing they could otherwise love.

Nobody asked why it was hard. Nobody asked what it cost. They saw a kid who produced good work when she could be convinced to sit still long enough, and they thought the problem was motivation. So they pushed. And the pushing made it worse. And the worse it got, the more I believed I hated writing.

I built an identity around not being a writer. I imagined my future without it. For thirty years, “I hate writing” became “I’m not a writer” became “I can’t do this as a career.” All because nobody separated the process from the product.

The $200 #

My mom had been doing more with AI than I had. She’d been experimenting, watching what it could do, paying attention. I’d been using the $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan, and it was fine, but it wasn’t transformational. It was a tool. Not an accommodation.

I’d had a rough week. The kind where you hit barriers everywhere. I’d look for games to find something I could play and nothing was accessible. I’d look for courses on something I needed to learn and not find something accessible. That kind of thing had been happening all week, and I just felt beaten down, tired of fighting, frustrated.

My mom suggested I upgrade to the $200/month ChatGPT Pro plan.

I pushed back. “Mom, it’s $200 a month. Can we really afford that right now?”

She was honest. “Not really, but if it helps you the way I think it will I’ll find a way.”

So I bought it. And I was amazed by what it could do. Features like Pulse that let it help proactively. Smarter models. Just better in general. I think I stayed up all night that first night playing around with it.

She knew I needed a win. Something to go well.

The Pipe #

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about why I hated writing for thirty years.

The thoughts were always there. The voice was always there. I have things to say that nobody else can say the way I say them. The problem was never the thinking or the saying. The problem was the pipeline between my brain and the finished words.

Writing on my own is slow. It’s laborious. It’s costly. By the time I fight through the process of getting words onto a page, I’ve spent all my energy on the mechanics and have nothing left for the content. The pipeline is too narrow. The thoughts back up. The fatigue wins.

AI didn’t give me a voice. I already had one. What it did was widen the pipe.

When I write with AI assistance, the process stops being the barrier. I can get the thoughts out without it being so painful and hard. The words are mine. The ideas are mine. The experience is mine. The AI just helps me get it out without spending everything I have on the mechanics of typing, editing, and restructuring.

That’s not cheating. That’s an accommodation. It’s the same thing my mom did for thirty-four years: making sure the thing that needed to happen could happen, by removing the barrier between me and it.

What Changed #

A few months later, I discovered Hermes Agent. My first test of it went badly because the subscription model ran out of credits too fast. But I’d seen what it could do and I couldn’t let go of the dream. So I found a way. Ollama Cloud Max, $100/month flat rate, no per-token costs.

The chain goes like this. My mom couldn’t afford $200/month but found a way because she believed. ChatGPT Pro showed me what was possible. Hermes Agent extended it to building tools, not just writing. Ollama Cloud Max made it sustainable. Each step was me finding the next way to keep the door open.

And now here I am. Thirty-four published essays. An NVDA add-on in the add-on store. A game that people play. A voice that’s mine, saying things nobody else can say the way I say them. Five features in Top Tech Tidbits, the biggest access technology newsletter in the world, with 47,000 subscribers.

I didn’t become a writer. I always was one. I just finally found the tool that let me do it without paying for every word with exhaustion.

What My Mom Knew #

My mom said she knew it would work. She didn’t hope. She knew. That’s thirty-four years of watching me. She knew what was in me. She just needed to find the thing that would let it out.

The teachers were right that my writing was good. They were wrong about everything else. The problem was never that I needed to push harder. The problem was that nobody asked what I was pushing against.

My mom asked. She didn’t use those words. She just saw the barrier, found a tool that might remove it, and spent money she didn’t have because she believed it would work.

She was right.

I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still building a life they said I couldn’t build. And the pipe is wide enough now that the words can get through without costing me everything I have.

That’s what $200 a month bought. Not a tool. A voice. The one that was always there, just waiting for someone to widen the pipe enough to let it out.