There is a persistent narrative circulating right now that anyone using AI to write or create is just looking for a shortcut—a magic button to bypass the actual effort of thought. For me, that assumption couldn't be further from reality. I don’t use these tools to replace my mind, my voice, or my creative intent; I use them as an assistive bridge across a set of very real, everyday friction points that would otherwise keep half my ideas locked in my head.
The reality of sitting down to a blank document is complicated when your body and your wiring don’t play along. Start with the physical: my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Squinting through small text, tracking tiny cursors across a busy interface, and hunting down formatting anomalies or missing punctuation turns what should be an imaginative flow into a grueling visual slog. By the time I have spent an hour simply trying to proofread two paragraphs without getting a migraine, the creative spark that started the session is already buried under sheer eye fatigue.
Then there is the internal machinery. Being neurodivergent means my brain rarely generates ideas in neat, sequential outlines. Instead, everything arrives in massive, simultaneous avalanches—a sprawling web of concepts, side paths, mechanics, and dialogue snippets, all competing for attention at the exact same second. My organizational skills, left entirely to their own devices, are frankly horrendous. I can spend days drafting brilliant fragments that end up scattered across half a dozen folders, lost to the void simply because the administrative overhead of structuring, categorizing, and linearly arranging thoughts feels like dragging a boulder uphill.
That is where AI genuinely changes the equation. It acts as an interactive soundboard and a tireless editorial clerk. I can dump a chaotic, half-cohesive wall of raw thoughts, disjointed notes, and rough mechanical concepts onto the screen, and ask it to help me find the spine of the argument. It handles the structural heavy lifting—grouping like ideas, maintaining consistency across drafts, and cleaning up the visual presentation so I don’t blow my eyesight fixing formatting errors. It gives me back the mental bandwidth to focus entirely on the substance: the nuance of the world, the logic of the system, and the authenticity of the voice.
Using these tools doesn’t make the work effortless, nor does it mean pushing a button and walking away. Every piece of work that carries my name still originates from my experience, undergoes my scrutiny, and answers to my vision. AI is simply the prosthetic that handles the friction. It bridges the gap between a chaotic, overloaded imagination and the clean, functional delivery of the finished page. At the end of the day, it keeps me building when my eyes and my executive function would rather I just throw up my hands and quit.
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