You think this title is ridiculous, and I don’t blame you… If someone else had written it, I would open the post fully expecting either a joke or a complete disaster. But I mean it.

For context, I usually poke fun at AI Hype:

So in the interest of more honesty and less hype, the gist of this article is: “Journaling is better than therapy in my opinion, but having ADHD I can’t do anything that requires that sort of consistency and commitment, so here’s how an AI agent actually helped me with that, which led me to discover things about myself” - but this woudn’t make for a good title, would it?

(Yes, I use em dashes. always have, won’t stop because random people might think AI wrote this…)

A couple weeks ago I installed OpenClaw to play around with it (as one does), no use case in mind. 
Tried a couple different things that didn’t stick, and in the meantime, remembered how I like to journal but never seem to be able to create a routine to do it. Sounded fun enough, so I created a daily cron job for my claw assistant: A daily, stimulated journal session. My assistant would remind me to start and follow up with questions and other prompts that led to me writing a complete journal entry in a way that is a little bit like a conversation about my day.

It kinda worked. I would skip a couple days, but always return. Then, during one of these journaling sessions, as I was writing about my day, Dave (my openClaw’s name) dropped the bomb:

Excuse me, what??? Of course I knew what RSD (rejection-sensitive disphoria) was. Of course I knew how it impacted my life. And this wasn’t RSD.

Long story short: I didn’t. I didn’t. It was RSD.

This is not a post about ADHD or RSD, so I’ll spare you the details - but that evening I cut the journaling session short and got into a rabbit hole of reading all RSD articles I could find and a whole book on the subject before bed. And I discovered something about my brain (Psyche? Condition?) that has impacted my whole life and impacts my relationships and work every single day. I was mind-blown. It was a big realization that has since been transformational in my life.

That was the first of many realizations, small and large, that I’ve since been making about myself and my ADHD.

I still think most of the AI discourse is BS, but that makes it even more worth saying when something is genuinely useful: this was. Not as magic, not as a replacement for thinking or actual human relationships, but as a tool that helped me do something I could not reliably do on my own.