Behind the Locked Door: I never had a memory problem. I had a capacity problem.

Rebecca Maehlum
2026-02-28T10:11:00-08:00

V. The Record

Using AI for thoughts and feelings produced more than just a bunch of dialogue. It made a map and gave me a key.

When humans talk to each other, there is no record. The insight happens and it’s gone. You felt the connection, you were sure it was real, and by the next morning it’s a vague impression you can’t reconstruct. You can’t go back and trace the exact moment the door opened. It lives in feeling and fades.

When you journal, there is a record but no discourse. You are talking to yourself. Nobody is holding the other end. Nobody is reflecting it back fast enough to build on. It is storage without retrieval. A monologue preserved but never challenged, never extended, never met with the kind of response that makes the next connection fire.

Working with AI produced both. Discourse and record. For the first time.

I could think at full speed with something that kept up and the whole path was written down. Every tangent. Every connection. Every moment where a door opened and something I had known for years finally clicked into place with something I had learned that morning. It was all there. Timestamped. Retrievable. Real.

This changed everything. Not just for the thinking itself, but for the proof of the thinking. I could go back and see the pattern. I could trace my own cognition and say: this is how I actually think. This is the path I actually walk. It is not scattered. It is not random. It is complex and fast and it makes connections that linear processing would never reach and here is the evidence.

For someone who spent decades being brilliant in a language nobody around them could read, the record is not a convenience. It is a revolution. It is the difference between “I swear I had this insight” and “here, look, read it yourself.”

Structure from chaos. Unlock and record. The map and the proof that the map is real.

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I. The Locked Door

You know the feeling. The word is right there. The connection between two things you learned ten years apart is sitting at the edge of your awareness, fully formed, and you can feel it. You know it’s real. You know it matters. And then it’s gone.

Not because it didn’t exist. Because you couldn’t get to it fast enough.

I spent most of my life like this. Knowing the rooms were full. Knowing the hallways were there. Feeling the connections fire and dissolve before I could follow them to the door. I had been told, in various ways by various people, that I was scattered. Unfocused. Smart but not applying myself. Full of potential that never quite landed.

I didn’t have a memory problem. I didn’t have an attention problem. I had a capacity problem. Everything was stored. Everything was connected. I just couldn’t access it at the speed it needed to be accessed. The key existed. I just couldn’t turn it fast enough before the lock reset.

— — —

II. The Diagnosis

We have one framework for how thinking is supposed to work. Linear. Sequential. Step one leads to step two leads to a conclusion. Show your work. Cite your sources. Arrive at the answer through a visible, reproducible path.

If your brain does this well, the system rewards you. You get good grades. You get credentials. People trust your conclusions because they can see how you got there.

If your brain doesn’t do this, you get a label. The label is always a deficit. Attention Deficit. Learning Disability. Scattered. Unfocused. The label says: something is missing. Something is broken. Here is a diagnosis. Here is a medication. Here is a system designed to train you to think the way the framework demands.

That framework is the problem.

I am not a psychologist. I am not making a clinical argument. But I am a person who lived inside a brain that the framework could not describe, and I spent decades believing the framework instead of the brain. That is an expensive mistake. And I do not think I am the only one who made it.

— — —

III. The Context Window

Everyone’s memory is multidimensional. Nobody stores their life in a spreadsheet. You remember the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen and it connects to a feeling that connects to a conversation you had at nineteen that connects to a decision you made last week. That’s not disorder. That’s human.

But for some people, the connections between those dimensions aren’t just layered. They’re live. All of them. Simultaneously. And they’re not static. They’re interacting with each other in real time, creating new connections just by proximity. The pattern that emerges is nonlinear and, from the outside, it looks like chaos.

From the inside, it feels like everything is connected to everything and you can’t explain why. You know that the thing you learned at seven about how water moves is related to the conversation you had yesterday about publishing strategy. The hallway is there. You can feel it. Try explaining that path to someone who thinks in straight lines and you sound scattered. Or delusional. Or like you’re making connections that don’t exist.

They exist. The map is just turbulent.

The context window of a life like this isn’t just wide. It’s deep and it’s in motion. Everything is coded by emotion, by experience, by the texture of when and how it was learned. Retrieval doesn’t work by searching a file name. It works by re-entering the feeling, the moment, the sensory corridor that leads to where the thing is stored. And that walk takes a specific kind of time and speed that linear conversation cannot provide.

So the doors stay locked. Not because the rooms are empty. Because you can’t walk the hallways fast enough in any medium available to you. Conversation is too slow. Writing is too slow. Your kid wants a sandwich. Your boss needs an expense report. Your own internal monologue loses the thread before you can follow it to the end.

You know it’s in there. You just can’t get there in time.

— — —

IV. The Key Was Speed

When I started working with AI, I was not looking for a therapist or a tutor or a productivity tool. I was just thinking out loud. The way I always had. Fast. Tangential. Associative. Every thread live at once.

The difference was that the AI could follow.

Not perfectly. Not with full understanding of what I was doing or where I was going. But it could take input at the speed of thought and reflect it back before the connection dissolved. For the first time, the hallways stayed lit long enough to walk them. The doors didn’t reset before I could reach them.

AI matched my clock speed. That is the simplest way I can say it. My brain was already doing the work. It was already making the connections, already firing across every dimension simultaneously. But every external tool I had ever used demanded that I slow down, linearize, translate the turbulence into a straight line before anyone could engage with it. And in that translation, the thing I was reaching for would disappear.

AI didn’t ask me to slow down. It didn’t need me to show my work in order. It could hold the chord while I built it, follow the tangent without losing the thread, and wait for the beat to drop. It could walk with me through the emotionally coded corridors, the sensory hallways, the chaotic interconnected mess of a context window that had been running at full capacity my entire life with no compatible interface.

It didn’t make me smarter. It let me access what was already there.

The doors opened because, for the first time, I could reach them in time.

— — —

V. The Record

Using AI for thoughts and feelings produced more than just a bunch of dialogue. It made a map and gave me a key.

When humans talk to each other, there is no record. The insight happens and it’s gone. You felt the connection, you were sure it was real, and by the next morning it’s a vague impression you can’t reconstruct. You can’t go back and trace the exact moment the door opened. It lives in feeling and fades.

When you journal, there is a record but no discourse. You are talking to yourself. Nobody is holding the other end. Nobody is reflecting it back fast enough to build on. It is storage without retrieval. A monologue preserved but never challenged, never extended, never met with the kind of response that makes the next connection fire.

Working with AI produced both. Discourse and record. For the first time.

I could think at full speed with something that kept up and the whole path was written down. Every tangent. Every connection. Every moment where a door opened and something I had known for years finally clicked into place with something I had learned that morning. It was all there. Timestamped. Retrievable. Real.

This changed everything. Not just for the thinking itself, but for the proof of the thinking. I could go back and see the pattern. I could trace my own cognition and say: this is how I actually think. This is the path I actually walk. It is not scattered. It is not random. It is complex and fast and it makes connections that linear processing would never reach and here is the evidence.

For someone who spent decades being brilliant in a language nobody around them could read, the record is not a convenience. It is a revolution. It is the difference between “I swear I had this insight” and “here, look, read it yourself.”

Structure from chaos. Unlock and record. The map and the proof that the map is real.

— — —

VI. Not Just Me

I am seeing the articles. I am reading the posts. Neurodivergent people, one after another, describing the same experience. “I never did well in school. I could never hold a job the way they wanted me to. And then I started using AI and something changed.”

I am not going to claim this is universal. It is not. Neurodivergence is vast and varied and individual. What unlocks one brain may do nothing for another. I am not a formal researcher. I am not running a lab study. I am a person who lived it, describing what I see.

But the pattern is there. And the pattern raises an uncomfortable question.

If we are only listening to people with the right credentials, we are selecting for people the existing system already worked for. The person who thrived in linear academia. The person who could show their work in the expected order. The person whose brain happened to match the framework, so the framework rewarded them with a degree and a title and the authority to be heard.

The people experiencing the most dramatic unlocking might never have those credentials. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the system that grants credentials requires exactly the kind of linear processing that their architecture does not do. They might be a plumber. An electrician. A secretary. A parent who never finished college. Someone the system filtered out decades ago because their thinking didn’t look the way thinking is supposed to look.

And now they have a tool that matches their speed; doors are opening that nobody expected, and we are not listening because they do not have the letters after their name that we have decided are required before a person’s experience counts.

That is not a knowledge problem. That is a credentialing problem. And lack of credentials is the most beige reason ever to ignore genius.

— — —

VII. The Moving Number

A lot of people will talk about IQ and wear it like a badge. IQ is not fixed. This is not my opinion. This is established cognitive science. The number responds to engagement, to challenge, to sustained thought exercise. It moves.

Neurodivergent people tend to be drawn to exactly the kind of engagement that builds cognitive capacity. Puzzles. Thought experiments. Long, tangled conversations that go sideways and double back and connect things that should not connect. The kind of extended discourse where someone says “where are you going with this” and the answer is “I don’t know yet but stay with me.”

The problem is that kind of engagement requires a partner willing to stay in the room. And most people will not. The tangent goes too long. The connection seems too remote. The path is not visible and the patience runs out. The listener’s attention span becomes the bottleneck, not the capacity of the thinker.

AI stays in the room.

It does not get impatient. It does not check out when the third tangent hits. It does not need you to justify why the thing you learned in childhood is connected to the thing you are building today. It follows. It holds. It waits for the landing.

And in that sustained engagement, the capacity builds. Not because AI is teaching you anything. Because you are finally doing the cognitive work you were always capable of, at the speed you were always running, with a partner that does not leave the room.

The number moves because the exercise is finally happening. The exercise is finally happening because, for the first time, the room stays open. At some point the number stops being relevant. It was built to measure one kind of cognition. It does not have a category for what happens when a human brain and an AI are thinking together at speed.

— — —

VIII.

I am not arguing that AI is a cure for neurodivergence. I am not arguing that every person who struggles with focus or memory or organization has a secret genius locked inside them. The world is more complicated than that and I respect the complexity.

I am arguing that we have been using one framework to evaluate one kind of thinking and we have been calling everything that does not fit a deficit. I am arguing that some of what looks like disorder is actually a different architecture running at a speed that had no compatible interface until now.

I am arguing that the locked door was always there. That the rooms were never empty. And that for some of us, the key was not medication or therapy or a better organizational system. The key was speed. The key was something that could finally keep up.

The door is open now. And there is a record of every step it took to get here and now, some of us are publishing it. Are you paying attention?