Everyone Hates AI, But It Freed My Mind.

On scattered genius, executive dysfunction, and why this technology might be the first tool actually built for the way some of our brains work.

Let me tell you about my mother. She walked into bookstores the way some people walk into churches — with reverence, and with a quiet, burning ache. She would find Shel Silverstein on the shelf and just stand there, caught between admiration and something heavier: “Why not me?” She had the talent. She had the poems, the illustrations, the half-finished children's books typed out on her computer late at night. She was an extraordinary cook, a costume designer, a soccer coach, a painter of custom shoes. She was always working on something. She just never managed to finish the one thing she cared about most.

She died at 34. And for a long time I carried that as a warning — look what happens when you scatter yourself too thin, when you never commit, when you let fear of success keep you endlessly in motion without ever arriving anywhere. But the older I get, the more I understand: my mother wasn't flawed. She was undiagnosed. And she was trapped — by a system that used her illness against her in ways that made it nearly impossible to build anything of her own.

The trap she lived in

My mother was diagnosed with leukemia at twenty-three, one year after having me. The medication keeping her cancer in remission was extraordinarily expensive. Her medical insurance covered it — but only as long as she didn't earn a real income. The moment she started working officially, they would drop her coverage. So she existed in an impossible bind: too sick to risk losing insurance, too alive and too brilliant to sit still. She couldn't build a career. She couldn't even try without the threat of losing the medication keeping her alive.

So she found the edges. Cash work. Side projects. Small businesses that stayed unofficial. She catered comfort food to pregnant women. She designed costumes for a nonprofit dance company. She coached my soccer team one year. She tutored at a university. She painted custom shoes and made a little business out of it. She was constantly in motion, constantly creating — and constantly unable to point to any of it and say: this is mine, this is real, this is what I built.

She poured her energy into her book instead. Into the poems and illustrations she worked on in private. And I think for a long time, that felt like progress — like she was building a career on the side, one page at a time. But I also think there was a part of her that was genuinely scared of success. Of what it would mean to finish. Of the exposure, the judgment, the loss of the thing she loved most — which was the dream of it.

I know that fear intimately. Because I grew up and became her.

The Jonah Complex, and me

I started a YouTube channel at thirteen. By sixteen I had a hundred thousand subscribers — genuinely rare at the time. At seventeen, overwhelmed by the weight of being witnessed, I quit. I walked away from a documentary I'd made in Puerto Rico — an ambitious project featuring a Puerto Rican film legend as narrator, a real commentary on the island's educational crisis — just as Hurricane Maria hit and erased the moment it was meant to exist in. Then I made music. Got industry attention. Hid again.

A psychology professor once looked at me after I spoke in a seminar and said, unprompted: "You have the Jonah Complex." It's the fear of one's own greatness — the retreat from success because success feels more dangerous than failure ever did. I didn't know the term then. But I felt the truth of it in my chest immediately.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined this term to describe the tendency to fear our own best possibilities — to self-sabotage not because we doubt our ability, but because we're afraid of what actualizing it would demand from us. It's especially common among highly creative people who have experienced early exposure, early failure, or environments where visibility felt unsafe. If you've ever gotten close to something real and then inexplicably walked away from it, you may recognize this.

Every time I got close to something — a project, a moment, a wave of momentum — I found a reason to pull back. Not because I didn't believe in what I was doing. Because some part of me was more comfortable with the potential of it than the reality. And I watched my mother do the same thing her entire life, in a loop she could never name or escape.

What we were never told about our brains

It wasn't until I got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult that things started to make a different kind of sense. Not just about me — about her. Looking back, I believe my mother had undiagnosed ADHD. It runs through that side of my family like a current: everyone operating at a high level of creative output, everyone scattered, everyone brilliant in bursts and chaotic in between. Everyone quietly exhausted by the gap between what they could imagine and what they could execute.

This is one of the cruelest aspects of ADHD that almost never gets talked about: it isn't a shortage of ideas. It's almost always an excess of them. The problem isn't motivation — it's initiation. It's not that you don't know what you want to build; it's that you can see fifty versions of it simultaneously and your nervous system can't always decide which thread to pull first. It's the paralysis of abundance. The burnout that comes not from laziness but from running too many processes at once with no way to offload any of them.

Executive dysfunction — the clinical term for the difficulty ADHD brains have with initiating, organizing, and completing tasks — isn't a character flaw. It's a neurological difference in how dopamine regulates the prefrontal cortex. People with ADHD often have no problem sustaining deep focus on things that genuinely interest them (hyperfocus), but struggle enormously with translating ideas into sequential action, managing working memory, and filtering what matters from what doesn't. The result can look like laziness from the outside. On the inside, it feels like drowning in your own potential.

My mother had no framework for any of this. She lived in a time and a circumstance that didn't have the language for it. She just knew she was scattered, and she carried that as shame. I watched her feel like a failure for most of her life even as the people around her saw someone doing everything — teaching, creating, raising a kid, fighting cancer, building small businesses from nothing. She couldn't reconcile those two realities. She didn't have the tools to.

Why I used AI to write this post — and why that matters

Here's where I'll lose some of you. And I'm going to ask you to stay anyway.

This post began as a voice memo. I spoke into my phone — raw, circling, emotional, going in six directions at once — and used AI to help me find the structure underneath it. I didn't hand it a prompt and walk away. I gave it my actual thoughts, messy and alive, and it helped me organize them into something another person could follow. Then I rewrote it, shaped it, made it mine. The thinking is mine. The story is mine. The synthesis is the collaboration.

For someone with ADHD, the distance between having a thought and writing it down can feel like crossing a continent. AI didn't give me ideas. It gave me a bridge.

The thing about an ADHD brain — especially one that operates at high creative volume — is that the ideas are never the problem. The problem is the translation. Getting from the raw, fast, nonlinear thought to the structured, communicable output requires a set of executive functions that our brains don't always make available on demand. And historically, that gap has been where so much creative potential quietly dies. In the drawer. In the voice memo that never becomes a post. In the draft that never gets finished because by the time you sit down to structure it, the energy that generated it is already three obsessions away.

AI closes that gap. Not by thinking for you — but by handling the translation layer so your ideas can actually reach other people. For someone who processes the way I do, that's not a shortcut. It's an accommodation. The same way a wheelchair ramp isn't cheating — it's just the thing that lets you get in the building.

If you're someone who works across multiple domains, has more ideas than hours, and consistently loses momentum during the production phase of any project — AI tools may be genuinely transformative for you in a way they aren't for everyone. Voice-to-text transcription, AI-assisted structuring, summarization, and editing support aren't about replacing your thinking. They're about removing the bottleneck between your thinking and your output. The volume and precision of your ideas doesn't have to be capped anymore by the executive bandwidth it takes to translate them.

What my mother deserved

I think about her every time I use these tools. She was an extraordinary poet. An illustrator. A writer sitting on a book she never got to finish. And I wonder — if she had had even a fraction of what I have access to right now, what she might have made. She typed her manuscripts alone at midnight, working in the margins of a life the healthcare system had deliberately kept small. The ideas were never her problem. The translation, the production, the sheer logistical weight of turning raw creative energy into a finished, publishable thing — that was what kept stopping her.

This website is named after her. Not as a memorial. As a continuation. The philosophy I'm building here — for scattered thinkers, creative polymaths, multi-hyphenates who have always operated at a volume that outpaced their systems — is the one she embodied without ever getting credit for. I'm giving it a name, a home, and a language she never had.

And I'm writing about it in the first place because I spoke into a microphone and an algorithm helped me find the shape of what I was trying to say. She would have used every tool available to her. I know that for certain. She always did.

You're not behind. You're not broken.

If you've made it this far, I'm going to guess you recognize something in this. Maybe you've been called scattered. Maybe you have a drawer full of half-finished things that you still believe in. Maybe you've watched yourself get close to something real, repeatedly, and pull back for reasons you couldn't fully explain. Maybe you've been told your whole life that your biggest strength is also your biggest problem — that your mind moves too fast, wants too much, can't commit.

I want to tell you what nobody told my mother: that's not a flaw in you. That's a feature that's been running without the right operating environment. And we are finally, actually, living in a moment where the tools exist to build that environment for yourself — to take the volume and precision of the way your mind works and actually get it out into the world without losing half of it in translation.

That's what this website is about. That's why I built it. And that's why this is the first thing I'm posting on it — not despite the fact that it was hard to write, but because of it.

Named for her. Built for the rest of us.