I Think I Stopped Noticing It

Someone asked me last week what I thought about GRACE, and I gave them the kind of answer people give when they haven’t actually thought about the question in months. I said it was fine. Which is not really true.

It’s not bad, exactly. That would be easier. Bad things are simple. You dislike them, complain about them, avoid them if you can. GRACE is more like living next to a road you once found noisy and now sleep through. It is always there. Constantly. Quiet little prompts, assessments, correlations, reminders, observations, all layered somewhere just behind whatever else I happen to be doing. Most of them never become important enough to finish reading.

I had to learn that. At first I read everything. That lasted maybe three weeks. You cannot live like that. I don’t care how disciplined you are. Nobody needs that much information about themselves. There are only so many observations about how much you’ve had to drink, what one shoulder is doing compared with the other, whether you slept enough, what that second coffee was probably going to do later, how fast you’re walking, whether you’re clenching your jaw, where you are in your cycle, how patient you’re likely to be today, and whether your digestive system has apparently decided to alter its usual timetable before you start thinking that maybe ignorance was one of evolution’s nicer features.

So now I let most of it pass. I know that sounds irresponsible. It probably is. There are people who seem to interact with every notification like GRACE is a very stern little woman sitting on their shoulder with a clipboard. I can’t do that. I have patients. I have paperwork. I have a six-year-old who can turn putting on socks into a legal dispute. I do not have room in my day to receive a running commentary on my own existence.

Most of the time, the messages are harmless enough. They flash into the edge of my attention and disappear because I don’t give them anything back. Sometimes I catch one accidentally. Sometimes one is so strange that it becomes impossible not to notice.

The other day I was helping a patient from a wheelchair onto an examination table. He was nervous, I was concentrating, and for about ten seconds the entire universe had narrowed down to weight, balance, grip, foot position, and making absolutely sure neither of us ended up on the floor. Then, directly in the middle of that, GRACE chose to draw my attention to the fact that my digestive habits had apparently become statistically interesting.

I nearly dropped a grown man.

Not because I was alarmed. Because I started laughing. Not much. Just one of those awful little trapped noises that escapes when you absolutely cannot explain what is funny.

The patient looked at me.

“You okay?”

“Yep.”

There is no professional way to say, Sorry, something inside my head has just taken an unexpected interest in whether I need more fiber.

So I finished the transfer, made sure he was comfortable, stepped out of the room, and stood in the hallway for a few seconds with my hand over my mouth like an idiot.

That was probably the moment I realized I had stopped treating GRACE with any sense of ceremony. A few years ago, having a system inside my head notice something that private would have felt enormous. Intimate. Maybe invasive. Definitely worth discussing. Now my first thought was: seriously?

My second thought was that I should probably buy pears.

That is what it does to you, I think. Not in some sinister way. Just by repetition. Nothing stays dramatic if it happens often enough. The first time GRACE started making observations connected to my menstrual cycle, I remember feeling weirdly offended, like it had opened a bathroom door without knocking. Now, if it decides my hormones might be relevant while I’m already irritated, I mostly think, Do not use my ovaries against me.

Sometimes I argue with it silently. Sometimes I feel judged by wording that was probably not written to sound judgmental. Apparently I’m less emotionally tolerant than usual. Thank you. Apparently rest would help. Excellent suggestion. I’ll tell my job. Apparently my intestines are underperforming. Go away.

I’m paraphrasing, obviously. We all know I’m not allowed to repeat what GRACE actually shows me. Most of the time I don’t think about that rule at all. Then every now and then I catch myself rewriting something in my own head before I say it out loud, and that’s when it feels wrong again.

Because this isn’t classified information. It isn’t someone else’s secret. It is my body. My sleep. My hormones. My bowel movements, apparently. GRACE can watch all of it, measure it, compare it, decide what matters, and tell me what it thinks. I’m allowed to know. I’m just not allowed to repeat the thing I was told about myself.

There is something deeply strange about having the most private information your body can produce inside your own head and still somehow not owning it.

Maybe that sounds creepier than I mean it to. Or maybe it is exactly as creepy as it sounds, and I’ve just had long enough to get used to it.

And then, mixed in with all of that, there will be something useful. A reminder about Lucy’s permission slip. Something that makes me notice I’ve been favoring one side of my back. A nudge that makes me reconsider how well I actually slept. Something I would genuinely rather know. That is probably why I never switched it off mentally altogether. You learn to skim. To let the river run past and occasionally grab something out of it.

I think that’s what surprised me when I was asked what I thought about GRACE. I don’t think about GRACE very much. I think through it. Around it. Past it. It is there while I work, while I drive, while I stand in the kitchen trying to remember why I opened the refrigerator. Sometimes it points me toward something useful. Sometimes it makes me realize I should drink some water. Sometimes it develops an entirely unwelcome interest in my digestion while I’m trying to keep another human being upright.

And mostly, I ignore it. Not because I hate it. Because if I listened to everything it had to say, I would never hear myself think.