Podcast: Unraveling the Narratives
Transcript: Unraveling the Narratives
Speaker 1: 00:00 All of our stories are being interpreted by white males who run the system so they can decide what works in our system and what doesn't. And so I really wanted to start learning what I need to know about myself because if I'm following what you know society has put in place for me to feel better and be at my best, that all I'm trying to do is mold myself again into what works best for society when we know when I know it hasn't really worked best for me before. Hey there, you're listening to the ADHD Goodlife podcast.
Speaker 2: 00:47 Each week we explore stories, ideas of topics around neurodiversity of an intersectional lens and the personal growth strategies we've found most helpful in transforming our lives. I'm your host, Sandra and a wife, mother, writer, coach, and educational specialist. I'm also a black cisgender woman, transracial adoptee and fellow neurodivergent after my own ADHD diagnosis at 40 and just like you, I'm learning, unlearning and healing so I can step into my uniqueness and create a life that truly allows me to flourish. Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. You ready? All right, let's get started. Hey everyone and welcome to,
Speaker 1: 01:26 Episode number two. In my last episode I talked a little bit about after the diagnosis and feeling the relief, you know, the frustration, but then really struggling with having to get to know myself in order to really decide what I really wanted in my life. And I wanted to go back to that a little bit and I wanted to take a step back. And go a little bit more in depth than I did in the last episode and what I did to really start to go forward, understand a little bit more about who I was as someone that was neurodivergent. And even though I felt like I accepted that quite quickly, I still felt very guarded about who I was and what it was like. I didn't really know very much about me and how I was in all of that. So I guess today's episode is more about trying to decipher and understand the narratives I've been playing in my head and how I've been trying to unravel them so that I can start picking apart which ones are my voice and which ones are something else, whether it's family, friends and society.
Speaker 1: 02:46 That has kept me small and kept me hidden and really kept me from reaching my potential. See, when I first got diagnosed and I was looking at the symptoms, I was like, okay, yeah I feel pretty textbook female at this part. Because I can identify with lots of presentations. I'm, I get some of the symptoms and they seem pretty similar and I can relate to that. So that's what got me diagnosed in the first place. But you know, some of the symptoms were bad, some of them were not as bad as others. And I got to understand that and I felt pretty confident about who I was with ADHD and how that kind of plays out in my life in the sense of the symptoms and the presentations. But the thing that was really getting to me and the things that I was really struggling with was that I couldn't find very many stories like mine, so I'm starting to look for other black females who had something similar with me.
Speaker 1: 03:52 Like I was wondering, “is this just the same for everyone? Regardless whether you're female or identify as female, what culture race you're in or not?” Because everything that I'm hearing and reading about, “Okay, there's a bit of stuff about shame and there's a bit of stuff about, you know, being your best life and NT society, but I couldn't really see it from a race perspective, from being black female, and I found it really difficult to find other people like me. That's part of the reason why I started writing the ADHD Good Life in the first place was because I couldn't really find those experiences. Even though I knew so much about ADHD I still didn't really understand myself. There was a lot of noise going on in my head and what I learned about hearing my intuition and the ego and having to decipher that so I could at least understand a little bit about where the voices were coming from.
Speaker 1: 04:53 What I mean by voices is narrative, but I still struggled with that and I didn't really find anyone who was similar to me to tell me what they had done. So that's when I started writing for myself. So what I learned so far in this journey was that there are so many layers to our diagnosis and that environment plays a huge role in that. Like depending on, you know, our family and how we were brought up the schools and all negative feedback where we worked, I think even in poverty and what countries we were raised in, they all play a role in how we think, how our presentations develop and how it impacts us, but what I wasn't seeing are any of those stories at all. I'm like for God’s sake, I hear one more life hack about prioritizing. I'm going to lose my shit because right now what I'm trying to prioritize is why do I still feel like I don't know what the hell is going on for me and why can't I see anyone else's stories that are even remotely like mine?
Speaker 1: 06:09 So I'm looking a little bit deeper and I'm really not an expert on any or all of this, but what I'm realizing, and I'm going to go back because of what I mean, it's like not being an expert on this, it's because again, was because of how I was raised. I was a transracial adoptee. I was raised in a white family, in a white neighborhood. I was the only black female. My brother was, you know, one of the only black males, and there were no other people of color. This is what I knew. I didn't know anything about all the trauma that it would bring, I didn't know anything about being intersectional groups. There was stuff about shame and loss with ADHD, especially undiagnosed for a long time, but there were still not a lot or a lot of people that were looking at, you know, what it is really like to grow up, you know, ADHD while black.
Speaker 1: 07:06 Okay. I knew about the school to prison pipeline but that wasn't really my picture either. I was just looking at just black women. What kind of struggles do they go with and does that impact how their ADHD is or when they were diagnosed too? Yes, it does. You know, definitely whenever they were diagnosed. I think it does make an impact, but theirs were stories that we don't hear. It's already bad enough that we don't hear a lot about all the inner work and how to manage all of this and heal so much of the trauma that we have growing up in hearing 20,000 more negative comments and you know, neuro-typical peers, but to not know about what it's like for people who identify as women or who non binary or how it's like for people in the queer community, how those stories of those folks who are not told anywhere.
Speaker 1: 08:17 All of our stories are being interpreted by white males who run the system. So they say what works in our system and what doesn't. And so I really wanted to start learning what I need to know about myself because if I'm following what you know society has put in place for me to be all better and be at my best, that all I'm trying to do is mold myself again into what works best for society. When I know it hasn't really worked best for me before. I don't want to pretend to be anyone else. I just wanted to see what other people like me were battling through so that they could be the person that they wanted to be living the life that they wanted to live and couldn't find it. So one thing that I always believed is that what I learned is powerful for me.
Speaker 1: 09:26 So I have done a lot of deep diving into not only understanding about myself, but looking at how the outside world and trying to understand how the outside world is impacting my symptoms and what are some things that were helping me to deal with that. I'm still not an expert on that, but at least I’m learning more so that there are options in ways that I can handle things for myself. So what I did to start to really unearth some of the stories that I had been telling myself in my head for a very long time, I started to get to know me first. So the first thing I started to do was to ask myself some kind of big questions and things I had never really thought to ask myself before. Like, what does give me joy? You know, what are some of the things that I keep coming back to over and over again?
Speaker 1: 10:28 You know, when I wasn’t diagnosed, you know, you cycle through some things that you're like, Oh I really love this thing. And then you drop it and then you go on to do other things. But something that keeps cycling back through the same things over and over again. And I'm not talking about, you know, the negative or the unhelpful coping mechanisms sort of things, but I'm talking about the things that do give you joy and do make you feel good about yourself, but you keep dropping them and maybe you drop them for six months, maybe you dropped them for years, but you keep bringing them back. And now that I was getting my management piece down, I was like, okay, what are those things for me that I thought didn't matter but I kept going back to because they did matter and is there a way that I could maybe bring some of those back into my life?
Speaker 1: 11:14 So I started looking and thinking about questions like that. I start thinking about things that I need to avoid like Ooh, or what do I need to avoid? That makes me feel good. I wasn't even looking at, like, you know what goals I had at this time. I was just like, what makes me feel good? What does it make me feel good? What brings me joy? What does it and how can I add more of the things that make me feel good and how can I get rid of more of the things that make me feel bad? My aim is really to be able to feel as good as I can for as long as I can. When I do flare up, I really wanted to not feel as down for as long. Number two I started to really think about, you know, the environmental factors that impacts my ADHD.
Speaker 1: 12:06 There's a lot of situational and events that make me flare up. Like that's kind of the nature of ADHD does that things happen. I've looked up, I wanted to know what were the things around me that impacted me the most. Were there people that would just send me spiraling where they're different situations that I put myself into that I needed to monitor or manage in the future and you know, being more aware of my presentations. This was really important for me because what I noticed is that one day like one thing can set me off, but the next day the same thing might not, but still knowing some of the general ideas and people and situations, that's been really important to me. The third thing was looking at my triggers. This has been, it's always ongoing and it's really difficult for me because at first I couldn't really understand what a trigger even felt like in my body because I've felt really unconnected with even just how I felt.
Speaker 1: 13:24 So getting to understand what a trigger felt like was big and then when I could recognize that I wanted to start and I did start listing what were the things that kind of got me doing that? What kind of things was I saying to myself? Like what were my thoughts when I was feeling triggered? Also, how do these triggers impact me? And my ADHD because I'm getting triggered by something. Then it's something that's happening outside me and I know that my ADHD can be triggered by things that happen. So the more that I'm able to unpack and list and notice these things, then at least I can say, ‘yeah, okay, I may be triggered.’ That's a big first step for me. Sitting with them and remembering to sit with my feelings and remembering to kind of see if I can get them back to what I'm thinking about so I can start to change or challenge that thought is a work in progress. But to have a list of things that I know set me off and to understand what that felt like so I could go, Oh, that's a trigger.
Speaker 1: 14:36 That has been invaluable. Now I also wanted to be able to start looking for different evidence as the next thing. Number four, we are looking for evidence of, you know what, I'm doing well in my life and the things that matter to me. See, we find what we believe we are. You know, if I'm thinking, ‘Oh I'm failure and I'm, I'm really messing up on this or that’, I'm just going to keep looking for evidence in my head and around me up. Why I know that's true. And when I'm ruminating then I combine all the evidence. I can make that shit up. You know, even whenever I'm doing well and I'm content, there's always that time when I'm looking for something to start worrying about or to start feeling sad about, when to start feeling anxious about. Like that's just the nature of things, right.
Speaker 1: 15:28 So when I am aware, I do try to note that evidence of ‘Oh yeah I did that. I'm going to put that down on my list. Oh yeah, I can, you know, trust myself with this, because I've been doing this for so long, I'm going to write that down. What I'm trying to do with this is really, I guess two things because I do want to see the evidence that I want to know the negative thoughts and the things that I'm saying about myself so that I can change them and start looking for, okay, well actually what's the evidence of the opposite of that? How do I want to see myself? Where am I seeing that in my life already? This one at first has been quite difficult for me because I had grown up just really thinking negative myself.
Speaker 1: 16:22 I'm very hard on myself, you know, nothing I did was really quite good enough. And even when people would tell me, Oh, this is really great or you know, you did really awesome with them. No, well, you know, and just make up excuses or just really downplay it. So looking for evidence of achievement and looking for evidence that supported a little bit more of, you know, what I wanted to be doing in my life. You know, that's been hard because there's been a lot of, you know, understanding the negative things I've been saying that I've had to note and notice first too. Other things that I did, and this is kind of goes back to when I was telling you about understanding that the stories and society weren't really showing me about other black women or anyone like that, and a marginalized group really, and their ADHD as well as showing any kind of really good emotional inner work and content like that.
Speaker 1: 17:26 So what I wanted to do after that was to really start to get an idea of, Okay, I know this is environmental factors that impacts me. Okay. So if that's the case, then what's society? How is that impacting me? How have the systems of society been impacting you? Me? Since before I realized it, before I was even aware of these impacts, just because of how I grew up. So number five for me was really getting an idea of the society around me and my place in it and how that has impacted me. This is kind of a difficult topic for me because of how I grew up and where it was all about being black and white spaces and how to be white enough and all about fitting into that small white town narrative. So much so that, I felt like for my own sanity, I don't know what it was that I just had to reject anything that taught me what it was like to live as black female.
Speaker 1: 18:42 And so I didn't really learn a lot, but it still didn't mean that I wasn't impacted by what society thought of me. Even though I'm blindly trying to find my place in it, not knowing the barriers that are put up for me and have always been put up for me, the things that even my white family and white parents could put down for me but at the same time weren't telling me about as well. Because what I was learning and what I learned was that, ‘Yeah, there are presentations about me that come up and depending on who I am could be accepted differently by different groups of people.’ So me not actually even realizing that is impacting me and it's forcing me to show up differently for different people. It's forcing me to mask more and more and masking so much that I can honestly say that I don't even know how long that's going to take for me to keep unmasking that and finding that.
Speaker 1: 19:48 So for me to start learning about what actually NT society really means and how that impacts marginalized groups and intersectional groups in this society, how we see ourselves, how we're viewed by others, what services we get or we don't get the support that we get or don't get, all of that stuff makes a difference. So I really knew that I had to start looking at that and understanding my beliefs around all of that as well because otherwise I wouldn't be really able to live the way that I truly want to live if I'm not seeing what I'm up against really in society. So to help me do that. Number six was again me trying to find myself in other people's stories because surely I am not the first black woman to be diagnosed with ADHD at 40 so here I am starting to look.
Speaker 1: 20:58 And the good thing is that I am in a community now. I've never been in a community before. So I'm starting to learn about other people's stories. I'm starting to hear their struggles, their tragedies, their triumphs, what has worked for them, what's not worked for them and how that looks. I'm thinking this is fantastic, awesome. Still not seeing a lot of black women, but at least you know, I'm seeing other people who are in intersectional groups, who are marginalized in some way and seeing a little bit about what they do. And I think for me that has been absolutely priceless and it's been powerful because when you spend your whole life thinking that you're the only one and then all of a sudden at 40 you're thrust into community. People who get it, who get you, who understand that this ADHD thing is not you know, one and done,
Speaker 1: 21:53 And then you know, everything's good, take your medication and then it's done. It is an everyday thing you were looking after, you were managing, you were trying to stay on top of and it impacts every area of your life. And to find people who get that, even that part of it has been amazing because then through their stories I'm able to see that I'm not alone. I am not making stuff up and what they're doing to feel good about themselves to succeed. You know, maybe I have a chance of doing that too in a way that works for me. Alright, so some of the things that I'm going to leave you with today and these are things that have helped me are some of my favorite resources. I'm going to put them in the show notes, but I just wanted to list out a few of them for you that have really been quite influential and at least me understanding more about ADHD, about me, understanding more or learning more about, you know, any kind of strategies and tools and hacks and even me just learning about other people's stories.
Speaker 1: 23:06 I'm on IG as the ADHD Good Life and is where I share a lot of my stories, but being able to be a part of that community, I've been able to meet some of the most incredible people who have really influenced what I share and what I've learned and a way forward for me and I'm really grateful for that. So I'm a big podcast person. I started listening to ADHD for Smart Ass Women and I'm actually a guest on that one too. And that's Tracy Otsuka’s podcast and what I really love about her podcast is that, it's informative and it's straight up clear and to the point and you can binge on like a ton of them at once and be completely pretty much caught up on all things ADHD. Her research is really thorough and it's just really great to listen to her.
Speaker 1: 24:02 Also in the realm of podcasts, I know there's a lot and I know there's a lot of well known ones too or maybe not, but now, I also like the ones where I'm able to connect with the, the podcast hosts, so I'm actually talking about them a lot more. So you know, a really good friend of mine is Patricia Sug and she does Motherhood and ADHD and I really love her episodes. They are short, very clear. She talks about all kinds of different things that come up for moms and give so many practical tips along the way. I know that she's always willing to help out and answer questions if you have any. And it's just such a great helpful podcast. So if you're a mom particularly, do look that one up. And I Have ADHD Podcast with Kristen Carder. She's also really brilliant too.
Speaker 1: 25:00 I love how she kind of dives into both sides. She does a lot of stuff about life hacks and all of the strategies and tools and things. But I love that she also does a lot of work about thoughts and a lot of the life coaching area there too. So does look a little bit about inner work as well and I think that's really important. She's got a great personality too. So definitely those are my podcasts that I think you should check out. For black females who are listening to this. If you're not following, Renee Brooks at Black Girl Lost Keys, please do that. She's really like one of the only black females that really is out there, especially with like Chadd, and in that group. She has a private Facebook group too specifically for black women and it is a really supportive space.
Speaker 1: 25:59 It is so welcoming and you know, you really do feel good in it. Well she has a blog that she does update it regularly, which is really great. It's so informative. Again, if you're not so much of a listener of podcasts and you want to be able to read stuff, then definitely check her out. But she's really active on Twitter and that's where you can like interact with her a lot. She's been an invaluable source of info for me. So if you need it, and even if you're not new, actually it was just looking for some podcasts guys. There's the blogs to look up, check these ladies out there are fantastic. I also think the other thing that you need to do is really start looking other people that are in your demographic or your intersectional group or marginalized group and just really start to get to know some people and follow them on it and see what they're doing. There's a huge community on IG and there are just a lot of kind people you can post on pretty much anyone who talks about ADHD and then you know they'll get back to you, they recommend people and really just a helpful bunch. That is all I have for today, so thank you so much for being
Speaker 3: 27:19 okay. Bye.
Speaker 2: 27:22 Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please feel free to leave a five star review and comment. It helps people find the podcast, especially listening on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to check out the show notes for any resources mentioned on today's podcast. You can find my own free resources links there, and links for getting in touch with me on Instagram and Facebook at the ADHD Good Life. I'm so grateful you could join me today. Have a great week, and I'll see you next time. Bye.