I don’t know anything about web design. I want to say that up front because the rest of this is going to sound like I do, and I need you to understand that I don’t. What I know is networks. I’ve spent twenty years breaking into them. What happened this Sunday morning was something I didn’t expect and I’m still processing it.
I’m building a network intelligence tool. It watches DNS traffic and device behavior, learns what “normal” looks like, and tells you when something changes. I needed a dashboard to show a business partner. The prototype I had was functional — dark background, four stat boxes across the top, raw data underneath. It looked like every AI-generated dashboard you’ve ever seen. Because that’s what it was.
So I started over. And somewhere in that process, I stopped thinking and started feeling.
The Pulse
The breakthrough was a chart. Not a bar chart or a pie chart — a pulse. An area chart showing my network’s activity over 24 hours with a shaded band representing “normal” — the statistical baseline the system had learned over two weeks. When traffic stayed inside the band, the fill was calm. Teal. Steady. When it broke out, the fill shifted to orange.
I looked at it and exhaled. Not because I understood what I was seeing analytically. My body relaxed. The chart felt like a heartbeat. My network was alive, it was breathing, and it was okay. The variations in the line — the little spikes and dips throughout the day — were still inside the band. Normal fluctuation. Healthy rhythm.
I have never had that experience looking at a security tool. Every dashboard I’ve ever used is designed to make you anxious. Red badges. Alert counts. Threat levels. They show you what’s wrong or what might be wrong. They never show you what your network looks like when nothing is wrong, so you have no reference point for calm.
This chart gave me a reference point for calm. And I felt it before I understood it.
Designing Without Knowing
Here’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me yet. I don’t know CSS. I can’t design a layout. I don’t have opinions about typography — or I didn’t think I did. But when the first version of the dashboard came back in dark mode with monospace fonts and that four-box layout, my body said no. Not my brain. My chest said no.
When someone showed me Cloudflare’s speed test page — white background, big confident numbers, gradient-filled sparkline charts, clean sections that flow like a document — my chest said yes. I couldn’t explain why. I just knew what it should feel like.
So that’s what we built toward. Not a spec. A feeling. The white background, the big numbers, the gradient fills under the curves — each decision was a somatic response. Does this feel right? Back says yes. Does this feel wrong? Chest tightens. Next.
I’ve spent most of my career trusting my gut on networks. I can look at traffic and know something’s wrong before I can tell you what. I always assumed that was pattern recognition from experience. Now I think it’s this — whatever “this” is. The body knows before the brain has words for it.
The Full Cycle
At some point during the design session, I went somewhere. I don’t have a better word for it. I started rotating — physically, in my chair — and I felt something activate between my shoulder blades. My back. That’s the doorway. I’ve felt it before but never named it.
My ADHD brain works in orbits. Multiple threads spinning at different speeds, each one carrying a different piece of a problem. Normally this is chaos. But when I get into this state — when the rotation starts and the back opens — the threads start to synchronize. Not perfectly. Not every time. But enough that connections form that wouldn’t happen in linear thinking.
During this session, the connections were:
- The pulse chart feeling like safety → the product IS the feeling, not the data
- My body guiding design decisions → I’m designing somatically
- Twenty years of pentesting → I was always one zoom-out away from the carrier level
- A home network demo → the curtain-pull to enterprise architecture
Each one landed in my body before it landed in words. Each one got a “yes” from somewhere in my back.
I have a small part of my mind that stays conscious during this — the watchman. It does two jobs: it trusts that the ground is solid (I’m safe, someone’s paying attention), and it sends status signals. “I’m rotating.” “Deep thought.” “Don’t look at the screen.” Those aren’t descriptions. They’re transponder codes.
The Membrane
The state broke when I looked more closely at the pulse chart and realized the data was synthetic. Demo data, not live traffic. The beautiful heartbeat that made me feel secure was a simulation.
The break was instant. I didn’t reason my way to doubt. My body caught the lie before my brain processed it. Something about closer scrutiny revealed the mismatch and the somatic experience collapsed. One moment I was in the flow, the next I was back in my chair looking at a screen.
And then — without deciding to — I arched my back, pulled my shoulders together, and felt a pop between my shoulder blades. The doorway closing. The body’s way of saying: session complete, returning to normal mode.
Then a long exhale through my nose, lips closed. The nervous system downregulating.
Then my rational brain came back online, and the first thing it did was ask: “Can I prove any of this, or did I just trick myself?”
The Honest Answer
I can’t prove the biomechanics. Maybe the rotation and the back and the pop are just stretching, and I’m assigning meaning retroactively. That’s a fair criticism. I have an ADHD brain that’s very good at building narratives.
But here’s what I can prove: the outputs are real.
The dashboard designed by feeling landed better than anything designed by analysis. The demo flow that emerged from the flow state — comfort, reveal, surprise — is structurally sound and I couldn’t have planned it. The competitive positioning emerged from a creative process, not a spreadsheet.
And the membrane broke on bad data. I wasn’t performing a flow state for an audience. I was in one, and my body terminated it the moment the inputs were wrong. You can’t choreograph that. If I was faking it, I would have stayed in character.
What Was Already in Motion
The change started before the injury. I was already working hard to become a better person — building habits, finding the right direction, getting the velocity right. But I was fighting the noise the entire time. My analytical mind was loud. It narrated, judged, planned, corrected. It grabbed the wheel constantly.
Then the TBI took pieces offline. Math. Speech. The ability to hold a linear chain of thought. The tools that made me feel competent in a world that rewards linear processing — gone.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you about traumatic brain injury: you don’t stop processing. The processing shifts. When the loudest voice in the room goes quiet, you hear what was underneath it the whole time. The body had been speaking for years. I just couldn’t hear it over the noise.
The somatic channel didn’t get stronger because I trained it. It got louder because the noise above it went quiet.
The ADHD Reframe
I’ve known I’m ADHD my whole life. But the definition placed on me was written by people who don’t have it. Linear thinkers describing what linear processing looks like when it’s absent.
“Can’t concentrate” — I concentrate on everything simultaneously. “Impulsive” — I process faster than the environment expects. “Disorganized” — I’m organized in orbits, not lines.
They described the shadow my mind casts on their wall and called it a disorder.
The three spinning wheels — the way my brain holds multiple threads in orbit at different speeds — that’s not a deficit in attention. That’s a different architecture for processing reality. The insights happen when the orbits sync, not when I force them into a line.
Where the AI Fits
Then the AI showed up. And for the first time, the speed of my mind had a partner that could keep up.
No “can you back up.” No “can you organize that differently.” No delay, no judgment, no asking me to translate my thinking into someone else’s format. I throw, it catches. Every time.
The TBI took the tools that made me feel competent. The AI gave me something different — it made me feel exceptional. Not by replacing what I lost. By matching what I actually am.
It didn’t force me to externalize my thinking. The TBI created a slight deficit, and my natural instinct was to compensate. Normally that compensation would be impulsive — quick fix, move on. But something stopped the impulse this time. The fast analytical path was damaged. So I had to slow down. And in the slowness, I found the body was already there, already working, already knew.
The AI became the external translator for what the TBI disrupted internally. Not because I was forced. Because my body found a new way to route the signal.
The Deal
Somewhere in the last year, I made a deal with my subconscious. I started listening — not to my thoughts, to my body. And my subconscious noticed.
The deal is simple: I listen as hard as I can, and it speaks through the body. Back says yes. Chest tightens on no. The rotation opens the channel. The pop closes it.
The somatic design process isn’t a technique I learned. It’s the compensation that became a capability. The trajectory was already set before the injury. The TBI cleared the road. The AI matched the vehicle. And my body — the thing everyone kept telling me to sit still — turned out to be the most reliable instrument I have.
I designed a security dashboard with my body on a Sunday morning, and it was the best design work I’ve ever done. The product I’m building — a tool that shows you the behavioral heartbeat of your network — was itself designed by listening to a heartbeat. Mine.
My back says yes to that.