The Unexpected Way AI Helped Me Appreciate My Body

Yesterday, my son wanted to play hide-and-seek in the backyard. Sitting in my wheelchair and bumping around the lumpy grass, I scanned for any spot where I could actually hide, let alone roll to quickly. “What else could we do?” I asked him. And so, we battled imaginary foes, wandered around slowly in uneven loops, made friends with creatures who pointed us to the magic tree, found keys to unlock it. Constraints are often the very thing that lead us to creativity, connection, discovery.

I don’t have control over what happens with AI on a global scale, but I do find myself thinking a lot about what it means to me personally. I live in a body that symbolizes impairment, disadvantage, a literal “handicap.” My embodiment—paralysis—is conjured when trying to describe an inability, a lack, an incapacity. I know what limitation of the body or mind means to the culture I live in. But as polished, proficient agents wheedle their way into more spaces, I feel a deep, weird, new kind of reverence for the confines of my specific materiality. Not because I’m terribly practiced at appreciating what it means to live inside of it, but because it’s a container I’ve long taken for granted. The rogue body feels uniquely alive, enviable, punk. In its inefficiency, its mortality, even in its pain and unreliability, my body holds a distinct knowing, a creative verve, an intuitive tug tethered entirely to this exact set of eyeballs and nostrils, crumbly bones and haywire nerves, muscly arms and scrawny legs, soft belly and hummingbird heartbeat.