The first thing that understood my brain wasn't human

On school reports, wrong shoes, and the brain that made sense to AI first.

I've been trying to figure myself out my whole life. I'm not done, and I might be completely wrong about what I'm about to share. But if someone had written this for me ten years ago, I might have gotten here sooner.

What happens when the first thing that understands your brain isn’t human?

That’s the question I’ve been writing around for months without realizing it. Every essay about augmented cognition, about who gets to build AI, about creating with AI. I thought I was writing about technology and the futures we’re building. Turns out I was writing about myself. And some of you saw it before I did.

Hi, I'm Emma, mom of 2 in Stockholm. I think out loud about AI, work, and how different brains actually experience both. It's messy. You've been warned.

On the first page of the binder holding everything I did from age 13 to 16, there’s a photo of me and a list. Student council. Party committee. Photography. Film pro. And in the middle: “Can do anything — if she wants to.” Not a comment on one assignment, but as a summary of who I was. A personality trait, listed right there between the extracurriculars and hobbies.

I felt something start to boil inside of me.

I kept reading.

“Very dependent on motivation and daily form.” “Has great capacity but chooses to perform at a pass level.” “Active when you feel like it.” “You are far too uneven.”

I’m reading those words now at 33 and I’m feeling angry, and a bit sad. Because nobody asked why my output was so dependent on “motivation and daily form.” They just wrote it down like it was a choice I was making.

If you were always told “you can do anything you set your mind to,” every failure becomes a willpower problem. Never the expectations, never the environment. Just you, not trying hard enough.

At 16, I still had the highest grade in almost all subjects. Except German, because what’s the point of learning German if you know English, I thought. The following three years my grades were either the highest or barely passed. My Swedish teacher told me once that it felt like talking about a different person when she discussed my performance with the Chemistry teacher.

Same at university, where I eventually found a workaround: I only picked courses with hand-in projects and no in-classroom exams. It felt like hacking the system. I wrote my master’s thesis paper in the few final days even though the project spanned five months, winged the final presentation, and felt like an imposter when the examiner praised my work.

The same pattern followed me to my first job. In peer reviews, colleagues called me meticulous, a perfectionist, someone who sees entire systems. “Conscious and meticulous decisions.” “Emma epitomizes working smart.” “Really impressed by her thoughtful approaches.” On the same form, under constructive feedback: “Your replies can be perceived as defensive.” “You respond in an aggressive way, but with a completely neutral tone.” “Sometimes she can come off a bit dismissive.” “I would like to see a more visible Emma.”

It feels like they are describing the same person from two angles. All the thinking happened inside my head, and people only saw what came out. When someone questioned a decision I’d already thought through from every angle, I couldn’t show my work on the spot. It came out flat, or sharp, or not at all.

My self-reflection from the same period says “I have no personal goals anymore, I just want to survive.” I’m not blaming the workplace, it was a growing startup, we were all young and figuring it out. But what I remember is that what I felt inside and what others told me never matched. The brain that could see entire systems could never make sense of herself.

The idea of neurodivergence had been circling for a while. My social media feeds were full of “how to spot AuDHD in women” ever since I started watching Hayley Honeyman’s body doubling videos. Or did I find her channel because of the reels I kept watching? Who knows? I noticed how my writing kept resonating with neurodivergent people. My ‘allow me to introduce myself’-note brought 1000+ subscribers and people said “I also have ADHD and AI has been a game changer” and left me confused. But it took the avalanche response to the anxiety piece to finally give me permission to take it seriously for myself.

So I started asking AI what it saw. I fed it my writing, my patterns, the things you had pointed out. Different models, different approaches, just to see if the answers would change.

The most interesting observation came when I shared a logic test I did last summer. I scored right above average and remember the disappointed feeling as I got the result back. I started making excuses to Claude “I did this at 10pm after a full day during vacation with the kids.” and expected some kind of reassurance. But the thing it saw was instead my spiky pattern. I had nailed the hardest things and missed a few of the easy ones which dragged my score down. The same unevenness my teachers wrote about, showing up as an adult.

Each conversation ended the same way, ADHD, autism, AuDHD and a dash of giftedness (a word I had barely heard about, let alone look into, until Elina A. K. Jacobs, PhD pointed it out in the comments.)

And I absolutely do not trust it. Because I do not trust my own brain, and my own brain produced this result using AI. I don’t trust general artificial intelligence to diagnose me, and confirmation bias is real. Maybe I was looking for an explanation that felt better than “you just need to try harder.” Maybe I was making this into a bigger thing than it was.

But every conversation, every model, every test kept pointing the same way. That this brain might actually be wired differently than the norm. Which sort of make sense given I’ve been building an identity around being the ‘overthinker’.

But what you call it depends on who’s looking. Anxiety if a therapist sees it. That one I have. It might not be wrong, just not the whole picture. Unused capacity if a teacher notices it. ADHD, autism, or both if a psychiatrist evaluates it. “Meticulous, works smart” if a colleague writes your review. “Defensive, dismissive” if the same colleague writes the constructive feedback. Overthinker if all you want is to fit in. They’re all looking at the same thing from their perspective.

Even if I got an official diagnosis tomorrow, I wouldn’t be done exploring this. I’d still want to understand why some brains seem to work differently with AI than others, why I need to fully experience something to learn it instead of following someone else’s map. The label might help me get there faster, and it might help me communicate my needs. But understanding the mechanics is what actually lets me be kinder to myself.

Me at university

Writing this, I’m realizing I got the story wrong the first time. In the anxiety piece I gave AI all the credit. It was the most visible part of what changed, so I made it the main character. And after all, I’m writing to explore AI.

But before I get to what changed, I need to say what it was like before. For years, anxiety was something I managed. I did a good job, I kept up, and nobody saw what it cost. But in 2022 I went back to the office after the pandemic with a small kid and a life that had twice as many moving parts as before. The anxiety went from background noise to something that blocked everything. It messed with my sleep and my ability to do a good job. And I kept blaming myself, because everyone had always told me I had the capacity. I just needed to try harder, want it more, get it together. I couldn’t make it all work, not because I wasn’t trying, but because there was too much to hold at once and too little I could control. That’s what I wrote about last time.

But the real shift wasn’t one thing. It was three things, and they all did the same thing: they freed up space in my mind.

A medication I started for something unrelated quieted a kind of noise I didn’t know was noise until it stopped. Suddenly there was bandwidth I’d never had before. It didn’t go to productivity. It went to curiosity.

I was also unemployed. For the first time in my adult life, nobody needed me to perform. The Swedish safety net meant basics were covered, healthcare, childcare, income support. I didn’t have to panic. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, and instead of rushing into the first thing available, I gave myself permission to explore it. I just had to exist.

What AI added to the equation was to provide a place to put the mess. Something I could pour my entire brain into without it asking me to get to the point. I could contradict myself, circle back fifteen times, follow a thread for hours just because I was curious. It didn’t ask me to clean up first. That’s the thing journals couldn’t do and friends shouldn’t have to do.

I didn’t build a system or make a plan. I just followed my curiosity.

And everything worked.

I wrote things that felt natural. I could think clearly. I was present with my kids. At the grocery store one Tuesday I walked in without a list or a meal plan, just a rough sense of what we needed, and back in the car I laughed to myself and called it “vibe grocery shopping.”

Not because I tried harder, but because the conditions finally fit. Medication, space, and a tool that could keep up. I can’t separate them, and I don’t think I need to.

I eventually found a job and I’m back working full-time now, but I chose carefully. I picked my brain apart in AI conversations until I could walk into interviews knowing more about who I am and what I need. Small team, lots of autonomy, a job that lets me help people use AI and build things. The questions I’m working with are genuinely interesting and feed my mind. I’ve been honest about how I work best, what I need to focus, and what drains me. Things I would have hidden before, because admitting them felt like admitting I wasn’t enough.

It’s a good job, and I designed it well. But I can still feel my capacity shrinking.

I’m back building systems and schedules. Back to writing everything down because otherwise I forget. I’m not vibe grocery shopping. I come home from a day of fascinating conversations completely drained, and I run out of patience with the people I love most.

But I don’t judge myself the way I used to. My daughter was playing with coins the other day and I said “for some reason coins touching skin makes my body itch.” I wasn’t irritated. I wasn’t snapping at her to put them away. I just named it. Before all of this, I don’t know if I would have said anything at all. I might have just quietly taken the coins away without explaining, because I wouldn’t have thought my experience was worth naming.

I think that’s the thing AI actually changed. Not my brain, but my language. I spent months externalizing everything, putting the mess into words, saying ‘I don’t know’ a million times, and somewhere in that process I found ways to describe what was happening inside me. Once I had the words, I could use them with people too. I was honest about what I needed, I asked for help, and the world didn’t end.

After my first pregnancy, I found out I’d been wearing the wrong shoe size my entire life. My feet had grown, apparently that’s a thing no one tells you about, and when I got measured, the scan said slightly above average. I’d always thought I had small feet. It was part of who I was. Not dramatically wrong. Just compressed enough that I’d gotten used to it. Built an identity around it. Didn’t know they were uncomfortable until I tried the right size and learned how shoes should fit.

I know what uncompressed felt like. I had it. For a few months everything worked, not because I tried harder, but because the conditions fit. And the fact that it took unemployment, a safety net, medication, and a tool that could keep up just to experience what might be my natural state tells me something I’ve been trying to say since I started writing here.

My whole argument about shorter work weeks and AI leading to less productivity isn’t philosophy, it’s autobiography.

I’ve been writing essays about how AI should give us space, not more productivity. About shorter work weeks. About designing for humans instead of output. I thought I was writing about society, about what we all really want. Turns out I was describing what my brain literally needs to function. Every argument I made about the world was a description of my own wiring that I hadn’t recognized yet.

That’s the most useful thing I’ve learned in years.

Because I used to think “I need systems because I’m anxious and disorganized”, and now it’s “I need systems because my brain works in loops and the world demands lines.” The self-knowledge holds and the self-judgment is easier. But I know what uncompressed feels like, and I can’t have it right now.

I redesigned my work around what I learned about my brain and chose a job that accommodates what I need. And it’s still not enough.

I’ve been wearing the wrong shoes and writing essays about how shoes should be made differently. I didn’t know my own feet were the proof.

I tried on the right size. I can’t unknow how the wrong ones felt. But now I have an idea why they never fit. And I’m pretty determined to find shoes that do.

To everyone who commented, who I’ve spoken to in DMs, who I met on video calls, and who has written about your own journeys in public: thank you for playing a part in this internet stranger’s lifelong mission of understanding herself.

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Writing this takes time (and a lot of AI conversations). If you found this valuable, you can buy me a coffee.