About | Kafka the Psychonaut

About Me

I've been and am so many different things that sometimes it gets quite hard to explain. I'm passionate about books since I was a kid, and I started writing my own poetry and creating my own stories when I was 12. I've also been a gamer since my first Atari 2600.

Kafka reading a book, surrounded by piles of books

I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in my teens, and with level 1 autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD) later. Masking was a struggle for decades.

I've always been a generalist. Good at many things — except those requiring motor coordination, of course — I had no idea what to do as a profession, or, more precisely, I wanted to do dozens of different things. I chose theoretical physics first, due to a passion for the universe and astronomy, and two years later switched to med school, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist, since understanding the brain and human behavior was my other passion. I did a PhD in machine learning applied to predictive psychiatry and a postdoctoral clinical fellowship in mood disorders. I chose to be a trauma therapist later, specializing in EMDR and Brainspotting.

Kafka coding at a desk with multiple monitors and a small robot

But being such a good generalist has often been a curse: I can have dozens of ideas per day. Poems, short stories, novels, music, games, software, pictures — they all keep popping into my head. The combination of ADHD and ASD gave me very low latent inhibition. I'm also an enthusiast of science fiction and cyberpunk themes, transhumanism among them, and I believe it was quite easy for me to accept the help of AI to exorcise some of these ideas out of my head. The only field I cannot accept any AI involvement is in my writing, which I do 100% myself.

Kafka planning at a desk with a board full of colorful notes

The name "Kafka" comes from Franz Kafka, my favorite author (and it's similar to Kefka, my favorite video game villain). "Psychonaut" is a play on argonaut — an explorer of the psyche. The brain and the universe are the two things that fascinate me most.

I absolutely love dogs more than I love anything else. They've been my best support throughout my life and they saved me so many times. I currently have seven dogs and I wish I could have more.

Kafka sitting on the floor surrounded by happy dogs

This website is where I put everything that torments my mind and ended up taking form: music, games, software, writing, images. Worlds I've been exploring for years in my head, now built to finally take shape.