MONSTER (LYRIC EXCERPT)
this is not a monster i personally created
was rather just in time to watch it form
all the simple wonders that used to rise within him
completely overtaken by the morning
i'm realizing at this moment while i'm putting pen to paper
while you curse your valuation from the bar
i mistook a brilliant moment for a life extraordinary
when i might have only seen a shooting star
GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY
EIGHT CORPORATE TRUTHS ABOUT MY PEOPLE
In 2016, while booking a five-leg international trip at work, I suddenly stopped being able to reliably recall details. I had always felt deeply confident in my working memory, and had been able to do this sort of thing with my eyes closed, so I knew something big was up. A brain tumor? Stress-induced amnesia?
At age 41, my bandwidth had been pretty much running on zero due to a combination of running a biotech startup, parenting a tween and toddler, breadwinning, commuting 2hrs to the lab, and cooking all our family meals from scratch. After thorough analysis and diagnosis, I learned that my life story had been written by a faulty author. The running joke about how “Amy can never find her keys,” and community consensus that “her wife is the organized one,” morphed before my eyes from perceived character deficits into common indicators of ADHD.
Late diagnosis is a common story for women, whose well-honed coping strategies (those which a wiser GenZ refers to as “masking”) start to fall apart when a combination of life-work stressors ramp up to eleven. As children, girls don’t always present with the fidgety, hyper-physical and outwardly obvious manifestations that catch educators’ attention, so girls instead enjoy rounds of encouragement to “just apply themselves.” In my case, cartwheeling in the grocery store aisle was just seen as part of a creative little goofbucket living her best life. When the Cs and Ds in math and science (I have dyscalculia too - a common ADHD partner) started rolling in around 5th grade, I was advised by educators to take things more seriously, but was given a pass due to my hyper-capacity in language, arts, and social science. My ability to write plays and books, and compose complex musical pieces by ear clearly contrasted with this idea that I was incapable, so I wrote their opinions about me off as generational, and ultimately went my own way.
It’s cathartic to realize that you were never defective as a child, teen, nor as an adult, even if you knew it, somewhow, all along. To finally have proof that what steered you “off track” was never dumb apathy; that your lack of accolades had nothing to do with your intelligence or dedication. When my diagnosis came, I took a lonnnng look at my life story, re-examining it from this new perspective and was never the same.
I recently saw a LI post from a late-diagnosed mom, whose journey to discovering her own ADHD was quite similar to mine. In honor of this self-outing in the town square of social media (albeit, a professional one), I have assembled a short list of truths from my own work experience — ways that I (and presumably at least some of my people) hit different in corporate environments.
I hope it highlights the ways we ADHDers are always working so hard to code switch while in the company of neurotypicals, and that what we are perceived to lack is bountifully refunded by our unique capacities, but mostly in the hopes that you’ll forgive us when we lose our corporate phone (again. true story.)
This list is of course not exhaustive, and every brain is different, so it’s not going to be true for every neurodivergent colleague you have. And finally please consult your doctor if you have any concerns about the abilities of your own brain, because I am the absolute last person to be giving you medical advice.
THE BREAKDOWN:
We care authentically about the people on our teams and their wellness, far beyond corporate norms, because we are only capable of being genuinely invested, or not in the room at all. We’re natural managers because our experiences of marginalization give us heightened sensitivity and capacity to problem solve, while our value of genuine connection makes people feel seen and safe. Seriously. Let us help make people’s lives better today, or we will just start thinking about laundry. Or cookies. Mmmmm.
We spent so many years building resilience to the disconnect between feeling intelligent, underfed by education, yet not attracted to (or welcome within) traditional learning environments, that we are absolute MASTERS of manifesting excellence with zero resources. Show us the rocketship you want, and we’ll create it from scratch in two days with some dental floss and spare wrapping paper from the garage. Directions not required, all set - we threw in an upgraded audio system and left it in your back yard last night. Sooo NBD.
We brighten to the idea of taking on more and adapt at warp speed to change, because it feels like adventure (we’re big on the journey, rather than the destination). Expanding our understanding of the world is straight fire, and harsh deadlines just sweeten the pot, so we’ll always volunteer to help more during crisis or crunch. We’ll need you to swoop in like a superhero to lighten our workload occasionally because new things always sound fun to us, and our idea of a “normal” pace is not inline with neurotypical expectations.
We’re mischaracterized as workaholics. While men have cultural permission to be at the office late, and will be the ones considered most readily for senior roles, we don’t consider working hard at something we deeply enjoy a “sacrifice,” regardless of the paycheck attached, especially when it means we are modeling that love of finding deep, fulfilling work to our kids. While we are incapable of sustaining interest in the rote, mundane, or familiar, if we are exposed to the hub of the organization where all the action is, we are ride or die, impeccable brand ambassadors, and probably want to memorialize it in tattoo form.
We’re mistaken as dismissive and forgetful because our state varies from day to day. Some mornings bring hyperfocus and we crank through an impossible list in an hour. Others, we need two hours of warm up time to be able to converse, and none of this aligns with a Gantt chart. Unfortunately, we have zero inclination to self-promote or play politics (boring) in the way that would smooth our less-optimal phases over, and we’re terrible at managing expectations or tracking our accomplishments for external validation (again, boring). WE don’t even know what tomorrow will bring in terms of our mood. So annoying, we know.
You’ll assume that we’re jerks in meetings. Our propensity to over-share and interrupt makes us seem pompous and dismissive, when it’s just that our brains actively fight against expected patterns of dialogue (and agendas for that matter). We are wired to either solve hard new problems or go find dopamine elsewhere, and abiding the timing our calendars have arbitrarily allotted for a conversation regardless of its complexity truly feels ridiculous. We dread regular meetings like a root canal so we’ll try endlessly to lighten things up and crack jokes, in an attempt to find connection and community, sort of like finding a buddy to huddle with in the snow cave until the blizzard passes.
We are natural entrepreneurs and builders because curiosity to our brains is like oxygen to fire. Proficiency in a wide range of subjects and areas is our JAM. Corporate normies won’t expect that the wide range of our experiences are ALSO rich and meaningful (we’ve often lived abroad, tried a zillion activities, and have had multiple careers in the time most people do three major life choices). If we’re not met by ADHD-aware management to encourage continued growth, we wilt.
Finally, we don’t have reliable access to the meds we need to function at a consistent pace. If I had a dollar for every pharmacist that starts their sentence with “Adderall is a Schedule I medication so we can’t give that information out”, as though I have not already called 20 pharmacies just to try to find it anywhere in stock so I can work tomorrow, we’d all be on our way to Bali. Ongoing supplier issues, high cost, discrimination, and rampant abuse of common pharmaceutical treatments for ADHD lead to unreliable lead times for refills. In practical terms, that means some days we’re mainlining espresso and kettle chips just hoping to survive, and we’re going to be pretty wretched people to hang with over lunch. We’re probably not going to explain ourselves, because crying to a pharmacist earlier that morning has been traumatizing enough. It means a high likelihood that we’ll forget things you just told us, or important stuff like an all-team meeting that’s been on the calendar for months.
I could go on, but you catch my drift. We’re at once the most delightful and the most impossible of collegues. We ask simply that you’ll remember to notice the former just as much as the latter.
If you’d be so kind. Kthx.
WHEN MY MOTHER ASKS
when my mother asks
if the two day old sushi is still alright for lunch
i say let's be better
than two day old sushi
and i wonder
if the fact that i state with utter confidence
that our life has been profound
that obviously you're the one
is not just as much
a declaration about deserving the real thing
as it is a promise
but you don't ask questions anymore or punctuate my messages with cowboy hat emojis
you ignore my witty repartee
and aren't exactly demanding updates on all the things
that are keeping my heart beating
every exchange four hours late
or two days early
the laces on my shoes are drawn too tight
and i totter at the edge of your dark abyss with my toes dangling in
a four year old at goldfish level swim class, tendrils dripping
saltwater mingling with and exhilaration and terror
painted toenails
allowing hope and sheer determination to buoy
and rationalize an obvious potential disaster
because being loved
by you
felt like the air turning in concert to beats off something that dropped just this second
tangible delirium
giggling, ingenious,
bloating my belly
adorned with rainbow stickers and fly as all hell
i am a master of sustaining starvation
many miles to travel on just a quarter tank
is something i’m endlessly willing to determine doable
but not good enough
is not good enough
any way you microwave it
warmed over day old coffee
is hot
and not better than no coffee at all