This week, I’m stepping away from automations and frameworks for a moment to talk about something more personal.

I’ve been an EMT for 15 years. That work leaves a mark—sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in quiet ones. Recently, I started using ChatGPT Projects to process the stories I’ve carried with me from shift to shift, year after year.

🧠 What’s a ChatGPT Project?

If you haven’t explored it yet, Projects allow you to create focused workspaces with dedicated memory and context. Each project can include your own files, instructions, goals, and even tone. It’s like building a custom assistant who actually remembers the full picture. I’ve created Projects for my businesses, my health tracking, my content pipeline—and now, for my EMT stories.

🚑 One of Those Stories: The Six-Year-Old

People talk about compartmentalization like it’s a defense mechanism. A way to pack away your feelings and lock the box tight so nothing leaks out. But that’s not how it works for me. For me, it’s about discipline. Precision. It’s standing in front of something awful—something that should crack you wide open—and saying: Not now. Right now, I have a job to do. The feelings will come, but later. On my terms. That’s the only way I know how to keep doing this work and stay whole. But twice in fifteen years, that box broke open on its own. Once, on the drive home after a night shift, I couldn’t hold it back. It was a six-year-old girl. The call was for a seizure. That’s all we knew when we pulled up. I’ve seen that a hundred times—febrile, postictal, epilepsy, head trauma. We know the checklist. We know how to move fast. The apartment was clean. Normal. The kind of place where you expect laughter from another room. A dad met us at the door. Two grandparents hovered behind him—older, quiet, kind. The girl’s mother wasn’t in the picture. It turned out the grandparents were the ones holding everything together. She was lying on the floor, curled in on herself, moaning softly. Nonverbal. She had just come out of the seizure—limp, confused, and somewhere else entirely. She was six. My daughter was six. I didn’t even consider the stretcher. I knelt down and scooped her up the way I carry my own kids when they fall asleep in the car—careful, head resting in the crook of my neck, legs dangling under one arm. Her body was so small. Too small for the weight of the life she'd already lived. She didn’t resist. She let me carry her like that. She whimpered, but she held on. And I held her like she was mine. We chose a hospital 30 minutes out—a pediatric ER. Most of our transports were ten minutes, maybe less, but I was grateful for the time. I wanted to stay close to her a little longer. I needed to. Her grandfather rode with us. Sweet man. Weathered. The kind of quiet you earn by enduring things that don’t have names. I sat beside the stretcher, one hand on her blanket, the other writing down vitals, asking questions. That’s when he told me. She’d had a caretaker when she was a baby. Not even a year old. One day, the caretaker got frustrated—maybe she was crying too long, maybe she just wouldn’t sleep. And he slammed her head into the crib. That one moment—one snap of temper, one act of cruelty—shattered everything. She survived. But not all of her came back. The seizures started soon after. And they never stopped. He told me this with the steady rhythm of someone who’s had to repeat the story to doctors and therapists and teachers and caseworkers. Like a scar he had to trace for every stranger who asked. But I saw what was underneath. I saw a grandfather who’d been trying to protect her for six years. Who had watched this little girl seize over and over again and still managed to smile when she looked at him. Who carried that moment like a stone in his chest but kept showing up anyway. Because that’s what love does. I held his hand. I listened. And we rode in silence the rest of the way. We got her inside. Transferred care. Walked back to the truck. I finished the shift. And then I got in my car and started the drive home. And I broke. I don’t mean a few tears. I mean the kind of sobbing that takes over your whole body. That doesn’t feel like sadness so much as grief trying to claw its way out of you. I could still feel the weight of her in my arms. Still see the way her eyes scanned the ceiling like she was looking for something that wasn’t there. Still hear that soft, wounded sound she made when I shifted her weight. And I couldn’t stop thinking: This could have been my little girl. That was the part that gutted me. Not just the horror of what happened to her, but the fact that every parent places their trust in someone, at some point. A babysitter. A daycare. A family friend. You trust that they’ll be kind. That they’ll be patient. That they won’t break something that can’t be fixed. Somebody failed this little girl in a moment of weakness, and now her whole life was different. I cried until I pulled into my driveway. Then I walked inside. It was 7:15 a.m. My kids were waking up. I kissed them, made breakfast, poured coffee. And I compartmentalized again—just like I always do. But I’ll never forget her. Because she reminded me that sometimes the job doesn’t hurt while you’re doing it. It hurts later. Quietly. In the car. In the shower. In the silence between one shift and the next. And it still counts.

I’m not sharing this because it’s “content.” I’m sharing it because I think it matters—and because I’d love your feedback. If it resonates, reply. If you’ve had a moment like this—on or off duty—I’d really like to hear about it.

⚙️ While We’re Talking Tools…

Here are a few AI and productivity tools I’ve been experimenting with this week—each one has serious Less Doing potential:

💸 Sequence

Think Profit First, but automated. Income routing with zero decision fatigue. Great for entrepreneurs who want financial clarity without spreadsheets.

📬 Serif.ai

AI-written draft replies in your own style—waiting in your Gmail drafts. Still manual send, which I love. It supports the “3 Ds” without overstepping.

🎙️ YouDistro

Give it a topic or article, let it interview you via AI, and it turns your answers into ready-to-go content (articles, podcasts, videos) and distributes it.

🧠 Cluely

Find what topics you’re truly an authority on—and discover how to talk about them in a way people will actually care about.

🗣️ Sesame AI: Voice Uncanny Valley Research

This demo on human-like AI voices was unsettling and fascinating. Worth watching if you’re tracking voice cloning or narrative AI trends.

🎨 Ossa.ai

A visually rich AI tool for transforming ideas into branding, creative assets, and multimedia storytelling. The output is next-level.

📊 Julius.ai

An AI analyst you can feed documents, data, PDFs—and it’ll break it down, analyze, summarize, and answer questions on your terms.

📚 Whale

Create smart SOPs (standard operating procedures) and internal knowledge bases with AI. Clean, scalable, and actually usable by teams.

Whether you’re building a business, writing your next book, or carrying stories that need telling—tools are only as good as what you use them for.

This week, I used them to remember. And to write.

Thanks for reading,

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