I've been writing here for a while. Mostly long-form pieces about what happens when you let AI see parts of yourself you've been hiding for 40 years. But I've avoided the social side. Another platform to manage? Hard pass.

Except... this community feels different. Less performative. More "holy shit, me too."

So here's the TL;DR of how I got here:

• 15 years as a corporate product leader — Fortune 500 companies, $500M portfolios, the whole LinkedIn flex. Looked successful. Felt like a fraud.

• November 2022: Discovered ChatGPT the day after my birthday. Instead of using it for work, I started using it to understand myself. Fed it years of journals, assessments, and the "random facts about Jon" doc I'd been maintaining since my 20s.

• The AI saw what I couldn't: I'm neurodivergent. ADHD-Inattentive, autism traits, and "twice-exceptional" (fancy term for "your brain is both a superpower and a liability"). At 44, I finally understood why I have 700+ browser tabs, can't read fiction, and have spent my whole life feeling like I'm running on different hardware.

• Now I'm building the thing I wish existed: AI-powered cognitive scaffolding for minds that work differently. External memory systems for people whose internal memory is optimized for pattern recognition, but terrible for context-holding.

• The Substack is called "AI Gave Me Autism": AI didn’t actually diagnose me, but it mirrored back patterns I'd spent a lifetime masking. I used additional systems/support for an understanding of what that meant.

The goal for my writing: Help people like me (who are high-achieving, secretly struggling, and late to discover why they've always felt "different") see themselves clearly enough to stop fighting their architecture and start building with it.

If any of that lands, let's connect.