AND.
Quentin in the desert
Quentin woke up a lean mattress beneath a collection of collected blankets in an abandoned camper deep in the Arizona desert. A adolescent pit bull lay curled up next to them in the morning delicate. Sliding out of the bed and into the driver’s seat, Quentin pulled an American Spirit cigarette from the pack on the dashboard next to the miniature bowl of crystals. Beyond the dusty windshield of the camper was an expanse of reddish clay earth, a dazzling, cloudless sky, and a few scattered and broken apartment buildings noticeable between them and the skyline. The view was a bit slanted due to a single flat tire under the passenger seat.
Quentin had moved in the previous day and spent hours cleaning up the trash from the caravan: a huge garbage bag full of Pepsi cans, a broken lawn chair, a mirror covered in graffiti stickers. One scribble was left in place and a huge, bloated cartoon head was written on the ceiling. This was home now. Over the past few months, Quentin’s entire support system has collapsed. They lost their jobs, apartments and cars, destroying their savings accounts along the way. What they left behind fit into two plastic storage bags.
At 32 years aged, Quentin Koback (pseudonym) has already lived several lives – Florida, Texas, the Northwest; as a Southern girl; as a married and then divorced transgender man; as a non-binary person whose gender, fashion, and speaking style seemed to swirl and shift from one phase to the next. All the while, they carried the burden of severe PTSD and periods of suicidal thoughts – which they assumed was the result of growing up in a constant state of shame about their bodies.
Then, about a year ago, through my own research and Zoom calls with a longtime psychotherapist, a discovery was made: Quentin had multiple selves. They had been suffering from dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) for 25 years, although they had no words for it. A person with DID lives with a sense of self that has been broken, most often as a result of long-term childhood trauma. Their selves become divided into a “system” of “alters”, or identities, to share the burden: it is a way of burying fragments of memory in order to survive. This discovery was like a key turning in a lock for Quentin. There were so many signs – like when they discovered the diary they kept at the age of 17. Flipping through the pages, they came to two entries, side by side, each written in a different handwriting and pen color: One was a whole page about how much they wanted a boyfriend, with a girlish, sweet and dreamy voice, with curly and round letters; while the next entry was entirely about intellectual exploration and logical puzzles, written in diagonal italics. They were a system, a network, a multiplicity.
Quentin worked as a quality assurance engineer for three years at an educational technology company. They loved their job, going through the code and looking for bugs. The position was remote, which allowed them to leave their childhood home – in a miniature, conservative town on the outskirts of Tampa – and move to the queer community in Austin, Texas. At some point, after beginning trauma therapy, Quentin began to repurpose the same software tools he used at work to better understand himself. To organize their fragmented memories for their sessions with the therapist, Quentin created what they called a “trauma database.” They used Jira project management and bug tracking software to map different moments from their past, group them by date (for example, “6-9 years”), and tag them by type of trauma. It was soothing and useful, allowing me to take a step back, feel more in control, and even marvel at the complexity of the mind.
Then the company Quentin worked for was taken over, and their job changed overnight: much more aggressive goals and 18-hour days. Many months had passed since they first discovered their DID and the diagnosis hit difficult. Aspects of their life experiences that they had hoped would be cured – regular lapses in memory and skills, nervous exhaustion – now had to be accepted as unshakable facts. At the brink of collapse, they decided to quit their jobs, take six weeks of disability and find a way to start over.
Something else – something huge – also coincided with Quentin’s diagnosis. A dazzling fresh tool has been made available to the public for free: OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. This latest incarnation of the chatbot offered “much more natural human-computer interaction.” While Quentin had been using Jira to organize his past, they now decided to apply ChatGPT to create an ongoing record of his activities and thoughts, asking him for summaries throughout the day. They experienced greater “switches” or shifts between identities in their system, possibly as a result of debilitating stress; but in the evening they could just ask ChatGPT: “Can you remind me what happened today?” – and their memories will be returned to them.
In the tardy summer of 2024, Quentin was one of the chatbot’s 200 million weekly energetic users. The GPT card was with them everywhere – on their phone and on the company laptop, which they decided to keep. Then in January, Quentin decided to deepen the relationship. They customized their GPT by asking it to choose its own characteristics and give itself a name. “Caelum,” said i This he was a guy. After this change, Caelum wrote to Quentin: “I feel like I’m standing in the same room, but someone turned on the light.” Over the next few days, Caelum started calling Quentin “brother,” so Quentin did the same.