The Catalyst

I did really well in grade school. I graduated in the top ten of my high school class. I had no behavioral issues, no red flags. It wasn’t until college that things started to fall apart.

Suddenly I was in lecture halls with 300 other students, no one checking whether I showed up, no structure keeping me on track. I couldn’t follow the professor. I couldn’t build my own schedule and stick to it. Before long I was failing classes I should have been able to pass. I figured out workarounds and found ways to compensate. But the pattern was always there underneath. Graduate school tried to break me. Medical school nearly succeeded.

I have a PhD in genetics and an MD. I say that not to brag but because I need you to understand what it cost. Every degree, every milestone, was purchased with an amount of effort that I now know was not proportional to what was required. I was spending enormous energy just trying to function. And when I finally saw a clinical psychologist in medical school and got the ADHD diagnosis, I did what a lot of high-achieving people with ADHD do: I chalked it up to not working hard enough and kept going.

Medical school was where I met my husband, got married, had my first child, and also quietly started falling apart in ways I couldn’t explain to anyone. I graduated by the grace of God and made the decision not to pursue clinical medicine. I moved into research, which felt like familiar ground. It wasn’t. The same struggles followed me through my first postdoc, my second postdoc, and into my junior faculty position. I was getting by and on paper looked to be successful. But at what cost.

Every day I was physically and emotionally drained, trying to scrape together whatever was left to be present for my family. The blog I’d been daydreaming about for years? The ideas that kept floating around in my head that had nothing to do with science? Those dreams slowly suffocated. I convinced myself there was no way out and I needed to accept the life I’d built.

And then my husband mentioned ChatGPT.

You have to understand something about my husband. He uses technology because it exists, not because he trusts it. Artificial intelligence specifically makes him nervous (think Will Smith in I, Robot). So the fact that he was the one who suggested I look into it could have been nothing but divine intervention.

I played around with it. It was interesting and fun. I could see the appeal. But I was still stuck. I had so many ideas in my head and no way to get them out. So many paths forward I couldn’t find the energy to take. One day I just sat down and said all of that out loud to the AI I was talking to.

What happened next changed everything.

For the first time in my life I had a coherent picture of what was happening in my brain. An actual explanation of the mechanism, in plain language, that made sense of decades of struggle. Being a scientist, I ate this up.

I learned how anxiety and depression were natural offshoots of the daily struggle to conform. I understood why things felt so hard for me when they seemed to be easy for others. My thoughts and feelings were validated in writing. Then I learned about cognitive scaffolding. I learned what it means to work with your brain instead of against it.

I got genuinely excited about the possibilities for the first time in a long time, made a long list of things I was going to do, and immediately became overwhelmed. This was followed by several months of getting my hopes up, losing momentum, and feeling like I’d failed again. This was the rollercoaster I’d been on my whole life, just with a new vehicle.

What I didn’t notice, while I was busy being disappointed in myself, was that something had been quietly happening on the side.

I had started building an app.

I’d been frustrated for years with the productivity tools available at work and decided to try making my own. I had an idea I’d been carrying around for a long time. I had very little coding experience, and had been working with an AI on a project that kept getting a little bit better every time I came back to it. I’d been working on it for months. And I was proud of it. More than proud — I was actually excited to work on it, even when it was frustrating, which is not something I could say about many things.

It wasn’t until I showed it to a different AI and described what I’d been doing that something clicked.

I had been doing the thing I believed I couldn’t do.

I wasn’t outsourcing my thinking. I was finally giving my thinking enough room to breathe.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. The app wasn’t the only thing. I’d been using AI to chip away at projects and ideas I’d been stuck on for years. Slowly, in the background, things were getting done. And suddenly the blog I’d been dreaming about for years didn’t seem impossible anymore. I didn’t have to struggle to come up with content or master a subject before I could write about it. I could just look at the past two weeks. Because I was living it.

I was using AI every single day as cognitive scaffolding. And it was working.

I have a sister who also uses AI, and we’d been sharing these stories with each other — the things we’d figured out, the moments where something finally clicked. So why couldn’t they become stories I shared with everyone. Because there are more people like me. People with more ideas than they know what to do with and no system that can keep up with the speed and complexity of what’s in their heads. People who have been fighting the way their brains work every day, trying to conform to a neurotypical model that was never built for them.

These are my stories and I hope they’re an inspiration. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.