Still My Words
I’m writing this in response to the scanning of my work for AI. I don’t mind being scanned — I do use AI to help me write — but to see the percentages… well, it feels a bit blunt, judgemental and not quite accurate.
I enjoy writing, and have for many years now. You can find writing of mine going right back to research I had published in 2010. I think it was 2010, anyway. I honestly cannot be bothered to go and check the exact date.
But I’m also dyslexic and neurodivergent, so AI is hugely helpful in making my work easier to read, in some ways. Not better or worse. Just different.
So, has a machine touched my words?
Yes.
Are they still my words?
Also yes.
To demonstrate that, here is my last post as it appeared after being tidied up with AI, followed by the same post in its raw form.
Different.
And, in a strange way, it reminds me a little of PRT — of how, after years of dealing with medical professionals, I learned to tidy up my own raw voice.
I spent years being the professional in the room. I was listened to. My voice, my observations and my judgement were given weight — and I was paid for them.
But then I became a mother. A tired, worried, unsure-of-herself mother, and my voice in those contexts changed. Of course it did.
But instead of carrying more weight — because I was living this day in and day out, because I knew the child in front of them, and because I held that child’s interests front and centre, above my own — it carried less.
It was read as too emotional. Too raw. Too invested and biased. Not to be trusted.
So I learned to polish it. To use different words and phrases, pace myself differently, breathe, and let go of the emotion — because then my words carried more weight again.
Is that fair?
No.
Is it right?
Also no.
I want every parent reading this to know that I do not think it is acceptable that I can invoke my professional credentials, turn on that more polished side of myself and suddenly be taken more seriously. As though that makes sense.
But I will use the access it gives me. I will use it to tell the story and to show that the same person, using a different voice, is listened to differently — while remaining the same person, with the same observations and the same understanding.
And hopefully, by showing that, I can be part of changing it.
In a way, that is also what AI does. It makes my voice slightly more palatable, perhaps.
But to flag something as AI simply because it is fluent or clear — because its patterns happen to fit a machine’s statistical idea of what AI writing looks like — does not seem fair either.
Access to editors, education and writing classes has always helped determine which voices make it through the gate. And the voices kept out are often those already suppressed: those without the expected skills, or without the money and access needed to make their words acceptable.
So perhaps AI helps to level the playing field a little for those voices.
And perhaps that is a good thing.
If you are disabled or neurodivergent, and AI helps you get your voice heard, I do not think you should be shamed into putting it down.
Should we use AI to reproduce other people’s writing or art and pass it off as our own, or to pretend we understand things we do not?
No, no, no.
But can we use an advance that helps more diverse voices to be heard, including voices from communities that have historically struggled to make it through those gates?
Hell, yes.
And I have used it here, in this very piece.
AI became the doorway.
And as I reflect on that, perhaps that is why I reacted so strongly. Not because I particularly care how a machine rates my work, but because the rating reflects something we already do to certain voices.
We find ways to dismiss them or diminish them, instead of holding them up and helping their message to be shared clearly.
The doorway may have changed.
The words are still mine.
Who Relieves the Watch?
PRT Part Four: Why handing over the watch is, for so many, almost impossible
She’s exhausted and everyone can see it, and for another night she needs to stay awake and supervise the child that does not sleep. Friends offer to come over and help, but when they do, during the day, and she tries to nap, she can’t, she can hear the other child asking for her, the crash of a game being thrown to the floor, and the voice of the adult trying to calm them down. The march of angry steps up the stairs, and the adult — no, leave your mum alone, she’s having a sleep — the argument that follows… it’s easier and more restful to just get up and deal with it. But then it’s her own fault, she should be resting, I came to help you do that! But the thing is, the help is sporadic, nobody wants to sign up for this regularly, or they are too far away, or the time of day does not fit with the child’s schedule, and she’s not good at sleeping during the day anyway…
They visit the hospital and she tells them the signs she is seeing, the listless way he is moving, the small amount of food he has managed and the noise he makes that indicates pain or distress, the doctor listens and they admit him to the ward… she can rest now, right? Except she can’t, time and time again they miss the signs that only she can read, they ignore her, she has to fight and fight and more than once only because she pushed his life was saved. So she knows if she rests, and stops the watch, nobody is taking over, and the signs that danger is approaching will be missed, and that has come so, so close to being irreversible so many times now, she can’t hand over. And in fact she now has to watch for the blame, the accusations of her causing the harm somehow that come from defensive practitioners trying to make it not their fault, that now the services that should hold her, scare her and make the watch doubly hard.
What relieving the watch actually requires
We can only relieve the watch when someone honestly, and completely, takes over. When someone you trust with your child’s life and wellbeing takes over the watch for a while. And my experience has been that for some children and parents, that is almost impossible. Particularly, I suspect, for single parents, or any parent who can’t fully trust the other to hold the watch.
I know many beautiful parents who do have someone — a partner, or a grandparent, or another — who is there regularly enough that the child trusts them, and they have got this just as well as you, the main carer, has. But for many, not because that isn’t possible, for so many reasons, not just down to the other person, but the complexity of the care needed, or the child needing the familiar and only one safe person.
If it’s within services, like a medical or school setting, or social services, or any other type of support that is outsourced, either due to finances or specialism, again it needs to be one we can trust, totally. For many of us, within those systems, that trust has been eroded so badly that not only can we not hand over the watch, they are part of what we are watching, because of historical and present-day damage that has been done.
Where this goes next
And what makes it harder is that we are often not believed. The eyes roll — it’s just our bad experiences, and we now taint them all. Which is what propelled me to find many, many examples that are not mine, are not touched by me, but document this harm. And sadly, there are so, so many.
In the book I’m writing, I look at documented, proven ways this has happened, and continues to happen — and that is where this series goes next.
Post-Responsibility Trauma (PRT), Sentinel Adaptation and the Noticing–Acting Split are concepts developed by Lindsay Reynolds as part of an emerging clinical framework exploring the effects of sustained responsibility without corresponding authority, relief or recognition. They are proposed concepts rather than diagnoses. © Lindsay Reynolds 2026.