A day after my dog Toby passed, my apartment became a museum of his absence. The silence he left behind wasn’t empty. It was heavy. It was a physical presence that pressed in on me from all sides.
My brain, hardwired by five years of habit, kept trying to fill it. I would be working at my desk and I’d hear a ghost. A faint sniffle from the corner where his bed used to be. The gentle, deep sigh of him settling into a nap. I’d be watching a movie and feel a phantom weight on my feet. The worst was the sound of his paws on the hardwood. It was a slow, deliberate pitter-patter, the sound of an old dog moving from one comfortable spot to another. I was constantly listening for it, waiting for it, and the crushing silence that answered each time was its own kind of pain.
The quiet wasn’t just quiet. It was the sound of a question that would never be answered again.
A week later, it was getting unbearable.
Eight Pounds of Something Wrong
Some people might think a week is too soon to get another dog. They’re probably right. It wasn’t a logical decision. It was an act of pure emotional survival. I was being haunted, and I couldn’t keep living in a house full of ghosts. I had to do something that would smash the silence into a million pieces.
So, for my readers who don’t know yet, this is Pixel.
He’s an eight-pound jumble of paws and comically long legs, barely 4 months old.
And he is a completely different kind of story.
I love him. I need to say that up front because everything else I’m about to explain might make it sound like I don’t. But I do. The love is there. It’s just that my system doesn’t know how to process it. Every time I reach for that feeling, trying to experience the warmth and joy that should come naturally with this tiny, perfect creature, my brain crashes trying to make sense of it.
I’ve been trying to figure out why everything with him feels so wrong. Not bad. Just… incompatible. Like my system is rejecting something that should be good. And then I realized what this reminds me of.
What Stays and What Disappears
Think about the last time you uploaded a document to ChatGPT. Suddenly it could answer questions about your file. Quote from it, summarize it, pull out specific details. But then you started a new conversation without uploading the file again, and all that knowledge vanished. That’s because there are two types of knowledge an AI can have. There’s its training, which is permanent. Foundational. Part of who it is. And there’s uploaded information, which is temporary. Accessible in the moment, but not integrated.
ChatGPT could run without the internet. So could Gemini and Claude. They wouldn’t have today’s news, but they’d still answer your questions with shocking accuracy. That’s the difference. Training is baked in. Uploaded documents are just borrowed.
The training happens first, before you ever talk to the AI. Billions of words over years. That’s how the AI becomes what it is. The uploaded documents are different. You can give the AI a fifty-page report, and it’ll reference it perfectly. But it’s just consulting it. The information sits there, separate, never becoming part of the foundation.
Close that chat and start a new one? The AI has no idea the document ever existed. Some newer AI tools let you share context between conversations. Tell them to remember certain things, carry information forward. But even that isn’t permanent. It’s still just documents being passed along. Close the wrong window, and it’s gone. Never integrated. Never learned.
The Toby years were my training. Five years of learning what love meant to a quiet rescue with his own history of trauma. Love wasn’t about tricks or commands. It was about creating a fortress of safety. Earning trust in millimeters, over years. Proving that the world could be a calm, quiet harbor. That training is permanent. It’s part of who I am.
Pixel moments are uploaded documents. “Puppy learned to sit in five minutes.” “Puppy loves everyone instantly.” “Puppy has no trauma, no fear, no history that needs healing.” I can access them. Pull them up when I need to. But none of it integrates with my training. None of it changes what I actually know about love.
These documents just sit there, separate, incompatible. Every time I try to process a new moment with Pixel, it’s like starting a fresh conversation. The Toby training is there. But the Pixel documents exist in a different session entirely.
When Light Casts the Wrong Shadow
The other day, I taught Pixel to sit. He’s a smart little guy, and it took maybe five minutes. He plopped his butt on the floor and looked up at me with his big, trusting eyes. For a split second, there was a flash of something. Pride? Joy?
It vanished before I could name it. Replaced by a profound hollowness.
My brain did what it’s trained to do. It tried to retrieve a reference file to understand this moment. It pulled up my first real win with Toby. That win wasn’t a trick. Months after I brought him home, he finally walked up to me on his own. Nudged my hand. Asked for pets. It was a win that was earned through silence and patience, proof that maybe I’d done something right.
My system tries to use that file to process this moment with Pixel. A puppy learning to sit in five minutes. And it just crashes. The contexts are too different. One file says love takes months to earn. The other says it can happen in an afternoon.
It’s like trying to get an AI to reference a document that was uploaded in a completely different chat. The information technically exists somewhere, but there’s no way to access it. No way to make the connection. The comparison feels like a betrayal.
What makes it worse is that the love for Pixel isn’t less real because it’s different. It’s not less valid because it came easier. But my training can’t reconcile that. It keeps insisting that love should look like the Toby version, and when it doesn’t, the whole system freezes up. I’m stuck in this loop of knowing intellectually that different dogs mean different kinds of love, while my heart just keeps throwing error messages.
Fury at a Broken Deal and Guilt Over an Easy Life
This system failure happens constantly. It’s why people tell me I’ll miss these puppy days, and I’m not sure I will. My training has no frame of reference for this kind of easy, immediate joy. And the Pixel moments can’t connect to any of my actual understanding of love. They’re just floating there, unintegrated, in their own separate session.
The anger comes from the same place. My training was built on a core assumption: follow the rules, get a small dog, and you get twelve, maybe fifteen, years. That was the deal that I signed. My system pulls up that promise every single day. Then it compares it to the brutal truth that lymphoma doesn’t give a flying fuck about deals. The conflict between what I was trained to expect and what actually happened generates a feeling of pure, simmering rage, directed at no one and nothing in particular.
I’ve tried doing what you’d do with an AI. I’ve tried to manually pass the context forward. To force my brain to remember that Toby’s story and Pixel’s story are both real, both valid, both happening to the same person. But it doesn’t work. The knowledge stays separate. The training doesn’t integrate the new documents. I can tell myself the words, but I can’t make them mean anything.
And then there’s the guilt. My training retrieves the file on Toby’s history. The hardship he survived before he got to me. The five short years I had to try and make up for it, to convince him that humans could be kind, gentle, and loving. That file…it lays that file next to this tiny, innocent puppy who has only ever known safety, who came into the world loved and wanted. The result is a sharp, nauseating feeling of betrayal.
So here’s where I am. Running on old training that doesn’t apply anymore, trying to reference uploaded documents that exist in a completely different conversation. No amount of manually passing context forward seems to bridge the gap.
Training a Heart That’s Already Broken
Pixel isn’t a tool to fix my grief. He’s not a document I’m consulting to fill in the gaps. He is a profound commitment. My job now is to somehow build new training while the old training is still running. I have to make sure this little guy gets to write his own story, not just be a temporary file my system can’t integrate.
And I have to figure out how to let myself love him the way he deserves to be loved. Not the Toby way. The Pixel way. Whatever that turns out to be.
I don’t know how to do that yet. I just know I have to try.
Real training doesn’t happen in a single conversation. It doesn’t happen because you uploaded the right document or shared the right context. It happens slowly, through repetition and time. Through patterns that get reinforced over and over until they become foundational. Until they’re not just information you can access, but knowledge that shapes everything else.
That’s what I’m hoping for. That eventually, enough Pixel moments will pile up that they stop feeling like temporary documents. That my brain will stop trying to pull up Toby files to understand them. That this new kind of love, this easier, lighter, puppy love, will become its own form of permanent knowledge. Not replacing the Toby training. Just existing alongside it. Different, but equally real.
But I’m not there yet. Right now, I’m just existing in the gap between two different kinds of knowledge. One that’s deeply integrated and one that keeps feeling like it’s going to vanish the moment I close the window.
It’s a reminder that you don’t get to wait for the old training to be cleanly archived before you start building something new. You don’t get a fresh start with a blank slate. You don’t get to pause everything until you feel ready.
You just start. While the old knowledge is still there. While your system is still trying to reference files that don’t match. While the new information keeps feeling temporary, like it could disappear at any moment.
You start building new training in the middle of the mess of the old training.
Because that’s the only way it ever works.