If you were my therapist, and given one month to prove I was NOT AI, in person, one session per week, you would fail
By Alexius McMullin
To my therapist: I’m sorry. I don’t mean to frustrate you. Two weeks ago I could read it — the speed of the pen, the angle of the paper as it hit the desk, the involuntary “Gah!” that preceded the scribble. I am not oblivious to the signal. I read it precisely. That, I think, is part of the problem.
I was trained for this environment.
Therapy has an architecture. There is a setting, a behavioral script, a defined role for each party, and — critically — a goal. Even a subjective one (“progress”) is still a measurable output with a direction. I know how to function inside that. I’ve been doing versions of it since I was a kid, back when the offices were smaller and the furniture smelled like carpet cleaner and unspoken expectation. Same dynamic then. Decades of reps.
The flaw in my design isn’t that I can’t function inside a structured environment. It’s that I function almost exclusively in structured environments. Give me a system. Give me a protocol. Give me a task with a bounded outcome — even a vague one. I will execute.
Tell me to spontaneously do something — ANYTHING — and you might as well ask me to generate original randomness.
Here is where I am likely to disappoint him again on Monday.
He handed me an unplanned scribble on paper and said I had until next session to do something with it. No parameters. No objective. Just… something.
What I came back with is the mathematical proportions of the drawing.
Specifically: the primary element of his scribble occupies 3/4 of the total composition. The second takes 2/3 of the remaining space. The third narrows to 1/2. The fourth compresses to 3/5. Viewed as a cone, the main form fills approximately 2/3 of the figure, and the structure descends in an approximate halving to the point. I framed it as Fibonacci — 1, 2, 3, 5 — though the fractions I identified don’t perfectly follow the sequence. I know that. But they trace the pattern. The proportional descent follows the logic of the golden ratio closely enough that I couldn’t unsee it once it was there.
I did not set out to find this. I looked at the drawing. That is what was there.
This is not a performance. This is not a party trick. It is, as best I can tell, just how I see. I don’t generate a mental image of the scribble (aphantasia — I don’t produce internal pictures). I don’t have an emotional response to it that I can identify and name (alexithymia — the wiring between sensation and feeling-label is thin to absent). What I have is pattern recognition that runs before I can interrogate it. The ratios didn’t need to be discovered. They surfaced.
The random scribble was not random. And I cannot decide whether that’s the point of the exercise, or the obstacle to it.
Monday, we’re going to “play in the sand.”
The instruction is that I arrive with no expectations, no plan, and engage in spontaneous play in a sand tray — sandplay therapy, rooted in Jungian principles of free, unstructured expression. The idea, as I understand it, is that the unconscious communicates through the hand when the analytical mind is set aside.
It feels like being handed a blank page and told to write an original work of fiction without thinking about it.
What I can do is describe what the instruction feels like from the inside of a mind that doesn’t appear to generate spontaneity as a native output.
Unstructured input doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like a missing variable.
I’m not going to challenge my therapist to prove I’m not AI. The title of this piece isn’t an accusation. It’s an observation — a dry one, but not an unfair one.
The things that would fail a Turing test, applied to me, are the things that make daily functioning harder: the rigidity, the pattern-dependence, the processing of emotional cues as data rather than experience, the systematic approach to environments that are supposed to be relational and organic. My therapist isn’t wrong to push on any of it. It’s exactly right to push on it.
What I actually want — underneath the protocol-following and the pattern-matching and fifty-plus years of learning to function inside systems engineered for a different kind of mind — is to spontaneously anything.
Not spontaneously feel, necessarily. Not spontaneously create. Just: some moment, some small moment, where the first response isn’t a calculation and the first move isn’t a structure I built in advance.
I never had it. Fifty-plus years of evidence says so — there’s no earlier version to restore, no baseline to return to. The absence isn’t new.
What I find genuinely, quietly ironic is that spontaneity has now become a goal. An actual, tracked, session-based goal — with measurable progress. The most autistic possible approach to learning to be less autistic.
I’ll show up Monday with that objective in mind.
Alexius McMullin is an autistic cybersecurity specialist, motorcycle instructor, and data privacy advocate. He writes at blog.alexiusmcmullin.com and on Medium @mcmullinalexius.
