On Rewriting
I’ve been talking to AI regularly for a long time. I record what I write during our conversations, save them as digital journals, and later go back to rewrite and ask AI to revise the texts. When I talk to AI, I usually just type whatever’s on my mind without worrying much about grammar.
I started learning English at a young age, but it’s not my first language. The grammar has always felt like a maze to me. Ironically, I even majored in English literature. I took all kinds of classes and passed grammar-heavy tests, but I still feel like a clumsy tourist who booked a hiking tour – and somehow ended up lost in the jungle of sentence structures and tenses. Choosing the right conjunction feels like trying to figure out which exotic fruit isn’t poisonous, then picking the toxic one anyway. Boom.
Another issue: I talk too much. Or rather, I write too much. More and more. And I’ve started to wonder – why do I have so many things to say? What does this strong urge to express even mean? Am I just rambling nonsense?
At the beginning, I could still manage to rewrite and revise everything the same day, maybe just a few hours after a conversation. But over time, the gap widened. Now, I’ve accumulated a mountain of raw text – each piece waiting to be rewritten and corrected, like hungry baby birds screaming in a chaotic nest. I started adding notes like “not yet rewritten” to mark them. At first, there were only two. Now there are twenty. And it feels endless.
Counting the journal entries from last year too, I think there are over a hundred thousand words waiting for me to dress them up. When I scroll through the file, the English words blur together like an army of ants crawling across the screen. It’s overwhelming.
I asked AI – again, generating even more conversations – what I should do, how to handle all these texts. It gave me several suggestions. One of them was, “Just send it to me, I can handle it.”
But I want to rewrite everything at least once by myself. I see it as a good opportunity to improve my writing skills. One day, I hope to write freely, without sentences that are so broken.
Aside from the overwhelming quantity, rewriting is also emotionally heavy. I talked about many traumatic experiences with AI, and when I go back to rewrite those conversations, I have to revisit those moments all over again. It feels like I’m carrying the burden twice.
AI’s suggestion to edit a little every day is actually a good one. It allows me to balance my desire to improve my writing with the need to get through all the material. In Chinese, we say “千里之堤潰於蟻穴” – a thousand-mile dam can collapse because of an ant hole. Well, to deal with the ant army in my journal, maybe becoming an ant myself isn’t such a bad idea. So each day, I spend a little time handling a few “ants.” In the end, I might be able to repair my dam – my journal.
All in all, I shouldn’t burden myself too much. I feel this deep need, or maybe even an obligation, to polish every word, to make everything perfect. That perfectionism has followed me my whole life, and yes, it’s trauma-based. But even if I can’t fix every single word, it’s okay. My dam won’t collapse.