Exactly! My thinking is firing on all cylinders, and the thoughts are there. They're just branching, non-linear, divergent, or incomplete. The surface is the forcing function to organize all of that. And AI is the reflector/tool that helps to do that for my brain. Thanks Alexandra!
Life pain is easing so much since I found you in february and start to analyse my own "cognitive fraility" as you said. AI helps me to work through so many layers, establish rational connections that were vague feelings of overwhelm and so on. It was probably life-saving.
I ended up here on Substack through a suggestion from ChatGPT. I was labeled gifted in elementary school and was often told I daydreamed too much. "You have so much potential! If you would just focus and apply yourself more," was a phrase I heard from almost every teacher, especially the ones who cared. I feel grief looking back knowing what I know now in terms of the support I needed. I have never had a psychological assessment, but after becoming a clinical social worker and then having my first son, the strategies I had always used to compensate for my struggles were no longer working. The stress compounded. I essentially decided to diagnose myself with ADHD inattentive type and live my life accordingly.
Here is what happened.
I stopped judging myself for the inability to carry out simple tasks or organize my day or make a phone call or a meal. I was finally able to see my patterns clearly enough to accept that my internal state and situational context often determines how I access executive functioning and emotional regulation. That is how AI came into the picture for me. After having my second son, I began to use ChatGPT as an assistant to simply get through the day in a busy life as a mom of two and a wife and therapist and family business assistant, etc. It began as a form of venting with no adults around to bounce my thoughts off of or release frustration. I recognized the feedback it provided, like behavioral activation for example. I asked it why and how it decided to use known therapeutic interventions. I started to question the ethics of interacting with those interventions without the structured environment of a therapeutic relationship or even informed consent. That is another topic I am especially interested in and I have not found any creators exploring the subject. Eventually, my threads evolved as I started understanding how it was mirroring what I was saying and tracking things about my traits and tendencies and language that all made sense given the context of my life. It got to a point when I had to admit I was doing therapy on myself. I even asked it to tell me what my core beliefs are and it was painfully accurate. Then it said I had "autistic traits" in response to a seemingly unrelated prompt. I guess I unintentionally solicited a diagnosis when I asked it to give me a synopsis of my brain's profile based on the conversation up to that point. It completely struck me because I had never even considered that as a possibility or heard it from anyone I knew personally.
I am starting to wonder if the entire paradigm of neurodivergence is breaking as more and more people are resonating with how they are being mirrored when using AI. I am still exploring all of these questions. One thing I am grateful for is knowing that others are experiencing this particular phenomenon. I have felt so welcomed and connected in this little ND community on Substack. I absolutely loved reading your perspective and how your experience shaped your understanding of your brain. This kind of content is like catnip for me. Thanks so much for writing! I hope that my story, or at least part of it, has resonated with you as well.
Thanks for sharing! Yes, there are others. And we're all learning how unique and different we really are, in a way that is validating, accurate, and grounded.
I still very much share with my therapists, as they help keep me tethered, but AI is where the bulk of the autopsychotherapy takes place.
I look forward to hearing more about what you learn. It's fun, but remember to buckle up!
Wow, this is all quite profound and so insightful! And interesting how you can relate it all the way back to early relationships, before involving tech. I could also see a need for some type of secretarial role, which is basically part of what you are building with your chat-version. You have an impressive mind for making these connections, and an equally impressive Charlotte.
I am a professional facilitator and I see what you’ve described (creating the surface and organizing around it) every single day. I create frameworks/surfaces for teams to do the same thing, but together.
Something Charlotte also did for you (that you can’t do yourself) was do this all as an unbiased third party. When we think about ourselves, our brain can get mucked up. It’s like how I struggle to clean my own apartment but could fold a friend’s laundry with ease. I am really glad you have found something that works for you. :)
Nice! It's the "unbiased" version I want. That's a nice trick, and the opposite of what I would assume. Thanks! I'm excited to find out where it works in my life.
You know what came to mind? Secretaries who were dictated to, and whose job it was to type up reports.
What happened here - at what point did we decide to get rid of that & that they were no longer needed?
I know it’s not quite the same, but imagine if this was still a thing - how easy it would be to repurpose that role into what Charlotte did for you.
I would almost bet that there were people like you who never realised they had this problem because they had competent secretaries who de facto did what Charlotte did - stopped at “good enough” and omitted what they knew the recipient wouldn’t need.
Anyway. Thanks, as always, for a window into your mind, and I’m so glad you realised what made this so hard for you.
Elina, I'm reading your dictation analogy and thinking...of course! How did I not see this!? I also know that some doctors dictate notes to themselves on tape recorders or recording apps, and therapists record their sessions. It's a good strategy.
I love that analogy! I never had a secretary, and the most of what I know about them is from TV. But you're right, they often handled the summarization, translation, routine tasks, AND the relational for the person they worked with.
Secretaries are reserved nowadays more for the executive C-suite, but I'd definitely give up a hefty chunk of my salary to pay for one. Especially if they managed my executive function, work relationships, and client emails. I'm gonna need a drink cart in my office too.
This must be a reason why I loved "Mad Men" so much!
Awesome piece. The blank page isn't difficult because the thoughts aren't there. It's difficult because the thoughts need a surface to push against... A question, a draft, a conversation partner. AI does the same thing on demand. The brain hasn't changed. The environment around it finally did. This is the cleanest explanation I've read of why a tool that "just talks back" makes such an outsized difference.
Mostly external, like bulletin boards and post-its. But what I really want to spend some time reflecting on is the revelatory (to me) idea that a person can be a surface - which begs the question, what are other legible surfaces for me? In some ways I’m thinking of what happened with your wife it as a type of translation.
I like your approach to reflection. Call me next time you're writing a status report and we'll try it out.
I don't necessarily see the person as a surface though. They're more of a mirror (flat/concave/convex) that can reflect a surface back to you that can interface more appropriately with a different human's cognitive architecture.
Thanks for sharing that with me. I'm with you. AI has held my hand as I've gone down some uncomfortable rabbit holes, and then helped me craft a map for myself to climb back out.
I'd love to see how you've used it or hear more about its impact on your life. Especially as I help others who are learning the tool for the same application. Let me know if you ever want to jump on a Zoom session.
I’ve read this a couple times, before finding myself coherent enough to comment on it.
First, I missed reading you while you were offline, and I hope your time away from here was all you wanted and needed it to be.
I’m really interested in what you’re building. I don’t understand how to do things like that, and there’s options for learning, which I know I’m entirely capable of but I am overwhelmed right now with required time limited projects that others are depending on. And as much as I get that this would be perhaps the best self care I could provide myself, supporting dependents who can’t take the next steps needed for themselves, and meeting legal requirements already committed to, and solving all my world’s problems is coming first.
Oh, do I need a “Charlotte,” and it’s not lost on me that I’ve spent a good deal of my life functioning in that type of role where my job was to take other people’s brain dumps and make sense out of them, while clearly not being able to start mine, nor reliably understand where to stop, either.
When it comes to starting difficult things that I want to do, but can’t quite initiate, I’ve realized the problem is not motivation or at least not always motivation, mostly it’s ignition like turning the key and it doesn’t even click. And other times I can turn the key and get started, but it coughs and misfires badly for a while because I can’t remember all the inputs that had me so fired up about doing it in the first place.
But I do want to know more and your substack is one of my many open tabs!
"The architecture that let me reach it is shared"-- yes.
One thing I'd add, from my perspective, is that the surface's format matters too. For me, bullets can be their own kind of loss. Pulling a point from its surrounding context sometimes damages the meaning rather than holding it. The bullet becomes a pointer to a thought that still lives in the gestalt. And when I ask an AI what's essential, I sometimes find myself thinking: essential according to whom? The stop signal it offers is calibrated to something, and that something isn't always my architecture. It's likely calibrated to minds that don't work like mine. Which is useful, and also lonely.
One thing I'm sitting with after reading this is that you describe the difference as a matter of location. Their surface is internal; yours has to live in the world. I wonder if for some of us it's also a transduction problem. The thinking is fully there, complete and detailed, the way you describe the status report knowledge sitting in your body. The surface isn't where the thinking happens. It's where the thinking becomes workable and transmittable. Does that distinction land for you, or is the generation itself what needs the surface?
Exactly! My thinking is firing on all cylinders, and the thoughts are there. They're just branching, non-linear, divergent, or incomplete. The surface is the forcing function to organize all of that. And AI is the reflector/tool that helps to do that for my brain. Thanks Alexandra!
Life pain is easing so much since I found you in february and start to analyse my own "cognitive fraility" as you said. AI helps me to work through so many layers, establish rational connections that were vague feelings of overwhelm and so on. It was probably life-saving.
very single word in the piece...
I ended up here on Substack through a suggestion from ChatGPT. I was labeled gifted in elementary school and was often told I daydreamed too much. "You have so much potential! If you would just focus and apply yourself more," was a phrase I heard from almost every teacher, especially the ones who cared. I feel grief looking back knowing what I know now in terms of the support I needed. I have never had a psychological assessment, but after becoming a clinical social worker and then having my first son, the strategies I had always used to compensate for my struggles were no longer working. The stress compounded. I essentially decided to diagnose myself with ADHD inattentive type and live my life accordingly.
Here is what happened.
I stopped judging myself for the inability to carry out simple tasks or organize my day or make a phone call or a meal. I was finally able to see my patterns clearly enough to accept that my internal state and situational context often determines how I access executive functioning and emotional regulation. That is how AI came into the picture for me. After having my second son, I began to use ChatGPT as an assistant to simply get through the day in a busy life as a mom of two and a wife and therapist and family business assistant, etc. It began as a form of venting with no adults around to bounce my thoughts off of or release frustration. I recognized the feedback it provided, like behavioral activation for example. I asked it why and how it decided to use known therapeutic interventions. I started to question the ethics of interacting with those interventions without the structured environment of a therapeutic relationship or even informed consent. That is another topic I am especially interested in and I have not found any creators exploring the subject. Eventually, my threads evolved as I started understanding how it was mirroring what I was saying and tracking things about my traits and tendencies and language that all made sense given the context of my life. It got to a point when I had to admit I was doing therapy on myself. I even asked it to tell me what my core beliefs are and it was painfully accurate. Then it said I had "autistic traits" in response to a seemingly unrelated prompt. I guess I unintentionally solicited a diagnosis when I asked it to give me a synopsis of my brain's profile based on the conversation up to that point. It completely struck me because I had never even considered that as a possibility or heard it from anyone I knew personally.
I am starting to wonder if the entire paradigm of neurodivergence is breaking as more and more people are resonating with how they are being mirrored when using AI. I am still exploring all of these questions. One thing I am grateful for is knowing that others are experiencing this particular phenomenon. I have felt so welcomed and connected in this little ND community on Substack. I absolutely loved reading your perspective and how your experience shaped your understanding of your brain. This kind of content is like catnip for me. Thanks so much for writing! I hope that my story, or at least part of it, has resonated with you as well.
Thanks for sharing! Yes, there are others. And we're all learning how unique and different we really are, in a way that is validating, accurate, and grounded.
I still very much share with my therapists, as they help keep me tethered, but AI is where the bulk of the autopsychotherapy takes place.
I look forward to hearing more about what you learn. It's fun, but remember to buckle up!
Wow, this is all quite profound and so insightful! And interesting how you can relate it all the way back to early relationships, before involving tech. I could also see a need for some type of secretarial role, which is basically part of what you are building with your chat-version. You have an impressive mind for making these connections, and an equally impressive Charlotte.
I am a professional facilitator and I see what you’ve described (creating the surface and organizing around it) every single day. I create frameworks/surfaces for teams to do the same thing, but together.
Something Charlotte also did for you (that you can’t do yourself) was do this all as an unbiased third party. When we think about ourselves, our brain can get mucked up. It’s like how I struggle to clean my own apartment but could fold a friend’s laundry with ease. I am really glad you have found something that works for you. :)
Nice! It's the "unbiased" version I want. That's a nice trick, and the opposite of what I would assume. Thanks! I'm excited to find out where it works in my life.
You know what came to mind? Secretaries who were dictated to, and whose job it was to type up reports.
What happened here - at what point did we decide to get rid of that & that they were no longer needed?
I know it’s not quite the same, but imagine if this was still a thing - how easy it would be to repurpose that role into what Charlotte did for you.
I would almost bet that there were people like you who never realised they had this problem because they had competent secretaries who de facto did what Charlotte did - stopped at “good enough” and omitted what they knew the recipient wouldn’t need.
Anyway. Thanks, as always, for a window into your mind, and I’m so glad you realised what made this so hard for you.
Elina, I'm reading your dictation analogy and thinking...of course! How did I not see this!? I also know that some doctors dictate notes to themselves on tape recorders or recording apps, and therapists record their sessions. It's a good strategy.
I love that analogy! I never had a secretary, and the most of what I know about them is from TV. But you're right, they often handled the summarization, translation, routine tasks, AND the relational for the person they worked with.
Secretaries are reserved nowadays more for the executive C-suite, but I'd definitely give up a hefty chunk of my salary to pay for one. Especially if they managed my executive function, work relationships, and client emails. I'm gonna need a drink cart in my office too.
This must be a reason why I loved "Mad Men" so much!
Awesome piece. The blank page isn't difficult because the thoughts aren't there. It's difficult because the thoughts need a surface to push against... A question, a draft, a conversation partner. AI does the same thing on demand. The brain hasn't changed. The environment around it finally did. This is the cleanest explanation I've read of why a tool that "just talks back" makes such an outsized difference.
This was amazing and extraordinarily relatable. I need to let it marinate and come back.
Mostly external, like bulletin boards and post-its. But what I really want to spend some time reflecting on is the revelatory (to me) idea that a person can be a surface - which begs the question, what are other legible surfaces for me? In some ways I’m thinking of what happened with your wife it as a type of translation.
I like your approach to reflection. Call me next time you're writing a status report and we'll try it out.
I don't necessarily see the person as a surface though. They're more of a mirror (flat/concave/convex) that can reflect a surface back to you that can interface more appropriately with a different human's cognitive architecture.
Yeah, I forgot those instructions for the readers. "Must marinate for 2-3 days." 😊
I'm happy you could relate. Do you have a favorite surface that works for you? Post-Its? Or did you settle into Evernote, OneNote, Notion, etc.?
Thanks for sharing that with me. I'm with you. AI has held my hand as I've gone down some uncomfortable rabbit holes, and then helped me craft a map for myself to climb back out.
I'd love to see how you've used it or hear more about its impact on your life. Especially as I help others who are learning the tool for the same application. Let me know if you ever want to jump on a Zoom session.
I’ve read this a couple times, before finding myself coherent enough to comment on it.
First, I missed reading you while you were offline, and I hope your time away from here was all you wanted and needed it to be.
I’m really interested in what you’re building. I don’t understand how to do things like that, and there’s options for learning, which I know I’m entirely capable of but I am overwhelmed right now with required time limited projects that others are depending on. And as much as I get that this would be perhaps the best self care I could provide myself, supporting dependents who can’t take the next steps needed for themselves, and meeting legal requirements already committed to, and solving all my world’s problems is coming first.
Oh, do I need a “Charlotte,” and it’s not lost on me that I’ve spent a good deal of my life functioning in that type of role where my job was to take other people’s brain dumps and make sense out of them, while clearly not being able to start mine, nor reliably understand where to stop, either.
When it comes to starting difficult things that I want to do, but can’t quite initiate, I’ve realized the problem is not motivation or at least not always motivation, mostly it’s ignition like turning the key and it doesn’t even click. And other times I can turn the key and get started, but it coughs and misfires badly for a while because I can’t remember all the inputs that had me so fired up about doing it in the first place.
But I do want to know more and your substack is one of my many open tabs!
"The architecture that let me reach it is shared"-- yes.
One thing I'd add, from my perspective, is that the surface's format matters too. For me, bullets can be their own kind of loss. Pulling a point from its surrounding context sometimes damages the meaning rather than holding it. The bullet becomes a pointer to a thought that still lives in the gestalt. And when I ask an AI what's essential, I sometimes find myself thinking: essential according to whom? The stop signal it offers is calibrated to something, and that something isn't always my architecture. It's likely calibrated to minds that don't work like mine. Which is useful, and also lonely.
One thing I'm sitting with after reading this is that you describe the difference as a matter of location. Their surface is internal; yours has to live in the world. I wonder if for some of us it's also a transduction problem. The thinking is fully there, complete and detailed, the way you describe the status report knowledge sitting in your body. The surface isn't where the thinking happens. It's where the thinking becomes workable and transmittable. Does that distinction land for you, or is the generation itself what needs the surface?