A Machine That Holds All My Thoughts at Once - AI for Dyslexia

I am dyslexic. My ideas live in pieces across notebooks I lose, apps I forget, conversations I cannot search. Obsidian and Claude built me a second brain that finally holds the whole. This is what accessibility looks like when nobody is calling it that.

I have been told I am an illegitimate writer since I was seven. I cannot spell "again." For most of my life I have written it three different ways inside a single paragraph. Agian. Agian. Agian. My brain knows the word. My hands do not.

This is about what changed.

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How an ADHD-dyslexic brain actually produces ideas

I am not just dyslexic. I am the wider thing. ADHD-dyslexia comorbidity runs about 25 to 40 percent of cases, and I am inside that band. My brain does not develop ideas the way the productivity industry assumes a brain develops ideas. I do not capture a thought, file it under a tag, retrieve it on demand, polish it into output. I have an idea in the shower. I have a different idea in a taxi. The two ideas are about the same thing and I do not realize it until eleven months later, when I am looking for a passage from a Vietnam chapter and find a sentence I wrote about a tarot card that is somehow the same sentence.

The pieces live in different containers. The containers live in different rooms. The rooms live in different years. Most of my best thinking happens in the spaces between, and the only reason I know that now is because I have a tool that can hold all the rooms at once.

Before I get to the tool, I want to name what the tool is replacing, because I tried other things first. The failure across all of them is the same failure, and the failure has a name once you know how to look at it. None of them held the connection between what I wrote in 2019 and what I wrote in 2024. They were containers, not workspaces. Each one assumed I was a person who would come back later and do the integration work. I was not that person. The integration work is the part my brain refuses to do, and the brain that refuses to do it is the brain the productivity industry was not built for.

How Obsidian and Claude work together as a second brain

In 2024 I built a vault inside an app called Obsidian. Obsidian is plain markdown files in folders on your hard drive. There is no proprietary database. There is no cloud lock-in. The files are just text. The thing Obsidian does that nothing else I had tried did is treat every file as a node and every link between files as the actual content. The work is not the file. The work is the network.

Then I pointed Claude at the vault.

Pointing an AI at a working vault is not productivity software. It is something else. Everything I have written in three years, every chapter draft, every voice doc, every revision note, every blog post, every essay attempt, every conversation worth keeping — all of it sits in a single workspace that the AI can read, search, and connect across in real time. When I am writing a new chapter in Book 8, the AI can pull a passage I wrote two years ago in Book 2 that is doing the same thematic work. When I am drafting an essay, it can surface a paragraph I wrote in a journal in Laos that I had forgotten existed. When I cannot remember whether I have already said something somewhere, the AI knows.

The first time this happened on a real project, I cried at my desk. Not because the technology was impressive. Because the part of my brain that knew the connection was there finally had a way to reach the part of the file system that proved it.

This is what nobody in the second-brain literature talks about. Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain is a productivity book for neurotypical knowledge workers. It is about capture and organization and retrieval. It is excellent for what it is. It is also not what I am describing. What I am describing is not capture. The capture was already there. The capture has always been there. My problem was never that I had not written the ideas down. My problem was that I had written them down in twelve different places that did not know about each other.

What the AI-plus-vault system does for me is integration. It is the connective layer my brain does not produce internally. It is not a memory aid. It is a memory itself, not mine, not the machine's, ours, sitting in markdown files I can read in any text editor on any device for the rest of my life.

My brain has always climbed a staircase where the steps collapse behind me. I can hold the chapter I am writing or the chapter I just wrote, but not both. I can hold the sentence on the page or the argument I am trying to make, but not both. Most people lose a few steps and recover. Dyslexic brains lose the whole flight. Obsidian and Claude are the staircase rebuilt. Every step I climbed last week is still there. I can look down, see how I got here, look up, see where I'm going. That is not a productivity hack. That is a structural repair.

Five things AI does for dyslexia / and ADHD writers

The five things this system actually does for a neurodivergent brain, named directly.

One. It removes the friction that burns the brain out before the work starts. The blank page. The first paragraph. The spelling. The formatting. The decision about where to file the new note. For most writers these are the easy parts. For my brain these are the parts that burn an hour of executive function before any actual work happens. The AI handles them. I am freed to do the part I am good at. Ideas, structure, voice, vision.

Two. It matches divergent-thinking pace. My ideas come faster than my hands can type. Most tools punish this. They want clean input. They want one thought per session. The AI does not. I can dump messy, half-formed, jumping-everywhere thoughts into a chat and the AI sorts them into something coherent. The mess is the input the tool was built to handle.

Three. It does not judge the input. I grew up with gatekeepers. Teachers who said my thinking was too messy. Editors who said slow down. Bosses who said get to the point. The AI does not say any of that. It engages with whatever I bring. It finds the signal. That is not a small thing. That is the difference between a person who writes their ideas down and a person who has been trained out of writing their ideas down by years of being told the ideas are wrong.

Four. It holds context across time. ADHD has a notorious time-blindness problem. I pick up a thread three weeks later and I have to re-onboard myself. Most collaborators have to be re-onboarded too. The AI does not. The vault is literally an AI-accessible memory for a brain that does not have one of its own. I no longer lose three days re-reading my own work to remember what I meant.

Five. For dyslexia specifically — silent spelling correction, no judgment on first drafts, messy thinking to clean prose with no shame in the middle. This is the part I want to be careful about. The AI does not fix my dyslexia. Dyslexia is not a bug. It is a wiring. But the AI removes the friction that the wiring produces at the surface, so the wiring can do the thing it is actually good at, which is connecting ideas across unrelated domains and seeing patterns most brains do not see. It is an accessibility tool the way glasses are an accessibility tool. Nobody calls glasses cheating.

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Is using AI for memory cognitive surrender?

I want to address the obvious counter, because I keep getting it from neurotypical readers. Let the machine remember for you. Sounds like cognitive surrender. The brain that does not have to remember will atrophy.

The brain that does not have to remember the spelling of "again" three times a paragraph does not atrophy. It frees up the cycles that were burning on the spelling and uses them for the work. The brain that does not have to keep twelve open Word docs in working memory does not atrophy. It uses the freed cycles to write the book. The argument from cognitive atrophy assumes the brain is using its remembrance capacity well in the first place. For brains like mine the remembrance capacity is being used to compensate for the absence of an integration layer that the rest of you take for granted. The AI does not replace my thinking. The AI replaces the part of my thinking that was being burned on overhead I should never have had to carry.

For a neurotypical brain this might genuinely be a tradeoff. I am not in a position to argue about brains I do not have. For the brain I do have, the system is not surrender. The system is the first time my brain has had the conditions other brains were born with.

The multi-disciplinary brain problem AI solves

My work spans writing, painting, design, and tarot. That is not unusual for neurodivergent people who have learned to manage their wiring. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Steven Spielberg is dyslexic. Charles Schwab, Cher, Jamie Oliver, Tim Burton, Anderson Cooper, Henry Winkler, Octavia Spencer. All dyslexic. Greta Thunberg is autistic. The pattern is not coincidence. The wiring that makes the spelling hard is the same wiring that connects domains, generates ideas faster than other brains generate them, and refuses to stay in one lane.

The cost of that wiring is the running-eleven-projects-at-once problem. Right now I am simultaneously launching two novels, finalizing a memoir for agent queries, polishing a YA fantasy, completing a tarot deck for international publication, running an art studio, and writing a Substack series. Three years ago that load would have collapsed me. Today it does not, because the system around the brain is doing what the brain cannot do alone. It holds the eleven projects in one workspace, surfaces what is urgent in each one, remembers what I said last week, and lets me move between them without re-onboarding every time.

The IBPA Book Award was for one of the projects. The system is what made the rest possible.

What this means whether you are neurodivergent or not

Here is what I want a neurodivergent reader to take from this. The reason you have been told your work is illegitimate is not your work. It is the gap between how your brain produces ideas and how the surrounding tools expect ideas to be produced. You have spent your life closing that gap with willpower. The willpower is exhausting. The willpower is what burns out at thirty-five and convinces you that you were never the writer or the artist or the founder you thought you were.

You were that person. The willpower was eating the cycles. Build the system. Let the machine do the integration. Use what you save to do the thing you are actually here to do.

Here is what I want a neurotypical reader to take from this. The AI panic in publishing right now is being run by people who do not know what AI does for the brains the system has been failing for decades. The Shy Girl trap, the detector regime, the "real writers don't" rhetoric. It lands hardest on the writers who needed the tool the most. Disclosure is the conversation worth having. Whether the tool exists for some people is not.

Here is what I want everyone to take from this. Glasses, hearing aids, wheelchairs, screen readers, captioning. None of them are cheating. AI for a neurodivergent brain belongs on that list. It is not a productivity hack. It is not a creativity threat. It is an accessibility tool the way glasses are an accessibility tool, and the only reason it does not yet read that way is that the people writing the rules have not yet talked to the people whose brains the rules will fail.

I am writing this with a machine that holds all my thoughts at once. Three years ago I could not write this. The reason I can write it now is the system. The reason the system matters is the brain it was built for.

The brain it was built for is yours, too, if it is yours. Build the room.

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Luke Stoffel is an IBPA Book Award-winning author, GLAAD-honored artist, and creative director. He is the author of How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter, winner of the 2026 IBPA Book Award; the sci-fi novel Boy, Refracted, called "a truly singular book" by Publishers Weekly BookLife; and The Third Person. His Pop Art Tarot is published by Rockpool Publishing and distributed worldwide by Simon & Schuster. He writes about AI in publishing, AI disclosure, and the future of authorship. Part of The Warboy Essays.