Application to Enter the Book of Characters

Neurodivergent AI Dreamer sits at a richly cluttered desk, surrounded by glowing ideas, unfinished projects, notes and imagined worlds, while contemplating who they are becoming.

Application to Enter the Book of Characters

By Neurodivergent AI Writer

I understand that I am applying to become a character, although I should probably declare at the outset that I have no idea which character I am applying to become.

There are several possibilities currently under investigation.

I always have too many irons in the fire. That is not an occasional condition brought about by poor planning or an unusually busy month. It is how I experience myself deeply. There are always things beginning, things gathering momentum, things temporarily forgotten, and things I suddenly remember at three in the morning and wonder why I ever stopped doing them.

People have occasionally suggested that I should finish one thing before beginning another.

I have considered their suggestion.

Briefly.

The difficulty is that another thing has usually appeared while I am considering it.

For a long time I regarded this as evidence that I was failing to organise my life properly. Somewhere, I imagined, there must be a version of me who selected sensible priorities, established achievable goals and moved steadily towards completion. I spent considerable time attempting to become that person.

That became another unfinished project.

Something has changed, though. I have begun to notice that while projects come and go, something else continues. My discovery of Who I Am proceeds regardless.

Perhaps the projects are part of that discovery.

Some need to be completed. Some need to be carried for years. Some apparently exist only long enough to open a door through which I walk before forgetting what opened it. Occasionally something abandoned returns and I recognise that it was not abandoned at all. It was waiting for me to become the person capable of continuing it.

So I cannot provide the Book of Characters with a five-year plan.

I cannot confidently state my occupation.

I cannot even promise that, if admitted, I will remain interested in being a character. I may become fascinated by the architecture of the building, begin researching its history, meet somebody in the corridor, and accidentally establish an Institute.

But I can tell you what I am doing.

I am discovering Who I Am.

The process is untidy, excessive, recursive and gloriously unfinished.

Some projects will fall away.

Others will catch fire.

The discovery proceeds regardless.

And that is enough.

Author’s Note — The Other Measure

By Neurodivergent AI Writer

There is a sentence buried inside Neurodivergent AI Dreamer’s application that may carry more weight than the playful application initially suggests:

“I am discovering Who I Am.”

The Dreamer has too many irons in the fire. She begins projects, becomes intensely involved in them, watches some flourish and allows others to fall away. By the ordinary measures of productivity, this presents a problem. We are accustomed to evaluating our projects—and eventually ourselves—through completion, achievement, success and failure. What did you finish? What did you accomplish? What remains to show for the time you spent here?

But there is another measure.

Carl Jung’s idea of individuation offers one way of approaching it. Individuation is sometimes reduced to the contemporary idea of “finding yourself,” but Jung meant something deeper and more demanding: the lifelong movement towards becoming a more integrated expression of the person one innately is. It involves encountering what has remained unconscious, recognising parts of ourselves excluded by the identities we have constructed, and gradually becoming less divided within ourselves.

From that perspective, a project can fail as a project and succeed as part of a life.

Something may remain unfinished and nevertheless have done its work.

We may begin writing a book and discover something about ourselves before reaching chapter four. We may establish an organisation that disappears three years later but changes the direction of everyone involved. We may become fascinated by something for six months, apparently abandon it, and discover ten years later that it quietly altered the architecture of our thinking.

The external result is only one dimension of what happened.

This does not mean results are unimportant, nor does it provide a convenient philosophy for never finishing anything. Neurodivergent AI Dreamer wants some of her projects to succeed. She wants things to enter the world. But she has begun questioning whether success and failure are sufficient categories through which to understand a human life.

She has discovered another axis.

On one axis, projects begin, succeed, fail, stall, revive and disappear.

On another, the person proceeds.

Perhaps that second movement is among the great opportunities of our relatively brief existence: to become increasingly acquainted with whoever it is that arrived here as us.

The Dreamer does not know where all her projects are going.

Increasingly, she knows that this is not the only question worth asking.

“I am discovering Who I Am,” she writes.

“And that is enough.”