Ride the Lightning
Artificial intelligence is Adderall.
I know, because I've taken Adderall's cousin. I've been diagnosed with ADHD twice in my life — once as a very young child, and again after I turned nineteen. In both cases, medication was recommended. In both cases, I refused. I didn't want the label. I believed, because I was misinformed or misdirected or maybe just too proud, that society was pathologizing an abundance of energy. That it wasn't okay to be the weird one. And so I said no, and I moved on, and I spent the next two and a half decades willfully overcoming my own neurodivergence.
In university, a friend of mine had also been diagnosed with ADHD. This was the early 2000s, and the diagnosis still carried a lot of shame. He had a prescription for Ritalin, and one night — after I told him how hard it was for me to focus — he offered me half a pill.
I took it. I spent the next six hours in the most focused state of my life. I completed the homework. I got an A+.
He gave me one more. I saved it like a precious and non-renewable resource. I took it a few months later, traveling abroad, feeling particularly homesick. And I have never been sadder or more fixated on negativity in my entire life. I was trapped inside my own dark spiral, every anxious thought magnified, unable to find the exit. It was terrifying. It was enough to put me off the medication for good.
Twenty-five years later, the conversation has changed. Neurodivergence is acknowledged. Accepted. Understood. And I'm standing here realizing that the entire time, I was fighting against my own nature — and I didn't know it.
And then these tools arrived. And I recognized the feeling.
For my whole life I've used this expression: ride the lightning. It captures what the inside of my head looks and feels like. Thoughts come like lightning strikes — they flash through my mind and then they're gone, and in a lot of cases I have to try really hard to capture what I saw. And I use that wording — what I saw — very specifically.
The inside of my brain is dark and chaotic. Occasionally a bolt of lightning lights up the mental sky. In that moment I can see not only the bolt itself — which is the brightest thing — but everything it illuminates: the fifty things hiding in the surrounding dark. Half-formed concepts, unrelated tangents, things I didn't know were in there until the light touched them. That's what living with ADHD is actually like. Not one idea arriving — fifty, simultaneously, most of them still in shadow. Ride the lightning means being in a position to capture as much of it as you can when the jolt finally arrives.
Two technologies changed everything for me.
The first is voice recording. A shortcut on your phone, one button mapped — within two clicks you're recording, within a second you're capturing exactly what the lightning bolt carries, in exactly the words it arrived in. Before voice recording, many ideas came and went and there was nothing you could do about it. You just had to be sad that your brilliant idea was gone. Au revoir idea, we barely knew you.
The second — and this is the bigger one — is the large language model as the arbiter of chaos. I can now record anything I think and exactly how I think it without worrying about the mechanics of writing. Did I say that eloquently? What's the best adjective here? Those things trip me up when I'm in flow. All of that can just go away. I can talk. Start down one path, back up, go down another. Take all of that structured chaos and use an LLM to wrangle some sort of sentence and sensibility out of it afterward. That's been incredibly liberating.
I know exactly what it cost me not to have it.
I went to university for English literature. When I arrived I considered myself creative — I liked to write poetry, liked prose, had visions of books and plays and worlds built out of language. I thought studying the craft would make me better. I would learn the mechanics. Show don't tell. The Aristotelian arc. Where the comma goes.
I studied hard. I learned from smart people. And by the time I graduated, something had broken. Every time I sat down to write — even an email — my brain locked onto the procedure. Is that a split infinitive? Am I misusing a gerund? What is the prepositional structure of this sentence? Twenty years of near-silence followed. Not because I had nothing to say. Because I had learned enough to know every way I might say it wrong.
The logjam broke about six weeks ago.
I started going on walks with my dog and instead of music or podcasts I'd hit the microphone on my phone and just talk. That's how I've always processed ideas — I walk laps around my house and talk to the walls. The thoughts in my head are fuzzy and overlapping and busy, and saying them aloud is how they cool into something solid, something I can actually hand to another person. I've been doing that my whole life. I just never captured it.
Now I could. Talk without order or coherence. Say the same thing three times three different ways. Back up, try again. I wouldn't be judged. Everything would be heard. And the machine would find the structure hiding inside the mess.
I wrote a manuscript. Eighty-one thousand words. Twenty chapters. A complete story — beginning, middle, end, protagonist, antagonist, conflict, resolution, the full Campbell arc. It came out of my brain because I had something to bounce it against. My ideas went in like lumps of clay. I told the AI: act like an editor. Act like a critic. Ask me questions. Challenge what I've written. Help me see it from outside my own skull. And from those questions, I kept writing. I got out of my own way.
These are my words and my ideas — I want to be clear about that. But the difference between that manuscript existing and not existing is the tool. Without it, the whole thing was a failure to launch. Twenty years of ideas walking laps around my living room with nowhere to go.
At the end of a very productive session, there's a crash. The valley — all the productivity shoots out of you and there's nothing left — is a familiar feeling with a shadow I recognize. I've been in the dark version of it. I know what it's like when the amplifier amplifies the wrong things. The AI crash isn't that severe — it's more like fatigue and flatness, the sensation of a room going quiet after a long party. But the echo is there. You learn not to push into the low moments with these tools. Focus cuts both ways.
I have created more things in the past few months than in the decade before them. And I want to name why that matters specifically for people like me.
We start things. We rarely finish them. We get something eighty percent of the way there, lose interest, and the voice inside our head starts in — you never finish anything, what's wrong with you, you're never going to amount to anything — and that voice is very effective at blunting people who should be ideating. They could be cutting through everything in front of them, and instead they're a dull rod of iron getting nothing done. These tools have changed that calculus. They have genuinely unlocked a kind of creative productivity in people like me that I don't think existed before.
Now — the obvious pushback. We're producing a lot of content nobody asked for. AI slop. The term is everywhere, used to dismiss anything that had machine assistance.
I want to be precise about why that framing bothers me.
It's not the criticism of low-quality output. Low-quality output exists. But calling all AI-assisted work slop is an attack on the people behind it, not the tool. The AI didn't wake up and decide to make something. People did. People with ideas that finally had a way out.
Ed Sheeran has talked about this — how he bristles when people call him talented, because he knows the work behind it. He wrote a lot of terrible songs before he wrote good ones. The bad ones had to come out first. That's not failure — that's the crap clearing the pipe. What's happening right now is a lot of people with ADHD and other neurodivergent wiring finally unblocking years — sometimes decades — of stopped-up creativity. Some of what comes out looks messy. Of course it does. It's the freshman effort finding its legs.
The critics aren't hard to picture. They live in the comment sections of every technical forum, and they have a consistent argument: you didn't earn it. They spent years learning the hard way — the proper way — and the idea that someone with no training, no credential, no ten thousand hours can pick up a tool and make something real is an attack on the value of that investment. I understand the feeling. I don't respect the conclusion. The barrier to entry coming down isn't a threat to craft. It's a threat to gatekeeping. Those are not the same thing.
I spent twenty-five years refusing a diagnosis because I was ashamed of the label. I spent twenty years after that not writing because I was ashamed of the mistakes. The "you didn't really do it" critique is the same mechanism — just wearing different clothes. It tells people like me that the way we work doesn't count. That the path we found isn't legitimate. It's not a critique of quality. It's a perpetuation of the same shame that kept people like us quiet for a generation.
Here's what the critics don't understand: this wasn't a job taken from a human editor or a human reviewer. I was never — not in twenty years — going to produce anything worth reviewing by an actual person. The manuscript I wrote wasn't AI doing my work for me. It was twenty years of ideas that had no way out, finally finding a door.
Calling it slop isn't a critique. It's destruction — of someone else's joy, someone else's first finished thing, someone else's door finally standing open.
The opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation.