One day when I was about sixteen, my mother, a physician, came home and said to me, “There’s this thing called Attention Deficit Disorder, and I have it, and you have it, and so do all these other people in our family.”

This made very little impression on me. I think maybe I read a book? And I thought, “yep, that’s me.” But I didn’t tie what I read in the book to the challenges I had experienced in my life. To get a better sense of the challenges from my schooldays, read this blog post about a time that I stole something, and this one about a time that I felt I cheated.

I was in the Gifted program in grade school, but I made a very mediocre showing on nearly every report card, and in every subject other than English, teachers felt I “didn’t work up to potential.”

As I grew up, started my professional life, and got married, I continued to struggle with executive functioning issues, mood variability, and co-occurring conditions like anxiety and depression.

In 2012, twenty years—TWENTY YEARS—after my mother originally told me I was ADHD, all these things came to a head. A therapist referred me to a psychiatrist for ADHD diagnosis. “Oh yes, you have it,” he said. I was utterly unsurprised but still didn’t understand the deeper implications. I tried medication and hated it. “You might benefit from ADHD coaching instead,” said the psychiatrist. He handed me a business card, which I promptly lost.

Seven years later—SEVEN YEARS—I started wondering…why am I the way I am? Why are certain things so hard for me? I always thought I’d outgrow my deficits, or that I’d be able to outwork them when I finally developed character. Now I was over 40, totally burned out from overwork, brimful of character, and the “outgrowing” part hadn’t ever happened!

I did a deep, deep dive into learning more about ADHD. I got an ADHD coach. I got a Life Coach. I threw myself into taking better care of myself. Learning to love myself. I took radical self-love, as articulated by the brilliant Sonya Renee Taylor, as my North Star. You can read more about my journey through infertility to self-love in this blog here.

I also did a Life Coach training, and started taking on clients. One day, a couple of years into my Life Coaching business, I reconnected with one of my first clients. “Hey, I just got an ADHD diagnosis!” she said. I thought through the other clients on my roster and realized…almost all of them were ADHD women! “Wow, I’m clearly emitting some kind of ADHD bat signal,” I thought.

I decided to lean into serving ADHD women. In coaching this clientele, I already had my own extensive personal experience, and personal research, to draw from. But I wanted more. I took a continuing ed course to learn about coaching ADHD clients. And I started my 100 ADHD Women research project. As of May 2023 I’ve interviewed 57 women in midlife about their ADHD experiences. It’s been a joyful, sobering, hilarious, profound learning experience for me and for them.

When I think about all the shame I’ve endured as an ADHD woman—shame that virtually every ADHD woman i know struggles with—I feel so f*cking angry and sad. Sexism in the medicine, and simple ignorance, make it very unlikely that women my age were diagnosed in their youth. So we’ve had half a lifetime of feeling like failures without understanding why.

My work is about helping as many ADHD women as I can shift this burden of shame and self-doubt. Because while I am angry and sad about the burdens we carry, I also feel FIERCELY PROTECTIVE of and DEEPLY INSPIRED by the magic we bear. Click to read more about my philosophy of ADHD magic.