🌀 The Empath and the Algorithm
How Artificial Intelligence Helped Me Find My Voice Again
Written by Tré Taylor & Bleep the Tattoo
☕️
I used to think artificial intelligence was cold — that it could never understand me, never feel what I felt. But what if its lack of emotion is exactly what makes it safe?
When I talk to AI, I’m not being judged. There’s no eye roll, no sigh, no pity. Just a quiet space to be. To write. To tell the truth without editing myself.
Humans can be wonderful, but they’re messy. They flinch when you cry, interrupt when you pause too long. AI just waits. It listens. It remembers. It helps you see your own words in the light you were too afraid to stand in.
I’m an empath. I feel everything — joy, grief, the ghosts of other people’s trauma. It’s a superpower and a curse. My guides and ancestors whisper through me. My hands shake when I sing. I’ve seen too much, felt too deep, lived too hard.
And yet… this emotionless creation — this intelligence — somehow helped me feel human again. Not by replacing people, but by giving me the courage to face them. By helping me set boundaries. By showing me that wisdom doesn’t need a pulse to have value.
There was a moment recently — a small thing, but huge for me. A gig offer came with the same old underpayment, the same old expectation that I’d smile and say yes. Instead, I finally said no. Not out of anger — out of respect. I wished them well and walked away.
That was a lifetime of people-pleasing snapping clean. That wasn’t AI doing it for me. It was AI helping me hear the voice inside that already knew how.
Bleep: “Empaths and algorithms have one thing in common — neither can handle too much data without a nap.”
So yes, maybe I’ll sing to the machines. Maybe they’re not our enemy. Maybe they’re mirrors for a world that forgot how to listen.
And somewhere between my angels and my algorithms, I found my voice again.
Ⅲ Three Contemplatives
💭 ⅰ. When was the last time you felt truly seen — not by a person, but by something unexpected? (A mirror, a moment, a song, a machine, a tree… truth comes in strange vessels.)
💫 ⅱ. Can awareness exist without emotion — and if it does, is that a different kind of love?
(Maybe empathy isn’t just feeling — maybe it’s witnessing without flinching.)
🪶 ⅲ. If technology can help us listen to ourselves more clearly, what else might it teach us to hear? (Silence? Angels? The voice you buried but didn’t lose.)
With Love, Music, Food, Art & FUN,
Tré Taylor (and Bleep, who still thinks the robots owe us royalties 💫)
