Oh, the irony. Dark thoughts are winning trophies and you want to get rid of them.

This is your gold, sit with it. Bad days can get you places.

Let those heavy thoughts take over—the ones that make you feel small, trapped, like your words are caught in a vice. Let them stack up, closing in around you like prison bars. Feel the images that flood your mind, vivid, detailed, generating faster than any AI could dream of. Say it out loud: ChatGPT on a lousy prompt spits out more than you can muster on your best days. Now you’re thinking: “I’m a fraud, folks. Lock me up and throw away the key.” Let those negative thoughts come all the way up to the surface, like ants at a picnic. Let them ruin everything.

And then, run.

Run as fast as you can and open that notebook. Open that laptop. Open that mind of yours. Those things closing in on you? They’re not prison bars. They are the lines of a page, and you’re about to write something on them. Don’t second-guess it—just type. Let the words spill out. Write like no one will ever read it. Write in the margins, between the lines, and keep going until the ink runs dry. Write thought your frantic fears, the boredom, the angry hopelessness and wanting to quit forever. Don’t worry if it’s ugly. Write it all—the raw, the rough, the ridiculous. You should know this: a flower doesn’t grow where it’s hard and thick; it blossoms where it’s muddy and filthy, and vulnerable. So just keep building, and when the wall is tall enough, forget all about it. Step as far away from it as you can. Drown your restless mind in cold showers. Swim for hours. Nap on bathroom floors if you have to. Find a place, any place, that feels like a sanctuary. But when you return, face that wall head-on. Look that bull right in the eye.

Gather all your negative thoughts and squeeze them for every single, juicy little bit they’ve got.

This is your gold.