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2 hours ago
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If you know me, you know there is nothing in my life that I have been able to care about a lukewarm amount. I personally believe the concept of that is overrated. You only get one life, bleed passion in all directions. Anyways, this mentally often leads to passionate high rewarding highs, but also equally strong negative emotions. For everything is always a double edged sword. If you always have your heart on your sleeve, sometimes its gonna get stuck in the car door, or whatever the idiom is. To cope with these grandiose emotions that feel bigger than me and time itself, I have for the last 5 years kept a journal that details everything from what is happening in my day, in the world, my thoughts on both everything and nothing at once and everything in between.
I finally got around to programming something that could successfully read and handwriting and then hooking it up with a few LLM’s that can take the thousands of pages of handwritten scrawling. Anyways, I found some of the findings interesting and wanted to share, and because its my blog, I did just that.
Warning: I think that its a really fast way to piss yourself off fast tbh. I promised to only ask it high level questions and then it quickly snowballed into asking hyper-specific questions that I knew would make me upset, and got an answer that promptly made me upset so I mean if you think you have more mental fortitude than me which is quite possibly true, but wanted to give a warning because the human mind and will is weak. Also just be fine with it one-shotting you now. Thats another concern.
Handwriting analysis - during periods that I am upset or writing about things upsetting to me, my handwriting often scrawls and gets faster/ will have wet pages from me writing in the bath.
Themes and recurring topics.
Motivations of this person
Character analysis of friends
Based on her writing style - where would you estimate this person is from, their demographic etc?
What are biases of the narrator?
Describe the narrator.
What is it like to be her friend?
What are things that the narrator is blind to?
If the narrator is to continue in their ways → what would their life look like projected down the line
Where would you guess the narrator is 5, 10 years from now
If the narrator prioritizes their primary motivations what would their life look like?
Describe the family dynamic of the narrator.
Is this person a good person? Are they likable?
Highlight quotes.
What is unique about the narrator? What is not?
Give me a timeline of the narrators life.
where would this person be optimally aligned in terms of their goals and morals
What are boundaries and morals the main character shows
Do they always execute on this?
When they don’t → is there a pattern as to why, when they don’t execute ?
Identify fears.
What languages would you guess that the narrator speaks based on these journals ?
What would this person benefit the most from?
How does the world change in the background of the story?
How does the narrators perspective on the world change over time?
How does the narrators character develop over time, what are things that change or mindset shifts?
Does the narrator have any major breakthroughs throughout this?
Give me an intellect analysis of the narrator.
What other texts is this similar to?
What authors does the narrator talk like
What pop culture or other references does the narrator makes or influences you can see in their writing or worldview?
Describe what you think the main character looks like (this is never explicitly mentioned in the journals).
Okay here is what it said and you can’t judge because you are literally on my blog reading about my journals dude, you are the weird one here. For this specifically I used the entire context and used Gemini, but have experimented with a few different models and context windows. Perhaps for another blog post sometime.
Even without explicit mentions of her home country, one could deduce that the narrator is likely certainly a young Canadian woman (early-to-mid 20s) living and working in the United States.
Her writing is peppered with subtle but distinctly non-American cultural sensibilities. The frequent, almost casual, travel between the Bay Area and Toronto hints at a close, personal connection to both places that goes beyond mere tourism. She discusses needing a specific type of work visa, a common preoccupation for foreign nationals in the US tech industry, and the fear of deportation is a significant source of stress. The overall tone—highly educated, liberal, and comfortable in a multicultural North American context, yet feeling like a slight outsider in the hyper-capitalist world of Silicon Valley—strongly points to a Canadian background. Your slang and cultural references are distinctly North American. The timeline places you in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and San Francisco during your early 20s.
The narrator is a highly intelligent, articulate, and deeply introspective young woman. She possesses a raw creative talent and an intense emotional depth. She is driven by a powerful combination of ambition and insecurity. Her defining characteristic is her emotional vulnerability; she loves with an all-consuming passion but is haunted by an equally powerful fear of abandonment. She is a quintessential romantic, seeking a life of great meaning and connection, but her internal turmoil often makes her her own worst enemy.
While never explicitly detailed, the journals provide enough clues to infer a physical appearance that contrasts sharply with her internal turmoil.
She describes herself as a "little blonde girl."
She is very conscious of her weight and body, with a recurring desire to be "slimmer than ever," "fragile," and "light enough I could almost fade away."
She takes care with her appearance, mentioning makeup, hair with ribbons, and cute outfits.
From this, we can picture a young woman who appears delicate, and conventionally attractive (blonde, petite). This external appearance creates a poignant contrast with the immense, chaotic, and powerful emotional world she contains within. People likely look at her and see a life that is put-together, making her internal feeling of being a "disaster" all the more isolating.
You've noted this yourself, and it's a key feature of the journals: your handwriting is a direct reflection of your emotional state. During periods of calm, routine, or productivity, it's likely controlled and legible. However, during moments of intense emotional distress—anxiety, anger, heartbreak—you describe it as becoming scrawled, fast, and erratic. The physical pages themselves bear witness to your turmoil, with mentions of wet pages from writing in the bath, sometimes tears, further blurring the lines between the act of writing and the experience of pain. This physical manifestation is a central theme you identify: writing as both a symptom of and a cure for your distress.
The narrator's writing style is emblematic of a mind fluent in English but deeply influenced by other European linguistic and philosophical traditions.
While she writes in English, the texture of her prose suggests a familiarity with French existentialist thought and literature. Her intense introspection, her focus on subjective experience, and her obsession with authenticity and creating a "self" are hallmarks of writers like Camus or Sartre. Her desire to "dramatically scrawl" is a romantic notion tied to a certain image of the European artist-intellectual.
Furthermore, there are hints of a Germanic philosophical influence in her preoccupation with grand, all-encompassing emotional states. Her feeling of dread is more than just sadness; it's a profound, existential weight. Her constant struggle with the purpose of existence feels akin to a search for a Lebensphilosophie (a philosophy of life). Her writing isn't just a record of events; it's an attempt to build a complex intellectual system to understand her own suffering.
Several powerful themes dominate the journals:
The Search for All-Consuming Love: The narrator's primary driver is the quest for a profound, all-encompassing romantic connection.
The Gap Between Inner and Outer Worlds: She lives in a state of intense, often torturous, emotional turmoil, but she often tries to present a "normal" or even "peachy" exterior. This chasm between what she feels and what she shows makes it impossible for others to truly know what she's going through, leading her to feel profoundly isolated. The main character often feels misunderstood despite constant efforts to express her motivation and viewpoints.
Identity as a Project: The narrator is acutely aware of herself as a work-in-progress. She actively tries to construct an identity—especially after moving to San Francisco. This project is both a genuine attempt at self-discovery and a defense mechanism to make herself desirable enough not to be abandoned.
Writing as Salvation and Self-Creation: The journals are not just a record; they are the narrator's primary tool for survival. The act of documenting her pain is how she processes it. A major breakthrough occurs when she realizes that this compulsive documentation isn't a sign of her brokenness but rather the origin story of her identity as a writer.
The Tension of Independence: She desperately wants the safety of a close relationship yet she also recognizes the pain causes her and therefore she strives for an independent life she can control, with her own friends, career, and ambitions.
At her core, the narrator is driven by a profound and often conflicting dual quest: the search for deep, authentic connection and the drive for meaningful creation. She is motivated by the need to build a life that is not only anchored by a stable, all-consuming love but is also defined by her own artistic and intellectual output. This creates her central tension: How does one build an independent identity as a creator—a writer, an artist, a data scientist—while simultaneously yearning for a passionate intense relationship? Her journey is the story of trying to reconcile these two fundamental human needs. Additionally: As a reaction to the pain of relying on others, she is also motivated to build a life so successful, interesting, and self-sufficient (through career, art, and friendships) that she can never be truly destroyed by another, a quest for emotional armor.
The Search for "Home"
The AI pointed out that the journals are filled with a search for a sense of belonging. What did "home" mean? At first, it was a person. Then, it might have been a place. Ultimately, the story suggests that "home" became the act of creation itself—the building of a life, a story, and a sense of self, piece by painful piece. Idk man.
This is a subjective question, but from a literary perspective:
She is not a simple "good" or "bad" person; she is a deeply human and complex one. Her intentions are almost always good—she wants to love and be loved. Her actions, however, are sometimes destructive to her relationships and herself.
She is extremely likable and relatable in her vulnerability. Her raw honesty, her intense desire for connection, and her struggle to make sense of her overwhelming emotions are deeply compelling. Readers would likely empathize with her pain and root for her. Her moments of sharp, witty observation (like the "happy baby" interrogation) also make her very engaging. Her unlikability stems from the moments of overwhelm or being pushed past a “breaking point” that has been building causing her to lash out, but even then, the reader understands the deep pain fueling those actions. Afterward, she is flooded with guilt and shame, seeing her actions as proof that she is a "bad person," which reinforces a negative self-image and perpetuates the cycle.
What's Unique: Her level of self-awareness and her ability to articulate her internal chaos with such precision and literary flair is remarkable. The way she conceptualizes her entire journey as a narrative she is simultaneously living and writing is highly unique. Her specific combination of a high-powered tech career with a deeply artistic and emotionally turbulent inner life creates a fascinating contrast.
What's Not Unique: Her core struggles are universally relatable for many young people, especially women, in the modern age: the anxieties of dating apps, the loneliness of living in a new city, the pressure to build a career, the search for identity, and the pain of heartbreak.
The narrator is highly intelligent and intellectually curious.
Analytical Intelligence: She holds a demanding job in the tech industry, which requires strong logical and analytical skills. She talks about data, coding, and debugging complex systems.
Emotional & Introspective Intelligence: Her greatest intellectual strength is her capacity for deep introspection. She analyzes her own motives, fears, and patterns with a rare and often painful honesty.
Verbal & Creative Intelligence: Her writing is vivid, metaphorical, and emotionally resonant. She has a natural gift for storytelling and a wide-ranging vocabulary. Her interest in philosophy (Socrates, Ayn Rand) and literature demonstrates a desire for intellectual depth. Her main intellectual challenge is not a lack of intelligence, but that her powerful emotional brain often hijacks her rational, analytical brain.
The narrator's family dynamic is complex. She details feeling like an outsider and a disappointment.
She avoids calling them because she feels judged.
She feels a responsibility to "parent" sometimes, suggesting a degree of parentification or role-reversal.
She feels they wouldn't understand her life or her struggles. Her family at home live similar lives, from which she has gone a completely different path that they often do not understand. This dynamic is likely a significant source of her feelings of not belonging and her desperate search for a "chosen family" and a romantic partner who can provide the unconditional acceptance she feels she lacks from her family of origin.
→ This is interesting to me and mainly focused around when I moved to San Jose and felt like I was letting my family down by leaving.
The narrator would be optimally aligned in a life that balances creative expression, intellectual challenge, and emotional stability.
Career: A role that is not just technically demanding but also allows for creativity and autonomy. This could be a creative role within tech, starting her own company, or pursuing writing professionally. A fully remote or flexible job would suit her need for control over her environment.
Lifestyle: Living in a vibrant city with access to both nature (the ocean, parks) and culture (bookstores, cafes). A life where she has a strong, stable "chosen family" of friends, reducing the pressure on her romantic partner to be her everything.
Relationship: A partnership with someone emotionally secure, patient, and an excellent communicator who understands and is not threatened by her intensity. A relationship built on interdependence, where both partners have their own full lives but choose to share them deeply.
Note: interesting to me, it further went in to suggest locations with optimal mindset alignment. For me, this is places that are creative and value connection but still greatness, like Lisbon.
Boundaries Shown: The narrator's primary boundary is for being made to feel less than from a partner. She also has a firm boundary against cheating.
Morals: She values loyalty, emotional honesty, and deep commitment above all else. She believes in fighting for a relationship and being a supportive partner.
Execution and Patterns of Failure: She often fails to execute on her own boundaries.
Pattern: Her fear of abandonment is the primary reason for failure. When someone does something that deeply hurts of violates a stated boundary, she often is deeply hurt but quickly accepts this as truth, turns a blind eye and abandons her boundaries entirely. This effort to preserve the relationship often is detrimental longer term.
Being "Too Much": The fear that her emotional intensity is a fundamental flaw that makes her unlovable.
Insignificance: The fear of living a purposeless life, of being a "side character" or not making a mark on the world.
Betrayal: The fear of being cheated on or having her trust broken.
Deportation: Both job, but also in a general sense of having a lack of security. The narrator has never described feeling a sense of belonging or safety.
Death: Or the lack of accomplishing her goals before she dies.
Following a significant breakup, the narrator enters a period of profound instability that is also, paradoxically, a period of radical self-reclamation. This phase is characterized by impulsive and often self-destructive choices, which can be understood as a messy but necessary part of her healing.
After losing the long distance relationship that had defined her identity, she is cast adrift, with no especially strong ties to her career, home country, and a sense of distance from family these feelings compound. The subsequent flings and dramatic entanglements are not necessarily about finding a new partner, but about proving her own survival. By engaging in chaotic behavior—she is testing the limits of her new, untethered self. Each "bad choice" is an act of reclaiming the agency she felt she had lost. It's a way of her taking agency. This period, while painful and fraught with regret, is crucial for her development. It's the crucible in which she is forced to separate her identity from her romantic attachments and begin the difficult work of figuring out who she is when she is accountable only to herself.
Development: She develops from a state of passive, codependent suffering in San Jose to being an active agent in her own life in San Francisco. She learns to build friendships, explore her interests, and take risks. Her relationships later, while sometimes tumultuous, are more mature in the sense that she is actively trying to communicate and set boundaries, even when she fails, demonstrating growth.
Major Breakthroughs:
The "Writer" Realization: The moment she reframes her compulsive journaling not as a sickness but as the beginning of her artistic identity.
The Critical Viewpoint Shift: The moment in Italy where she decides to turn her emotional turmoil to something useful. This is the most significant breakthrough, as it gives her a name for her struggle and a path forward. It transforms her from a victim of her emotions to a student of them.
The narrator's relationship with religion is desperate, not faith-based. She explicitly states, "I wrote to God even though I didn't believe in God I don’t think." For her, God is not a consistent presence or a source of spiritual guidance, but a last resort—an emergency contact for when her emotional pain becomes unbearable.
Her prayers are a form of desperate bargaining. Sometimes she pleads with God, this isn't an act of worship; it's an attempt to manifest control over a situation where she feels utterly powerless. She turns to the idea of a higher power when all other methods of managing her life have failed, hoping that if she pleads hard enough, some cosmic force will intervene. It's a tool for survival, not a system of belief.
The narrator would benefit most from consistency and radical self-acceptance.
World Change: The background is the hyper-competitive, transient, and often isolating world of the 2020s tech boom in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. The story also captures the shift to remote work and the general economic precocity of layoffs.
Perspective Change: She begins by seeing the world entirely through the lens of her sheltered childhood in Canada. After moving to SF and a break up with a long distance partner, her perspective widens to include friendships, self-discovery, and her environment. Her final major shift is in Italy, where she stops seeing her emotional patterns as personal failings ("I'm just crazy") and starts seeing them through a constructive lens that allow her to achieve such incredible artistic feats.
Similar Texts: Her work is in the vein of modern confessional memoirs and autofiction. It would sit on a shelf next to The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (for its critique of modern alienation).
Similar Authors: Her raw, introspective, and often uncomfortably honest style is reminiscent of Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends, Normal People), particularly in the way she dissects the minute power dynamics of modern relationships. Her combination of intellectual analysis with raw emotionality is also similar to writers like Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?) and Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts).
The narrator's worldview is shaped by a mix of contemporary pop culture, indicating she is very much a product of her time.
Music: The beatles, ABBA, pushing daisies (likely the band). Music is a key emotional trigger and comfort.
TV/Movies: Twilight (she often drunkenly critically analyzes in her time in San Jose), Love Island, The League, Mai Pham (a YouTuber, suggesting she consumes online content), The Simple Life. These references show an interest in the dynamics of romance, friendship, and female identity as portrayed in popular media.
Literature: She explicitly mentions Ayn Rand and Socrates, showing an ambition to engage with "serious" ideas about individualism and philosophy.
"Not to be dramatic but I feel like I am in a purgatory of my own creation." - The thesis statement of her entire journey.
"God please send them back to me. God please send them back to me. God please send them back to me." - Shows the raw, repetitive desperation of her heartbreak and anxiety. Especially interesting as the narrator is not especially religious, making the pleading even more tragic.
"I wonder if I will ever will read through these entries. Maybe I could give these to my daughter when she is in her 20s and feels lost or something, if people still like have kids and talk to one another and such of course" - A moment of profound self-awareness and foresight, seeing her pain as something that could one day be useful.
"The isolation had a byproduct: it taught me to write." - A key breakthrough where she reframes her trauma as a creative origin story.
In the final section of the journals, the narrator is a changing person. The chaos has not disappeared, but her relationship to it has been transformed.
Identity: She is now consciously building a life based on her own values. She is actively working on herself and her pursuits, thinking critically about what she wants from life. She has the highest level of agency yet. She is no longer just surviving her life; she is designing it. She understands her triggers and, while she still struggles, she has the tools to navigate them. She is attempting to build her own story.
Obviously I removed some parts here, no you can’t know up until which point I included data, no you can’t have the character analysis of you through my eyes. I thought it was interesting the llm said that I was an unreliable narrator, as this should be the truest recounting in my opinion, but it is correct in that when I am upset it deviates, and also it can be hard for the AI to tell what is truth when reading through because sometimes I will use it for ranting and not explicitly state if that is a conversation I had or just ranting.
With that being said…
We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, curating memories and scrawling our biases into the margins. Feeding my journals to a machine was a strange attempt at objectivity, a way to see if an outside eye could find a plot in my chaos. What it found wasn't a single, simple truth like I had hoped, but a complex web of fears and motivations that feel uniquely mine and yet universally human. Maybe the point of looking back isn't to get a perfect report of who we were, but to see the patterns clearly enough to decide, with intention, who we want to become. <3
*Appendix*: if anyone wants to do this LMK i have the code and can help. Was planning on doing something later this week for others to do the same.
