Amy Grace Wells - Expectations

In this episode we speak to content designer Amy Grace Wells about expectations. Diagnosed only a few years ago with ADHD, Amy is reconsidering the expectations she and others have of herself. We get into how our expectations form, how identity and power influence expectations, and when "should" is and isn't a useful concept.

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

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(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas

Everybody, welcome to another episode of “Lately, I've been thinking about…”. My name is David Dylan Thomas, coming to you live from Edinburgh, from the swanky environs of a hotel lobby in downtown Edinburgh at the ContentEd Conference. I'm here with Amy Grace Wells. 

Amy, tell us a little bit about what you get up to.

Amy Grace Wells

Oh gosh! Well, right now it's a lot of content design. It's a lot about talking about structure of content design. It's a lot about talking about neurodiversity and content. It's a lot about chasing my nine-month-old daughter around! So, just busy in all fronts.

David Dylan Thomas

Excellent! And tell us, what have you been thinking about lately?

Amy Grace Wells

So lately I have been thinking a lot about expectations. 

David Dylan Thomas

Interesting!

Amy Grace Wells

In a very deep and personal way. 

David Dylan Thomas

Okay, so tell me more. 

Amy Grace Wells

Well, so, if you haven't seen me on the interweb or at a conference lately, I have been really deep diving into neurodiversity because I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 35. I'm now 39, so this has been a fairly new journey to me and I've been working with an ADHD coach for a couple years now. I've been doing a lot of research, and just kind of trying to understand how I exist in the world.

On top of that, like I said, I have a nine-month-old and so there's a whole new section of my identity that I'm also exploring.

And so, I'm just kind of thinking about…a lot of it's just rethinking about how I exist in the world and what I expect of myself, what I expect of others, and challenging everything that I thought I knew. 

David Dylan Thomas

So, what would be an example of an expectation you have of yourself that you might be rethinking now?

Amy Grace Wells

One thing that I'm really thinking about a lot is how much. What is the expectation for how much? How much work, how much parenting, how much other stuff. I'm finding right now that I'm not really doing a lot of the other stuff, the not-work and the not-parenting and the just-me. I'm not making a lot of room for that and so I’m thinking about the expectations of, I think a lot of us are very ambitious in our career and we want to continue to grow and to expand and I want to do that and I have a lot of opportunities right now, but I'm also like, well, ooh, I'm taking advantage of a lot of those opportunities and should I be? What's the expectation? Should I be doing this or should I be doing less? Should I be saying no more? 

David Dylan Thomas

Where do you think your initial expectations, the one you're kinda of questioning now, where do you think they came from?

Amy Grace Wells

I think a lot of it has come with this neurodivergent journey because we live in a very neurotypical world. Everything is kind of set up nine to five. I can't work nine to five. I do not function well in the morning. I function amazingly well; I can focus and can be so productive from like 10:00pm to 2:00am.

So, I've really started being challenging. I work at 10up, which is a remote company. While we have some expectations about being responsive during our typical nine to five hours, so that we have some predictability with our colleagues, they really kind of encourage a flexible work environment as well. 

And so, part of me has started to try and explore and look at the expectation of do I need to be productive from nine to five? Or can I be functional and can I be productive at another time? Because that's what works for my brain. Then I'm not beating myself up. I'm not getting into a guilt shame cycle of, oh man, I should have gotten more done today – and that's still a very common thing for me.

But just starting to challenge all of those expectations, even expectations around food. So, a couple years ago I did a lot of work on removing morality from food, because it's just food. But even now, I’m like, is that food actually neurodivergent friendly? In my head I'm thinking, okay, if I'm going to eat yogurt, I should eat the best way. I should get some plain Greek yogurt. I should add some honey, some fruit. Make it really healthy and just do what I see on social media, on Instagram and stuff like that. And that's a lot of steps for anybody. 

David Dylan Thomas

It sounds exhausting!

Amy Grace Wells

It does! But especially for somebody with ADHD. So, I've even been challenging myself, my expectations in that way. Do I just need to eat yogurt that I rip the top off of? Even something as simple as that is an expectation that I'm challenging.

David Dylan Thomas

Do you think part of that is a desire to have it be simple and predictable? In other words, going back to the morality food thing. I want to be sure; I don't want to have any questions about what I eat. I want to silence the haters and have my eating choices be unassailable, versus, ‘well, I feel the need to eat something real quick right now, but that's not what I did at my last meal. My last meal was really well thought out. All my meals must be the same.’

Amy Grace Wells

I mean, there's definitely something to predictability and routine. It's always interesting, particularly for ADHD brains. We crave just being free to do what we want when we want to do it and follow whatever the dopamine is giving us. But we actually need a lot of structure and routine. But then also there is something to the whole, like Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day to remove that decision because that takes mental energy.

I think that's where part of, at the end of the day, I don't have the ‘me’ part of my personality because I'm using up all my energy on the work part, on the parenting part, on the other parts, so then there's nothing left because I'm having to work harder to make every single little decision and then letting those expectations seep in to tell me that maybe my decision is wrong.

David Dylan Thomas

Are you familiar with the spoons analogy?

Amy Grace Wells

Yes.

David Dylan Thomas

Actually, I'll let you describe it for those listeners who might not be familiar with it, if you don't mind.

Amy Grace Wells

Let me see if I can explain it in a great way. So, spoons has kind of come out of, I believe like disability, and things like that. It's just a great way to explain, you might start the day off with five spoons. And every little challenge in your day, every stumble, every decision could take away a spoon. So at the end of the day, I mean, even in the middle of the day, you could end up with no spoons. And when you have no spoons, there's nothing left.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, and it's funny too, because this is backed up by science, even for neurotypical minds. It's called decision fatigue. Every decision you make, however your brain works typically, however, your brain works, generally speaking, uses up actual physical energy. And so, the more decisions you make, the less energy you have for the next decision to the point where you're just making the easiest possible decision. We've seen this play out horrifically in the judicial system, but that's another conversation.

The reason I bring that up is that it sounds like you are having to use up your spoons on the parenting and the work, which leaves you fewer spoons for the ‘me’ and it's interesting, wouldn't it be great if we could just allocate spoons at the beginning of the day? Be like, ‘okay, sorry, work. You've used up your two spoons already. I gotta move on to parenting!’

Amy Grace Wells

Right! But again, it goes back to the expectations. There's an expectation you can't tell work. You can't tell them that ‘my spoons are done for the day. You used them up, I'm sorry. you pinged me on Slack 48 times. So that was all your spoons.’

David Dylan Thomas

You know what's funny about all this though? Because we work in tech and in tech we have something called agile. So again, quick explainer, agile is a way to get projects done that kind of breaks it up into smaller work cycle's called sprints. For each sprint, for each little chunk of work you're going to estimate how many points – literally, the call them points – it’s going to take to redo this font or change the color on this thing or build the intake portal for that thing. You say, ‘that sounds like 13 points to me’, or whatever.

They are absolutely talking about spoons. Wouldn't it be great if we could just apply that methodology, which at the very least, hip, if not fully accepted and embraced by most of the tech world right now, and say, okay, the way you're used to thinking about points, just translate that to spoons for me right now so that I can set expectations, which is the reason points were invented in the first place, was to set expectations properly and say, ‘okay, instead of points, just think about spoons’.

I feel like low hanging fruit might be overstating it, but I feel like there is a ready-made metaphor for helping other people understand that when you're talking about spoons, you're not trying to be selfish, you're trying to set expectations.

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah. I mean I've never thought about it that way. Again, my company, we definitely work in agile sprints, but oftentimes design works outside of that. That's really for engineering. I've never actually thought about that. Maybe I need to start incorporating that into my work to help set better expectations.

David Dylan Thomas

It’s like, ‘this is what you want me to do today? Okay, I’m going to estimate that’s three spoons….’

Amy Grace Wells

But then, even when you said by the end of the day, I don't have any spoons left for me, that's the most important part. That's the part that gives you spoons.

David Dylan Thomas

Exactly. That's another important part of the analogy is that there are things that take away spoons, but there are also things that give you spoons.

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah.  And so, if you run out of spoons you don’t have anything left to then recharge and to refill those spoons. And I think that’s where I’m hitting that wall a lot lately and it’s something I’m really thinking about how I can carve out more time for me.

I think it's hard anywhere, but I think especially in America and being a working mother, there's a lot of expectations. You can't really win as a mother in America because there's always somebody that has a different expectation. 

David Dylan Thomas

I feel like a lot of that patriarchy, I think a lot of that is, to extend the spoon metaphor, even further, historically, the battle in America has been about quality. About land-owning white-dude, you seem to have all the spoons and you expect more spoons from us. Progress has looked a lot like okay, fine, you can these spoons but we are not giving up any spoons ourselves. We will allow you to partake in activities that might require more spoons of you, but we're not giving up any of our spoons.

We’re not going to give you any of our spoons so that your life can be easier. So you get the freedom of choice, certainly you can, we are not going to make it illegal for you to have a job or do this or that, but we're not going to make it easy, and we're going to expect you if you complain about, ‘wait a minute, you seem to have more spoons than I do’, we’re going to be like, ‘oh, you said you wanted to be equal. I don't know what you're complaining about.’

Amy Grace Wells

Well, isn't that kind of how the nine to five shift got created with Ford? Well, he created the eight-hour shift so that his workers would have time to basically spend their money outside of work. I might be very wrong about this, but he created the eight-hour work day to kind of balance that work and life a little bit, I think mainly in a capitalistic view, to give them time to then go spend the money that he's giving them. It's like, okay, I'm not going to work as hard as you're working on the factory floor, but I’m still going to give you the time.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's interesting because I've been reading a lot about allocation of work and allocation of resources and how that's played out differently over time. Some of the first bureaucracies, ironically, were designed – so this is like groups of indigenous folks who were eventually taken over by the Inca, would have sort of smaller like sub-tribes, so to speak, that were basically in charge of keeping records of who had what and who was doing what. Not so that they could like tax them or something, but so they could literally be like, ‘oh, it looks like you over there don't have enough food. Let's make sure they have enough food. Looks like you over there are having trouble with your crop. Let's make sure that they are able to like have arable land or whatever.’

It was literally for the purposes of redistributing resources so everyone had what they needed. It's funny because it's the same database you would use and that eventually the Incas would use to subjugate people. But when you're intent, the ability is there.

The ability is there to give everyone the spoons they need, the intent isn't necessarily there. 

Amy Grace Wells

Yes. And then I just think even if the intent is there, there's an expectation. There's somebody who has some idea in their head of how you're going to use those spoons.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. Honestly, this is why…have you ever heard of the conservative argent for UBI? 

Amy Grace Wells

No. 

David Dylan Thomas

So UBI – again, for those listeners who might not have heard the term, it's universal basic income. It's basically saying whoever you are, if you're a human living in this country, you get a certain amount of money every month forever. Zero requirements is the important point here. You don't have to apply for it. It’s like, ‘Here's a thousand bucks. I don't care what you do with it, it's yours, go’

The conservative argument for UBI – going back to expectations – if we have UBI, we don't have to have all this fricking infrastructure around the social safety net. We don't have to have this whole infrastructure built around who gets social security? Who gets food stamps? Who gets this? Who gets that? Nope. Federal government gets out of your business and just says, ‘here's the money you do with it what you want, because it's your money.’ Which is a classic conservative-like stance.

It fascinates me because I would not have expected there to be a conservative argument for UBI, but given conservative expectations, that actually makes a lot of sense. That’s kind of what I like. There are no expectations. I am not judging what you should be doing with your money, how you should be living your life. How people overall, how neurotypical people should spend their time and money. I'm not trying to normalize that. I'm just saying, I'm going to assume whatever you're trying to do, if you have this much money, it'll be easier and then I'm going to get out of your business.

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the consequences of your action. We gave it to you.

David Dylan Thomas

Exactly, which is another conservative standby.

Amy Grace Wells

But then that gets really complicated with the privilege and all of that because the UBI doesn’t just erase all of that. But, you also look at how many barriers you’re taking out if you don’t make people apply for it. There’s a lot to think about there.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, I think there’s a dignity standpoint as well. I mean, it's not surprising to me. They did an experiment with UBI in New York with mothers. It was like a thousand bucks a month, which is nothing in New York – says the privileged person. But what they found was people who got that money were twice as likely to find work, not just likely, but actually found work at twice the rate of the people who didn't get it.

So, it's not like UBI is this sort of path to financial freedom and you're just going to sit around all day watching the internet. You are actually in a better position to do the things that we “expect” of you because we've set those expectations so high that you can't even live. I think that's fascinating. 

The other thing you were saying though is, so there's the expectations you have of yourself, but then there's expectations others have. What have you been rethinking about that?

Amy Grace Wells

So much, so much. I think one that's a huge conversation I'm having with myself and how I also communicate that out, especially as a neurodivergent person, again, working in a predominantly neurotypical world.

I run the employee resource group at our company for neurodivergents. We have a really amazing, supportive community. It's small though. I'm sure that there are other neurodivergent folks that I work with that just don’t want to join and that's okay if that’s where they live and that's fine. But a lot of my colleagues who are neurotypical, a lot of them have reached out to me because they want to understand better, but also really challenging and starting to communicate. So not only challenging myself, but actually starting to push that out to other people, ‘That's not going to work for me. I can't make that meeting because I have three hours of meetings before that and I'm not going to be productive for you. I'm not going to be helpful in this meeting. Can we make it at another time that works better for my brain and my spoons?’

When you look at mothering and parenting, my daughter's nine months old. I had her very late in kind of the typical childbearing years, but I'm actually really glad I did that because I think it changed the expectations I have of myself. I'm not saying that every day, I'm not thinking, ‘oh my gosh, should I be doing more of this?’

But it also means I have different expectations for my spouse. He's actually incredibly supportive, he in a lot of ways takes on a lot of the care tasks, the routine changing of the diapers and a lot of the feedings, and he's a morning person…

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, perfect!

Amy Grace Wells

So, he takes on the morning. I'm in a very privileged position to have day-care and all of these things, but that mother guilt still creeps in and it's still a conscious effort to say, what's the expectation? Where did it come from? That's a big thing with the expectations. With challenging expectations, you have to stop, you have to give it a spoon. You have to say, ‘where did this come from? Why do I think this? Is it valid to what truth I'm living and do I need to keep it or do I need to let it go?’

David Dylan Thomas

That’s the Marie Kondo-ing of expectations. ‘Is this expectation bringing me joy?’

Amy Grace Wells

Exactly, no. Let it go. Pretty much that, I think that's exactly what I ask myself every day. Now. I'm like, does this make my life easier? Does it bring me joy? No?

David Dylan Thomas

It's funny as I say that, I'm trying to think, are there any expectations that bring me joy? I find what brings me joy is not giving a fuck! Honestly, I mean speaking of privilege, I own my own business and I'm in a position where I can set my own hours, thanks to the support for my wife who has a very stable job that she loves. Like there are a lot of factors going into the freedom I get, but the freedom I get, what I notice I like best about it is I can structure my day, because functionally as a speaker, as a workshop giver, I only need to be “on”, very specific times, several times, a month. I'm on for those things, but once I'm off, everything else is asynchronous. I can get back to that thing within a few days, whatever.

So, as a result of my actual day to day, I can basically have this routine of I will get up, I’ll have leisurely civil breakfast, watch an episode of Deep Space Nine, maybe play some video games, maybe do some weeding in the yard if it’s nice, then maybe we can start doing things like email and such. But that email can be mixed in with laundry, can be in mixed in with meditating. I get to move those pieces around as my spoons require rather than be like, a 9am meeting…who does that?

Amy Grace Wells

I block out 9-10 every day on my calendar because I do not want meetings before 10am.

David Dylan Thomas

Little spoiler alert for folks who try to schedule meetings with me. If you notice that there are only meetings available from like 1:00PM to 5:00 PM every day, it's not because the 9 to 1 got booked. It's because I do not allow that. I have only made myself available for meetings from 1:00pm to 5:00pm on weekdays.

Again, that's just a consciousness of I am not going be very helpful for you. I'm going be very angry if I have to meet you before lunch. 

Amy Grace Wells

This whole idea of the expectations and everything else is just so fascinating to me. Even things like exercising, for example. There's kind of an expectation that you stay healthy, you exercise to stay healthy and things like that. But it's also something that brings me joy, but it doesn't bring me joy when I attach the expectation to it. I love doing CrossFit. I love lifting heavy things. It's really cathartic to drop a really heavy deadlift. I love it. It makes me feel strong. It brings me joy, but as soon as my brain goes, oh you have an expectation to do CrossFit three times this week because you are trying to do this, it removes all of the joy.

David Dylan Thomas

So, I totally agree. Even playing video games can become a thing like, well, no, you said you were going to do this thing at this time. And you just sort of like you catch yourself, like, wait, it's a video game. Why am I even setting an expectation around this?

Where do you think the power of the expectation comes from? I feel like these things wouldn't matter if they didn't have some kind of power to them.

Amy Grace Wells

I mean I think a lot of it right now, for me personally, I think there's a lot of it that's just ingrained in your life experiences, whoever raised you expected of you, what you saw. That's something that I'm thinking a lot about when it comes to my daughter is how do I want her to see how I live and how I manage kind of societal expectations to present to her a healthy way to think about things. 

Then I also think with a lot of the day-to-day things, the eating, the exercise, the work, it's very media and social media heavy. What you see is kind of what you expect to mirror. When you see a lot of people being represented in this way, even know that's not true. Even if you know that almost everything on Instagram is a lie and staged and edited. It just seeps in. There's just a part of it that just attaches itself and it takes conscious effort to say nope. 

David Dylan Thomas

Well, and that's the other bit. You made an excellent point that it takes a spoon to save a spoon. Like it takes a spoon to put in the work to stop and notice your expectation. Again, that's very true. Most cognitive bias is basically our mind taking shortcuts because taking the long road takes effort, thinking slowly takes effort, and we have to be very careful when we choose to put in that effort.

Even making that choice of when to put in the effort versus just letting it happen the way it's going to happen takes spoons. It reminds me of the rocket problem. If I have a big rocket, I want to get it up, it's really heavy. I need a lot of fuel, but the more fuel I add, the heavier the rocket gets. It's like, fuck.

That's what it feels like thinking about how do you become conscious in a way where you don't become a slave to your expectations? You can get out from under it, but it's going to take energy and eventually that means you're going to run out of energy faster and it’s like this paradox.

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah, and that's kind of the space that I'm in right now because I'm challenging so many expectations at once. What I hope my expectation is that eventually it's going to be easier that as I kind of dismantle some of these things in my brain and break those connections, that it will be easier. But right now, it's really hard. 

I've been working with an ADHD coach who specifically understands our brains, for a couple years now, and a lot of that time has been building some better habits that work better with my brain, set better expectations for how I move through the world. That habit building is really hard.

It's the same kind of mental energy to challenge expectations as you go through your day and every time, it's kind of to this point where every time I kind of feel a negative emotion about something, I start to say, ‘oh, I should.’ If I catch myself saying, ‘should’, I'm like, ‘dang it! Okay, let's take a moment. Let's take a breath. Let's think about where this is coming from.’ But that takes a lot of energy. 

David Dylan Thomas

It’s funny too how you mentioned habit forming because what you're reminding me of when you describe that space of that effort and that tension. I think about like working out. I think about developing an exercise routine and the first few weeks are horrible because your body's doing something it's not used to doing it, doesn't want to do it, it'd be much easier not to do it and you're not seeing the benefit yet.  It's a sort of like, ‘I hurt now and I look the same. Actually, I feel worse. Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? It is taking more energy, but you weirdly get to a point where your body starts to expect it and it's like, wait, why aren't we running today? Aren't we supposed to be running now? I want to run.’

Amy Grace Wells

I aspire to get to that point one day! 

David Dylan Thomas

I feel like for me that journey has been around listening and trying to get better as listening as that’s something I’ve been working on since 2013. A friend of mine, Alex Hillman, said ‘it’s impossible to listen and react at the same time’, and that just hit me like a truck.

I started being like, what does it feel like to really listen to someone and not wait my turn to speak? And just practicing that and literally just having the word ‘listen’, appear next to the person's head in my mind to remind myself to shut the fuck up, and that eventually got to the point where that's my default, I hope.

It’s an ongoing practice. But there was definitely a period where it was just sort of catch myself thinking of a cool story to tell or basically tuning that person out after they'd given me just enough words to form a reaction.

Amy Grace Wells

For me it’s kind of interesting because I live in two very different camps with that. One it’s the ADHD spiderweb brain, as I call it as my brain’s very tangential, everything is connected, nothing is linear. It’s all spiderwebbed. Sometimes I have to catch myself not interrupting and not jumping in and being like, ‘oh my gosh, yes’ and not jump here and not jump there.

Then it's also, I work at an agency and my job is to work directly with clients and there is kind of an expectation that you're going to be able to kind of react and respond and think really quickly. That's something I've kind of challenged at work that I've pushed back on. I need time to listen.

Even in college, I hated participation. I think that participation grades are not inclusive because I would be the person who would sit back, listen to the entire discussion in class, really kind of let it sink in, internalize it, synthesize it, and then I might provide one kind of really thoughtful comment that takes in a lot of the perspectives that have been heard, but that's not enough for participation. But I was participating because I was actively listening. And so I hated participation grades in college because there was an expectation for what that participation was and it's not what worked with my brain. 

David Dylan Thomas

It's funny when you said a participation, I thought you meant just showing up, but you meant literally ‘you must say a thing. You must say many things so that I know that you're paying attention.’ Which is only one way of paying attention, and is arguably sometimes not actually paying attention.

That's almost like a thoughtcrime though because what they're really trying to do is get into your mental state. They want to know, not just are you in the room, but are you paying attention? Which is really only something you can know if you're literally in that person's brain. So, it is a very weird thing to try to measure and set expectations around.

Amy Grace Wells

I mean this was even in graduate classes. If you don’t know, I have a bachelors and two masters because I have ADHD and I can’t stop myself. I’ve talked myself out of several other degrees. 

David Dylan Thomas

You have a problem!

Amy Grace Wells

I do have a problem. Even in graduate classes. I’m like, what are you doing? We're graduate students. You should be able to just know that we're going to show up and it's just fascinating. One of my masters is in a higher education, so I have a lot of feelings about the state of curriculum and how we teach and what we expect of students nowadays. But again, it all comes back to expectations.

David Dylan Thomas

When I think about expectation and the word ‘should’ are very related. When I think about when is it that ‘should’ is appropriate, I think very much about morality. So there's definitely places in society today where we're like, ‘that person should treat the employees at Twitter better’ – just to give us something, it's November 2nd or something, and I just heard that half of Twitter's going to get fired. It's really messed up.

There’s a definite ‘should’ there that we are all very comfortable with. We’re not like, ‘oh, you shouldn't should Elon Musk.’ No, we’re ‘you should Elon Musk.’

I feel like that should, as opposed to the should around, ‘you need to be available for emails from 9-5’, that ‘should’ feels false. The should around Musk feels true because that should, to me anyway, is related to values. Compassion. You ‘should’ be compassionate. For me it's things like compassion, curiosity, connection. For me those are valid ‘shoulds’, because they align with what I truly believe.

That, full disclosure, that is coming from a place of therapy. Your ADHD coach is my therapist, right? It's me acknowledging that my expectations were being set by other people, or really, I was judging my performance, my ‘shoulds’ were around, ‘Okay, at the end of this meeting, that person should like me and at any point that person should say good things about me’.

That's how I move in the world, which is basically putting my self-worth in other people's hands, which ends up not being a great idea, not an awesome way to live. My therapy was a lot around shifting from ‘am I a good or a bad person?’ as the core question of my existence to, ‘well, what are my values and how close am I to them right now’ as a much healthier and much more valid and authentic way of living.

I don't think about expectations so much in that context, but I do think about a valid ‘should’ for me is a ‘should’ that's tied to those things as opposed to just, ‘dude, it's 9:00am, you're supposed to be awake.’

Amy Grace Wells

Well, it's interesting because that's one of the first things I did with my ADHD coach was a core values exercise. Even years later, we come back to that a lot when I'm struggling with something. One of my core values is curiosity and exploration, which explains why I have two master's degrees, and a whole bunch of hobbies and did a yoga teacher's training and taught karate and worked as a sign language interpreter and all these things. 

That's really start to be where okay, that's what I can attach my ‘shoulds’ to. Just like you said with kind of the morality things. Number one, the first question is, should a morality value be attached to that?

Now if it's caring for other people that you have power over, yes. Is it the type of yogurt you eat? No. You even have to challenge should there be a morality value of care and compassion attached to this? Or where should that be? If it’s me with my yogurt the value should not be on the yogurt. The value should be on me caring for myself in a way that nourishes me, makes me feel good, is compassionate…not the value of the yogurt.

David Dylan Thomas

We like to attach value to things instead of people. We call that capitalism! No, that's interesting. Well, it's funny because to me I think of it almost like a scope creep of ‘should’. ‘Should’ belongs in a place where it's about these sorts of bigger things like compassion and connection.  It somehow ends up also being about, where did you buy those socks? 

Have you ever watched The Good Place?

Amy Grace Wells

 Yes.

David Dylan Thomas

Okay. So I don't want to spoil The Good Place, but everyone go watch The Good Place because it is among other things about the scope creep of morality and how difficult it is, especially here and now to sort of like really get a tight rein on what is good and what is bad and what is a moral act and what is not. But again, I like that. I like thinking about how can we center these things in, in people and humanity and less actions and things and stuff.

Amy Grace Wells

Right. Well, and even nowadays, if I am saying ‘should’, if you have a ‘should’ in your conversation, in your thoughts, whatever it is, that means there's a question. ‘Should’ is not a statement, ‘should’ means there's a question to answer and that's something that I've started to try and catch.

If you're saying ‘should’, that is not a statement.  There's a reason that you're thinking that and there's a question that you're asking yourself, whether it's, ‘should I be doing this versus that? Should I be caring about this more? Should I be expending more energy there?’ It's always a question. It's not a statement. 

David Dylan Thomas

Another breakthrough I had with my therapist was around this idea of emotions and what to do with emotions. One of the things he said was that emotions are information. The emotion is the emotion and feel the emotion, but also know that the emotion is trying to tell you something.  And what is it trying to tell you? 

One of the greatest questions I've found to ask when I feel myself reacting strongly to something like something's keeping me up at night and it's not the kind of thing that necessarily should keep me up at night, I have to ask myself, ‘well, why do you care?’ And I'm like, oh, fuck. I've led to some real breakthroughs by trying to break down why do I care about that thing? It will be something like, ‘my friend said he doesn’t like the movie Aliens. He’s saying that Aliens is not feminist...’ and I’m going off in my head. I literally can’t sleep, and at some point, in the middle of the night I’m like, ‘why do I care? Why do I need to defend a movie that billions of people at the time were perfectly happy with it?’

My friend was just expressing their opinion, but like, why do I care? If I care this much, this is not about aliens, this is not about feminism, this is something else. And then I break it down and I break it down. And it's like, oh, right, I'm worried that I don't have worth. Somehow – because this is how brains are – somehow I've gone from ‘this person doesn't like a movie I like’, to ‘I have no worth’. I’m like, Okay, we have something to work on now!

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah. I mean, I think so much of it is internalizing because it's so easy. It's so easy for our brains to put the onus somewhere else and just mask. To borrow a neurodivergent term it wants to be in agreement with everything around us. Cognitive dissonance expends energy. It's just one of those things that our brains kind of tend to mask. And so, we tend to put that emphasis, that value, that onus that consequence externally. And a lot of this is turning it, internally. Now, don't get me wrong, I am very much a, ‘I will blame myself first for everything.’ I had undiagnosed ADHD as a woman for 35 years. I learned to internalize a lot of my own failures. But it's one of those things, I just feel like I'm questioning everything.

David Dylan Thomas

I don't know. I feel like I'm lucky because I think that questioning reality gives me spoons. I love it. Ever since I was a kid – I think I've learned this from Dr. Who – ever since I was a kid watching Dr. Who, old Tom Baker Dr. Who, there was always this element of those stories where things are not what they appear.

I always loved the reveal. I always loved digging deeper. I always loved that notion of things are not quite what they appear. So when I was asked to apply that to myself, one of my favorite phrases is ‘everything you know is wrong’. I love that as a premise for a movie, like The Matrix. All of reality is an illusion. What's really going on here? People hate exposition. I love exposition. Tell me what's really going on.? 

Being able to apply that to myself, I actually found kind of freeing. Frightening in a lot of ways, but freeing because it's like, oh, so you’re saying I'm not actually limited by this false morality that is really just about keeping me under control. There's other options there and there's a duty that comes with that because it's not like there's no reality and you start to find out, oh, okay, on the one hand I've lived with this lie of what a black man is in society and what I should and shouldn't do or be and freeing myself from that. But on the flip side of that, I have also endorsed this fiction about what a woman should and shouldn't be. Now I have to re-approach and moving the role differently as a result of that. So, it's not about saying, ‘oh, I can do whatever I want all the time’, I think it's more mapping better to reality about those things.

Amy Grace Wells

Yeah, and I think I'm starting to get to that place where the challenging gives me a little bit more energy. I think I'm in that space when I look at my identity just as a woman in America. There's a lot of challenges that I've explored there and been like, you know what? I don't give a flying fuck about this one.  I don't care about this anymore. I'm not going to live that.’ 

It's just one of those things, it's the process. You have to get through the process, but then I think once our brain starts to accept some of that challenge and you start to really explore those things then you get to a point where you're like, yeah, that doesn't serve me. I'm going to think this way and it's going to make me happier. It's going to give me more energy, and it's just going to, I mean, Marie Kondo, it's going to make everything more joyful.

David Dylan Thomas

So let’s talk about that. What are the emotions you've been feeling as you start to get into the process?

Amy Grace Wells

I think in a lot of ways right now, I'm focusing on challenging the things when I feel negative emotions, like I said, so particularly guilt and shame. Because if you are feeling guilt and shame, typically that's attached to a value or an expectation. You can feel sad about something. I can feel sad that I didn't get enough work done this week and I didn't feel productive, but if I'm feeling guilty or shameful that I didn't get enough done, that's slightly different. I can feel negative emotions, negative emotions are okay, they're fine. They're emotions, they're valid. But I'm starting to find that guilt and shame when I haven't legitimately done anything wrong, if I have made a mistake and I have hurt somebody, that's valid to feel shame or guilt, but if it's not about something I did wrong?  That's the space that takes too many spoons. There's something there that isn’t valid.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. I feel like maybe there's a question behind the question that's like, in your mind, you have done something wrong, but it's not the thing that you're being accused of. It’s like when the government goes after Al Capone for tax evasion, it's like we're really upset about the other thing, but the only thing we can get you on is the tax evasion. Your brain is like, ‘I'm actually upset about something else, but the only thing I can get you on is the yogurt. So I'm going get you on the yogurt and you're going feel these emotions about the yogurt, but it's really about this other thing over here and for whatever reason, I can't just say that.’

Amy Grace Wells

Maybe it's not just about the yogurt, maybe it's about the fast food that you had yesterday along with the not-perfect yogurt. I just know for myself, I'm a type A perfectionist. I thought for a very long time I was a slacker/procrastinator. That was the undiagnosed ADHD. I'm actually a Type A perfectionist, that was a fascinating find to find out in therapy for anxiety. I really have to challenge myself because that's where my brain wants to live.  So much of that is not reality. It's great to have expectations of yourself if you're using them as goals to move forward and if you're not expecting change overnight, but it's not good if those expectations are just draining you. 

David Dylan Thomas

So as we close, I want to think about like the future. What do you think a world looks like for you where your expectations and others expectations are kind of more aligned with reality? What should we be expecting? Going back to combining both should and expect?

Amy Grace Wells

This is what I talk with my ADHD coach a lot about. It's kind of a common theme in our conversations, and it is ease. I want to bring a sense of ease into most areas of my life. Now that doesn't mean that, you know, the CrossFit class is not hard. It doesn't mean there's nothing challenging. But it means I'm moving through my day with a sense of ease. I'm looking at things, even if they are hard things with a sense of, okay, I can do this. It'll be okay. I'm not going to beat myself up over how it goes. I'm just going to make progress. I'm going to put the effort in and I'm going to be okay with that and I'm going to give myself space. I'm going to give myself time, I'm going to be compassionate with myself and with the others around me, understanding that not everybody's at their best every day, but I just want everything to have a sense of ease.

David Dylan Thomas

I think that's great and I think that's a great place to end on. I wish our listeners ease and wish you ease. 

Amy Grace Wells

Thank you!

David Dylan Thomas

For ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’, I’ve been David Dylan Thomas and we'll see you next time.