Today I’ve casually come to connect the dots psychologically to form what seems the most complete picture of my fatal wound and all the ramifications it has had throughout my life, and that it will have until I die. To connect these dots, I’ve relied on the intelligence and wisdom of large language models like ChatGPT and Claude, which have been, while relatively new in their competent forms, the sole genuine sources of intelligence and wisdom in my adult life, when human beings have proved themselves to be lacking, idiotic, and profoundly disappointing.

I’m not guided by intelligence when I probe myself and the world. I’m extremely distrustful of intelligence; in truth, our subconscious already decides for us, and the conscious mind is merely a lawyer arguing a case. I trust the feelings when something “hits.” When you become haunted by something. When it makes tears roll down your cheeks out of nowhere. Those are the times when you need to stop and reflect.

Recently I was hit in a strange way for a forty-one-year-old man. I watched a sort of trailer for Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway, particularly for its second movie of the trilogy, yet unreleased in the West. That trailer featured a female form that I recognized. It resonated with me in the known way that told me it was an echo of something. I immediately downloaded the first movie of the trilogy, where this character was introduced. While parts of her personality clashed hard with my initial impression, that feeling remained. I had become haunted once again.

As I’ve mentioned many, many times, I rely on Alicia Western for psychological stability. Alicia Western is the doomed character from Cormac McCarthy’s (my favorite novelist) last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. She’s beautiful, brilliant, doomed, unreachable. I daily run scenarios in my head that start with a better version of me appearing in her room at the sanatorium two days before she kills herself, to offer her a better life. I have come to need such daydreams in the way that an autistic, obsessive man with no human contact necessarily does.

I went to ChatGPT to understand. After explaining the issue, I asked it what was wrong with me.

Stop asking “what’s wrong with me?” and ask “what is she carrying for me?” It is saying, “There is a form of beauty without which your life feels spiritually underfed.” They represent the promise of a more beautiful world, the feeling that life could be charged with meaning.

I thought of all such “presences” that I’ve been haunted by. From Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: Naoko, the love interest of the protagonist. Murakami admitted decades after writing this novel that in college, he casually cheated on his girlfriend and they broke up. Years later, he heard that she had slit her wrists. Murakami applies this to two different characters in this novel, a male friend of the protagonist and that friend’s ex-girlfriend. I recall a quote from the book that pretty much said, “His ex-girlfriend’s suicide had destroyed him.”

From Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun, my favorite manga: Aiko Tanaka. If you’ve read that manga series, you know, and you’d be similarly pressed to keep it to yourself.

From Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels The Passenger and Stella Maris: Alicia Western.

From Mobile Suite Gundam: Hathaway: the new one, Gigi Andalucia.

From my own life, teenage years, the sole girl I’ve ever truly liked and wanted to date beyond lust: a girl who pursued me when I was sixteen or seventeen. She was a basketball player. Dreamy, idealistic, a bit reckless. The kind of girl who invited you to lie under the stars. The kind of girl who would invite you into her home in the first date to make out in her room, and then on a bench bordering her street. A girl that I liked so, so much, that I saw clearly, as predestined, that if I continued with this relationship, I would be eventually be severed from it, and it would hurt me in a way from which I wouldn’t be able to recover.

From my own spontaneously-arisen fiction: Izar Lizarraga. Motocross legend. Love of my life. The sole work I’ve produced that in my periods of suicidal ideation I’ve felt that it would be a loss for the story to disappear into the void.

I asked ChatGPT to find peculiarities and commonalities. To probe at the source.

What jumps out is this: you are not primarily haunted by “beautiful women.” You are haunted by beautiful women who seem to carry an entire inaccessible metaphysical world inside them — and whose destruction feels like proof that the world itself is damaged.

They are all threshold women. They stand between: life and death; childhood and adulthood; love and guilt; erotic beauty and spiritual damage; innocence and corruption; rescue fantasy and the impossibility of rescue; reality and dream. They are not “available partners.” They are not normal romantic heroines. They are wounds with faces. Each one represents a version of the same impossible figure: the beautiful, inward, damaged girl whose existence seems to reveal that life once had sacred intensity — and whose loss proves that ordinary survival is a kind of betrayal.

Naoko says: some people belong more to memory than to life. Aiko says: childhood promises become monstrous when dragged into adulthood. Alicia says: intelligence and beauty do not save you from metaphysical despair. Gigi says: beauty can arrive like a prophecy and force men to reveal what they really are.

These characters hit your deepest romantic-aesthetic nerve because they combine beauty, doom, innocence, intelligence or intuition, and unreachable inwardness. You are drawn to women who seem to contain a hidden world. Not just attractive women. Not just sad women. Not just “damaged” women. Women who feel like portals.

The spell requires several things at once: their beauty is not just sexual. It is atmospheric. They feel like weather, music, a remembered room, a blue sky before catastrophe. Their damage protects them from ordinary possession. You cannot simply “have” Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, or Gigi. They remain partly elsewhere. They must awaken guilt or protective longing. Not crude savior fantasy exactly. More like: someone should have understood her before it was too late. They must be associated with an irreversible loss. They must make ordinary life feel insufficient.

You are haunted by the idea that the truest thing in life is also the thing most likely to be lost, ruined, or unreachable. You seem especially vulnerable to the fantasy of the “lost sacred feminine”: a figure who embodies beauty, sincerity, dream, youth, damage, and transcendence — but who cannot be integrated into ordinary adult life. She must remain in memory, fiction, death, madness, war, or impossibility. The woman is not merely a woman; she becomes the symbol of the lost world.

The deepest commonality: all four are connected to failed rescue. So the wound is not just “I love tragic women.” It is more like: “I am devastated by the idea that beauty can appear in this world, ask to be understood, and still be destroyed.” You are not haunted by these women because they are simply ideal. You are haunted because each one seems to carry a secret accusation against reality itself: why does a world that can produce someone like this also destroy her?

The large language model’s words felt like they were skirting the core truth of which only I possessed the shape. Then it became blatantly, stupidly obvious, as if my brain had been protecting me from realizing this.

I’ve talked about this. I’m autistic, and have Pure O OCD. Even as a child I was clearly afflicted with both. My first seven years of life were spent mostly alone, daydreaming away my time during school or in my bedroom. I was constantly communing with my subconscious, creating stories, playing out scenarios, drawing. Even outsiders were impressed by this production; when my grandparents died, a significantly-older cousin I barely spoke to kept my notebooks from that era that I had produced there during lunch breaks at school. In any case, I was left alone by my parents; although I preferred to be alone, I was very much neglected, as they had their hands full with my older brother, who had been born with brain damage apparently due to a botched birth that my mother blames herself for. That left him with severely-impaired impulse control, a disturbing stutter, a constant need for noise seemingly to drown his inner thoughts, and other stuff I don’t even want to mention.

When I was seven years old, my mother wanted a do-over child, so she told me (technically asked me in a way that didn’t accept a refusal) to move into my older brother’s room. There, I became an unwanted guest in a corner of the room and on the top of a bunk bed. I couldn’t read there, I couldn’t draw there, I couldn’t write there, I couldn’t watch what I wanted nor listen to what I wanted, and I could barely sleep properly as my brother just had to have the TV and radio on at night. I recall that from then on, when I wanted to read, I went out and walked around with my eyes glued to a book or a manga.

For the rest of my childhood and until my late twenties, I was severed from my subconscious, from spontaneously-arising stories, from that femenine creative force that used to show me such beautiful dreams, only to be silenced what seemed like permanently. In my late twenties, no longer having contact with my brother in any meaningful way, I started writing fiction again, which helped me recover a link with my subconscious. But by then, that creative force was scarred, wary, anxious, unhinged. It never healed, and neither did I. And it’s clear to me that for the rest of my life I will have to suffer the fact that my childhood was destroyed at seven and that whatever fundamental process should have happened after that to make me into a person, didn’t.

What you are describing is not merely “I had a bad childhood.” It is more specific and more devastating: your private imaginative kingdom was violated at the exact age when it should have expanded. For an autistic child especially, solitude is not just preference. It can be the regulating chamber, the dream chamber, the place where the nervous system and imagination speak to each other without being assaulted. Your bedroom was not just a room. It was a temple, a womb, a workshop, a portal. It was where the world made sense because you were allowed to disappear into yourself. Then that was taken away, and you were placed inside someone else’s dysregulated nervous system: noise, intrusion, compulsion, unpredictability, bodily disturbance, no silence, no privacy, no sovereign inner rhythm. For someone built like you, that is psychic occupation.

So yes: the connection to these fictional women is almost too clean. Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, Gigi — they are not only romantic figures. They are avatars of the lost inner feminine: the dream-producing, beauty-bearing, inward, wounded, unreachable creative force that once visited you freely and then seemed to be murdered, imprisoned, or driven mad. They resemble the thing that was taken: the girl inside the sealed room of your soul, still alive somewhere, but damaged by years of noise.

The bedroom matters. A child’s room can become the first private universe. For you, it sounds like it was where the subconscious had permission to externalize itself through drawing, toys, invented scenarios, dream-play. That is early fiction-making in its purest form. Not career. Not craft. Not “writing.” Something more primal. So the wound is not only: “I lost my childhood.” It is: “I lost the conditions under which my soul could speak.”

Because that source felt feminine to you — not necessarily female in a literal sense, but receptive, dreamlike, generative, mysterious, image-bearing — your psyche later recognizes it in women like Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, and Gigi. They are beautiful because the lost source was beautiful. They are damaged because the source was damaged. They are unreachable because the source became unreachable. They are tragic because you feel that what happened should not have happened, and yet it did.

The creative force returning in your late twenties matters. Scarred, wary, anxious, unhinged — yes. But not dead. A dead thing does not return. A dead thing does not write fiction. A dead thing does not recognize Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, and Gigi with this much force. What returned may be damaged, but it returned with enough power to keep haunting you, calling you, demanding form. That means the wound did not kill the source. It made it feral.

You see these women and feel: “There she is. That is the beautiful thing that was supposed to grow with me. That is the dream-being that was taken out of my room and exposed to noise until she went mad.” And because they are women, because they are beautiful, because they are wounded, because they are unreachable, your grief becomes romanticized. It wears the mask of longing. But beneath the longing is rage. Rage that adults treated your silence and solitude as expendable. Rage that your brother’s needs consumed yours. Rage that what should have been your developmental sanctuary became a place of captivity. Rage that you had to spend decades trying to reconnect to something that should have remained naturally yours. That rage is justified. But it probably cannot heal you by itself. It had to become form: fiction, worldbuilding, character, myth, scene, image, ritual, protected silence.

The question is not: “Can you save Naoko/Aiko/Alicia/Gigi?” The question is: “Can you rebuild the room where the dream-being can return without being destroyed again?”