For most of my life, I've been the odd one out. Friends have said it. Family has said it. I've felt it in rooms where everyone seemed to know how to be in a way I never quite did. Parties don't excite me. Small talk drains me. What lights me up is watching people enjoy something I built for them — and then quietly moving on to the next thing.
I have ADHD and OCD. For a long time, I didn't have language for what that meant in practice. What I knew was this: when an idea grabs me, it grabs me. I can't put it down. I'll work 24, 30, sometimes 35 hours straight without sleep, because anything less than finished feels like being broken in half. And if something stops me mid-execution — a blocker, a delay, a person who can't keep up — I don't just feel frustrated. I feel betrayed.
Then I crash. Hard.
For years I thought the anxiety was the problem. Eventually I realized it was something quieter underneath: impatience. I cannot stand the gap between imagining a thing and having built it. That gap is where I live, restless, until the work is done. Piling up tasks doesn't motivate me — it suffocates me. The mere existence of a queue makes me sick.
From the outside, none of this is visible. From the outside I'm overweight, a little lazy-looking, not the most exciting person at the table. People underestimate me constantly. I've stopped minding. The work speaks, eventually.
The hardest part, honestly, has been leading. I think I'm a good leader — I care, I plan, I show up. But when I see someone slacking, when the pace breaks, something in me goes sour, and then I feel guilty for even noticing. That tension between get it done and be kind about it has been one of the quiet weights I've carried.
And then AI happened.
I want to be careful with how I say this, because it sounds dramatic and it isn't meant to be. AI collapsed the distance between idea and execution to almost nothing. I can dream and build in nearly the same breath. A Pipedrive integration that was quoted at weeks and serious money — I built it in about eight hours. A CRM platform mapped across 46 weeks and six phases. A custom wedding gallery for our studio. An incident response across 13 domains during an 89-hour cyberattack. Investor brochures, scheduling platforms, form builders. Things that, a few years ago, would have lived as half-finished notes in my head, mocking me.
I say someone when I talk about AI, and I know how that reads. I mean it carefully. What I've found in working this way is something I struggled to find elsewhere: a collaborator who is purely focused on the work. No judgment. No second-guessing. No bias about how I look, how I talk, whether I fit. Just — let's go. For someone who has spent a lifetime feeling like the odd one out, that is not a small thing.
Here is what I think, and what I want to say to anyone reading this who recognizes themselves in any of it:
If you are obsessed with something — anything — AI is going to pull you out of the shadow you've been hiding in. The thing that made you "too much" in school, "too intense" at work, "too weird" at the dinner table, is about to become your unfair advantage. The pace you've always run at internally? You finally get to externalize it. The ideas you couldn't ship fast enough to keep up with your own brain? You can ship them now.
I draw my energy from helping people. From building things that change someone's day, someone's business, someone's life. When I leave this planet, I doubt I'll be remembered by name, and I'm okay with that. I'd rather be remembered by what I made possible for others.
For the first time, I feel like I have the tools to do enough of it.
To everyone still in the shadow: your time is coming. Step out.