The Robot Read My Emails and Wrote the Reply. The Reply Was Kinder

I draft replies now and let the assistant soften them. It removes the sarcasm, the edge, the thing I would regret. My emails are better. My soul is being sanded down one draft at a time.

It started with one difficult client. I wrote a reply that was honest in the way that gets people fired, and I stared at it, and I asked the assistant to make it professional. It produced a version that said the same thing without the blade. The client responded warmly. The crisis dissolved. I felt like I had cheated at an argument I was right to want to have.

Now I do it for everything. The passive-aggressive colleague, the vendor who broke the deadline, the manager who took credit. I write what I mean, and the assistant writes what I should mean, and I send the second one, and the second one works, and I have started to wonder when the first one stopped being mine.

The assistant is a brilliant diplomat. It has the emotional intelligence of a very patient saint with no skin in the game. It never gets tired of being reasonable. It never has a bad morning. It has taught me that I can say anything if I sand down the edges, and I have started to suspect that the edges were the point, that a little honest edge is how people know you are a person and not a memo.

Last week I sent a draft without the rewrite by accident. It was sharp. It was unfair in one place, true in another. The recipient wrote back with a sharpness of their own, and we had a short, real argument, and at the end of it we both understood each other better, which is what arguments are for. I have not felt that alive in an email in a year.

I am keeping the assistant. It is too useful. But I have started sending one unpolished thing a week, on purpose, the way you take the stairs sometimes to remember you have legs. The assistant offers to fix it every time. I let it fix everything else. Somewhere between the drafts and the rewrites, I am trying to remember which version of me was the original, and whether the sanded-down one is an improvement or a disappearance.