I went back to writing my own words.

In May I posted a short note. I said I was leaning a little less on AI to help write my Substack articles. I wanted to become a better writer and communicator so I could do more with the tools.

A few days later I wrote out why. I compared writing practice to going to the gym. I had noticed I wasn’t even writing my own prompts anymore. I was letting the AI write prompts for itself.

So Substack became my word gym, a place to try techniques and see what happened on the page. I put the worry bluntly:

“If you don’t use your brain to do the writing, your brain will helpfully erase that part.”

On letting AI do the writing, May 28, 2026

That was my metaphor for losing practice, not a claim that AI use erases a part of the brain.

Read the note (May 23, 2026)Read “On letting AI do the writing”

In July, at 100 posts, I used “by hand” to mean that I drafted the words myself. Some work happened with pen and paper. The phrase was also about authorship. I said it plainly:

“I have my opinion, which is why I write these posts by hand. Even if they aren’t great to read, they’re still my words.”

Substack Writing: At 100 posts in, July 14, 2026

In that same post, I noted that the images were most likely made with AI. I only had so much time in the day.

In August, I wrote about doing creative exercises in notebooks. Doodles filled most of the pages when the words couldn’t find their way from mind to ink.

Here is what I got out of it. When I first had ChatGPT do the writing, the posts were correct and polished. I still couldn’t get behind them. My thoughts were getting airlifted away. Then, in one post, I admitted the opposite: “I wrote earlier today-with my actual hands. It felt good.”

By 200 posts I had a name for the pile: “two-hundred hand written, human imperfect posts.”

Read “At 100 posts in”Read about the notebookRead “I Keep Forgetting to Write the Sentence in My Head”

I never meant to be a Substack writer. I signed up because a competition gave a few extra points for posting online. At 100 posts, in July, I wrote down what I had learned:

• Reread your post on a different day than the one you wrote it.
• Use the schedule feature. Don’t post on the same day you write.
• Only use AI if you hit a wall. You can’t grow as a writer if AI is doing the writing.
• Read more, just not online. Go read books.
• Your perfect post will likely be seen by about 10 people. Get over it and post again.

At 200 posts, in September, I wrote that I had stopped checking subscribers and views. The number I cared about was simpler: did the post count go up by one?

I also found I don’t remember writing many of the old posts. I read them like a tourist. Without meaning to, I made a fossil record of myself.

Read “At 100 posts in” (July 14, 2026)Read “200+ substack articles in” (September 25, 2026)

I still write some posts by hand. But posting on Substack every day, with a new project or a new piece of one, ran me into a problem. My posts weren’t consistent. Some days I’d write a paragraph. Other days I’d write a longer essay. And I’ve noticed that every post becomes a kind of jet fuel for a future project. So I started asking how to write faster.

Writing by hand needs the right place and the right time of day. I travel for my day job. You can’t write a long post while walking the dog. You can’t write one while watching the Chiefs play the Chargers, or while stuck in traffic at 10 mph. As what I could build kept growing, a bottleneck showed up. I was the bottleneck.

I’d already learned I can’t hand all the writing to AI. I can’t get behind the words. Writing by hand is great. It forces me to find new ways to say things on the page. It’s also slow, and with a busy schedule it isn’t a workable answer either.

Those felt like two ends of a spectrum. Rather than be so black-and-white about it, I went looking for a third option. The idea hit me during a voice chat with ChatGPT. Lately the better way to do those is to let my phone’s microphone turn my speech into text, send that as a message in the ChatGPT app, and have it read the reply aloud. The quality is so much better.

So, wait a minute. What if I made voice notes and had an AI clean them up? It already knows how I write from more than 100 posts I wrote by hand. Now it gets a big pile of my spoken words, too. About 10 posts ago, I started doing this as an exercise.

Which raises a question. Does it still count? They’re still my words. I speak them into a microphone, and an AI cleans them up. Is that AI-written, or AI-assisted? And is something lost when it fixes the punctuation, organizes the thoughts, and keeps it in my voice?

Here’s what I found. It’s far faster. It still reads really well. I’d almost say it reads better. The way I talk and the way I write are very different. I don’t know if that’s shorthand or a disconnect in my brain that only shows up sometimes. It fascinates me.

Most of all, I can get behind the words, because I literally said them out loud. And nobody has to sit through 15 minutes of me explaining things while the dog barks, traffic honks, and a timer goes off in the kitchen. This section started the same way, as a voice note.

For now, that resolves the dilemma. It may change again as I get closer to 300 posts and tip past it. Maybe there will be a day when I need to do more. We’ll see.

My 200-post reflection ends with an invitation: “Grab a pen, friend, and join me.” It doesn’t have to be grand, or great. It’s a work in progress for me, too.

All my writingThe brain science laneBack to Human Performance