What I gave a friend who was going through something hard.

A friend of mine was going through something hard last winter.

I’m not going to say what. She’s a private person, and even with all the details changed, I don’t want to put any version of her situation in a newsletter. But it was the kind of thing where, when you find out, you don’t know what to do with your hands.

My first instinct, naturally, was to make her something.

This is what I always want to do. This newsletter is about it. Someone I love is going through it, AI can help me make a thing in twenty minutes, I should make the thing. Right? That’s the whole point of having this technology in your life.

I almost did. I had the idea. I had a draft started.

Then I stopped.

I think the most important thing I’ve learned about AI for the people you love is when not to make the thing yet.

What I did instead, for about three weeks, was just be in touch with her. Not big touches. Small ones. Sending a meme. Asking about her plant. Asking how she’d slept. The kind of low-stakes regular contact that says I’m here without ever saying it out loud, which is how she would have wanted it.

In one of those small conversations, she mentioned a thing. Off-handedly. She said: I keep thinking about that bench in my grandmother’s garden. I haven’t thought about it in twenty years, and now I think about it every morning.

I didn’t say anything in the moment. I sat with it.

A week later, I sat down with the AI for the first time. I asked it to help me write three short sentences — that was it, three sentences — about what it might be like to sit on that bench again, at the time of day she’d mentioned, with her grandmother. I had the AI generate one small soft watercolor illustration. I printed it on a single 5×7 card. The whole project took me forty minutes, including the printing.

I mailed it to her.

I didn’t say what it was. I didn’t reference our conversation. I just put it in an envelope and dropped it in the mail.

She called me the day she got it.

She said: I don’t know how you knew.

I said: you told me, two weeks ago, in one sentence. I was listening.

We talked for an hour. She told me the card was in her wallet. She said it had been a hard week and on Tuesday she had taken the card out at lunch and looked at it for ten minutes and then closed it and gone back to work and gotten through the afternoon.

The card was tiny. The card cost almost nothing. The card took less effort to make than dinner. The card was the thing she needed.

What I want to say to you, if you have someone in your life going through something hard, is two things.

First — wait. You don’t have to make the thing the day you find out. You probably shouldn’t. The first impulse to fix something for someone is usually about you, not them. Let it settle. Stay in touch in small ways. Listen.

Second — when you do make the thing, make it small. One specific reference to something they said. One image that ties to one memory they mentioned. Not a five-page bedtime story. Not a three-minute song. A 5×7 card with three sentences and one picture. Something they can put in their wallet. Something they can take out at lunch on a Tuesday.

The big projects we usually talk about here — the songs, the bedtime stories, the videos — they’re for joy and celebration. When someone is going through something hard, the thing that helps is almost always smaller and quieter and more specific than that. A card with one memory in it. Made not because you wanted to help, but because you were paying attention.

The AI is the tool. The listening is the gift.

I’m really glad you’re here.

— Tapan

PS — If there’s someone in your life going through something hard right now, you don’t have to make them anything today. Just send them a message asking about a small, specific thing — their plant, their dog, something they mentioned last week. That’s the start.