So, Now What?

"Breaking Norms: Living Authentically with ADHD and Queer Identities"

• angela tam

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What happens when the identities that make you who you are seem fundamentally at odds with each other? How do you reconcile being a mental health therapist who didn't recognize her own ADHD until their late 30s? Or being raised in a conservative Christian faith while gradually understanding your own queerness?These questions form the heart of this deeply personal episode where I share my journey of discovering parts of myself that had been hiding in plain sight. 

For years, I chalked up my struggles with time management, emotional regulation, and constantly shifting interests as simply personality quirks or the normal challenges of parenting three children while running a therapy practice. Little did I realize that these were classic manifestations of ADHD in high-achieving women—a presentation rarely discussed in traditional mental health training.

The pandemic's forced pause created space for self-reflection that led to profound realizations about how I'd been masking not just my neurodivergence, but other aspects of my identity that didn't fit neatly into the boxes I was raised to occupy. Through social media, supportive communities like Progressive Asian American Christians, and my own therapeutic work, I began to understand how the pressure to assimilate and belong can keep us from seeing ourselves clearly.

What I've discovered is that unmasking—allowing ourselves to be authentically seen—requires specific conditions: quiet reflection time, the ability to observe ourselves without judgment, compassionate relationships that celebrate our differences, and sometimes professional guidance to help navigate the complexities of self-discovery.

If you're navigating seemingly irreconcilable identities or feel like you're constantly working harder than everyone else just to appear "normal," this episode is my hand reaching out to say you're not alone. Your journey toward authenticity is worth every uncomfortable moment, and finding spaces where all your identities can peacefully coexist is not just possible—it's transformative.

Come follow me on instagram @heyangelatam and my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you! 

Speaker 1:

Hey y'all, this is Angela Tam, and welcome back to the. So Now what podcast? I am your host, angela Tam, mental health therapist, a parent and an advocate for those who are navigating seemingly irreconcilable identities. If you heard my last podcast episode, I shared a little bit about my seemingly irreconcilable identities related to finding out that I was, that I am queer, and if you know anything about Christianity queerness and Christianity typically don't mix in America except in really small, progressive spaces, which I'm grateful for and thankful for and about navigating my late-stage diagnosis with ADHD as a mental health therapist. And this podcast is for you. If you have identities that are seemingly irreconcilable, that don't seem like they can live in one space, if you are in the conservative South, if you are in the Bible Belt, if you are in a rural area, or even if you are in the conservative South, if you are in the Bible Belt, if you are in a rural area, or even if you're in the city but living under the thumb of your parents, who are immigrants and very conservative, and you do not know if you are queer. You do not know if you are queer, you do not know if you have ADHD or not or have any other identities that might throw off your sense of belonging. This podcast is for you. This podcast episode is for you. I want to share a little bit more about my experience with my own ADHD and about how I did not know about my queerness or ADHD until the past five years. I wanted to share about how these things are kept from ourselves, even if it's so glaringly obvious to other people. It's possible for you to not really accept or sit with your own potential diagnoses of ADHD or your loved one's potential diagnoses of ADHD or their identification around their queerness, being trans or any other identity that is seen as an outlier to our normalized state of beings a normalized state of beings.

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I'm a parent of three kids 11, 8, and 3-year-old kids. They are very, very adventurous, very loud, very weird in all the best ways, and I'm married in a monogamous relationship with my husband, who is also very from a family that has conservative values and identifies as Chinese American, and we have navigated my changing identities and my self-discovery journey related to my faith and how it navigates with my queerness and ADHD, and I wanted to share a little bit about that today. I wanted to share a little bit about how I discovered I had ADHD through different avenues related to social media or my own conversations with my friends, and how I finally felt safe enough to really be honest with myself and own my differences and own my wirings and own my identities. So I will explore a little bit about that. Having safe spaces in my life contributed to my ability to be honest with myself. What I mean by that is finding friends or being in spaces where having paradoxical identities were normalized, was a really big game changer for me. For example, I am a part of some progressive faith spaces that allowed me to really show up as my full self, despite all the traditional norms that I was expected to be. There was a space that I was involved in, and still am involved in, called the Progressive Asian American Christian Group, and that space normalized that.

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There were a lot of elders and people who were younger than me that had these identifying characteristics or shared identities that were seemingly against the mainstream church, such as queerness or being neurodivergent, and how that was not only accepted but that was celebrated For me even before I knew I was queer. That was something that was a huge resource, and I attended a study group, a fellowship group, where we went through basically a year-long analysis of how different people came before us that are decolonizing their faith and integrating that with their Asian identities faith and integrating that with their Asian identities, their queer identities and how they were setting a pathway for advocacy for a more intersectional experience of the faith and activism. So for me, that was incredibly life-shifting and that helped me to be more at peace and be more open with my different identities so very, very ADHD or very queer and embraced their own ADHD and welcomed my weirdness, my too muchness, and really thought and embraced all of my qualities that I previously felt shamed of and that helped me to be extra, if you know what I mean. So what I want to invite you to is to create that safe space or to find those spaces where you could show up in all of your identities, even if they don't match expectations outside of that group. And if you don't have that group temporarily, I would love to be one of your people, even if it's from a distance and even if it's through this podcast, and you could count on me to be a consistent person that shows up for you and can be a person that shows you compassion and understanding, because we have some shared overlap experiences and I might not share all of your identities, but I hope that you would know that I would be supportive of who you authentically are.

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I was about 37 or 36 when I had an inkling that I had ADHD, and I'm kind of embarrassed to share this because I am a seasoned therapist. I've been in private practice since 2013. But, to my case, I did not learn a lot about ADHD in grad school. In fact, I didn't learn about much at all in grad school. Not because my grad school wasn't my teachers weren't great I love my teachers but it's impossible to cover everything about mental health in grad school. It's basically grad school is just like scratching their surface and all of our continuing education is building on that. And so I did not do any continuing education around ADHD, really because I did not, I didn't have a lens for it, I didn't see an importance about it and, just like everyone else that happened to be in COVID during that quarantine period that year of quarantine that we all did I did a lot of reflection and observation and I slowed down my life, and so during that time, I did a lot of observation about my kids, did a lot of observation about myself and I used social media to my advantage.

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That's when I really dove into social media more and I'm grateful for social media. For some reasons, there's a lot of trash out in social media, but I feel like social media has really helped people like me identify some unconventional traits of ADHD in high-achieving women, or at least people that were assigned female at birth and socialized as female. So I want to share some of that with you today. That led me to believe that I have ADHD. That led me to believe that I have ADHD. So the first is something called time blindness, which I feel like is a really ableist term. So I don't like that term and I maybe use I would use a different term such as a tunnel vision or time lostness, lostness.

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This term of being time unaware or time lost refers to the idea that when you, when we are engaged in activity that is so that captivates all of our attention it doesn't even need to be fun or interesting, but it's just something that we're doing we just lose track of time, and sometimes people could say that happens to them too and they don't have ADHD. But for the ADHD person, we totally stop checking our watches. We don't have any awareness of when we need to stop or other responsibilities that we need to have. We're just locked into the moment and we're really present with what's going on. We're not thinking about the past or the future. We're just, like, really, really present and that's a gift that we have. But also part of the challenge is that we lose track of time and we're late to things or we spill over to the other activities that we're because we're late and other people also are responsible, take have to take up the responsibility because we're late or we've lost track of time, and so that was something that I just thought that that happens in everyone, like, oh, everyone you know lose track of time when they're having fun. Not really. That was something that I was very surprised to learn.

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Some of the other things I was surprised to learn through social media that was an unconventional trait with ADHD in high-performing people who are socialized to be female is the hyper-focus aspect. So ADHD the term ADHD stands for attention deficit, hyperactive disorder and first of all, the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual that helps us figure out what symptoms there are and then helps us to, as mental health practitioners, label or diagnose someone as having a certain quote-unquote disorder is coming from a very problem-centered paradigm when it comes to diagnosis, and so I just want to say that when I use these terms, I don't see it as a problem, and I recognize the inherent structures that I was educated into which is part of what supports the mental health industrial complex that these diagnoses are actually used for insurance purposes, and they have a lot of money behind those industries and corporations and also have negative repercussions for people who are diagnosed. So I just want to take a note of that. And ADHD, going back to my first point, adhd is a misnomer because it says there's a deficit of attention, which is not really true. It's actually a hyper fixation or too much attention on things that we actually don't need to be focused on right now, and there's a difficulty in prioritizing what is important to focus on and what needs to be shifted. And so, for me, what I noticed for and how it showed up in my life, was that I could get lost in some activity or in a conversation or in my hobbies and neglect everything else because I'm just so tunnel vision in it and, as a result, there is a time blindness or time unawareness aspect to that. But the hyper focus and hyper fixation. I thought it was a flow state of being. I thought everyone had that, and it is true, everyone has a flow state that they can tap into. But what's different with ADHD brains is that we have difficulty coming out of that and sometimes even coming into that. So you'll see people like me hyper-focusing and then not eating, not drinking, not going to the bathroom, just really burying themselves into this tunnel of work or hobbies or whatever it is. And then the other thing is the shadow side to this, or the challenge that comes with this, is that hyperfocus can result in addictions, and so a lot of people with ADHD have a higher risk for addictions, whether it be substance abuse or work addictions or whatever, because there's this draw to that hyperfocus and captivation.

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And when we have brains that don't have enough dopamine, it is harder to pull out of that hyperfocus and shift into something else that might be less interesting, that might be more boring or even more challenging. With ADHD there's a lack of dopamine component, and dopamine is what is the lubricant for us to transition into different activities and the struggle to transition to different activities stopping one thing, shifting gears, moving to another thing that requires dopamine. And if there's a deficit it will result in a hyperfocus, and that hyperfocus our brain is really smart and it wants us to use whatever we're hyperfocusing on to get extra dopamine. So that's both an asset and sometimes maladaptive if we're trying to move on to something else or we're trying to be flexible and shift gears. That is how it showed up in my life. I for sure found myself fixated on these activities or projects or my work at the cost of my kids sometimes and it was showing up with me watching shows on Netflix until 3, 4 am and then having to parent the next day. And that was really tough. That was really difficult when I couldn't shut off what I was doing. I couldn't stop scrolling, I couldn't stop watching my shows, and it was taking a toll on me during COVID. And now it's a bit different. I don't have those struggles anymore with watching shows or scrolling up until the late hours of the evening as much. But that does come and go and I do have systems in place right now.

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The next thing that I didn't know that was an unconventional trait about ADHD is forgetfulness. I found myself misplacing items my car keys, my wallet, my cell phone. There is so many times and I'm so glad for my Apple Watch because I use my Apple Watch so much to find out where my cell phone is I have Most of the time no idea where I place my cell phone. I try really hard to work on that, but sometimes it just does not come to me very easily. I also have name anxiety. If you tell me your name, I just met you, I will forget it. If you show me your face and you come again the next day and we are walking down the street and I'm seeing you again and I just met you, you will probably be so insulted that I did not recognize you. So that comes with that forgetfulness. How that shows up with my work is that I'm finding myself really writing everything down that my clients say, because I just will not remember what they say. I have the memory of a fish sometimes and that's actually really great as a therapist because I don't take any of my clients' feelings home with me. But also it's a challenge because some clients have been really hurt that I have forgotten major details of their lives even after I write them down.

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And something that was hard for me was around ADHD, around recognizing this is that I just thought everyone forgot stuff. I thought it was old age, midlife. I'm in my 40s now and I just thought it was something that everyone struggles with in their 30s. But it isn't. It isn't what people struggle with. People remember things. People don't misplace things that often and for me that was a big struggle. That still is a big struggle.

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The next thing that I thought that it was just a me thing and not an ADHD thing is my random hobbies. I have a graveyard of things in my garage in my home that haunt me, that are from the ghost of my hobbies past. I have pickleball nets, I have pickleball paddles, I have microgreen growing kits, I have planter boxes, I have gardening supplies. I have plant supplies. I used to have basically a greenhouse in my home where I have so many plants around my house I used to do this that you used to walk in and you used to be like, wow, this looks like a plant store. I have a lot of hobbies. I had a lot of hobbies that I no longer have today and now I realize, wow, I spent a lot of money on those hobbies getting those supplies and they were just a phase. I'm learning about that now and I realize. Not everyone does that, but that is a really typical ADHD trait.

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The next thing that I thought was a me thing and not an ADHD thing, but it is an ADHD thing is struggling with feelings and really having low frustration, tolerance and impatience, thinking that, okay, this is COVID, this is several years ago and I'm parenting my young kids and I have a short attention span. I have a short patience for my kids, thinking that this was. You know me Well with ADHD. What happens with emotional dysregulation is that there is a quicker onset of difficult feelings, the intensity of difficult feelings stays longer and the duration of how long a feeling stays and goes away is exacerbated by ADHD and the lack of dopamine. So, again, dopamine helps with buffering your emotional regulation abilities. You can, in a non-ADHD brain, you can feel big feelings and, depending on your own history, you could just let it ride and let it go pretty easily. But for ADHD people, we hold on to it, we hang on to it longer, we feel things longer, feel things more intensely and we feel things faster and it goes away slower.

Speaker 1:

So those are the things, the challenges that comes with ADHD and a big thing that me and my clients work through those who are neurodivergent and, I guess, those who are non-neurodivergent is emotional regulation, and it does not look like cool, calm and collected. That is not. That's a falsity, a false representation of what emotional regulation is. Emotional regulation is the ability to stay with your feelings, validate your feelings, be with your feelings, but not agree with your feelings, and to hold space for your feelings in a way that's not overwhelming, even if it's anger, frustration, disappointment, grief. Emotional dysregulation does not look like being calm all the time, and so that is something I really work on with my clients around this.

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And another thing that comes with struggles with feelings is that we have internalized so much shame around what we should be able to do. We've had so many people project their expectations on what normal developmental milestones we should have reached. As a 30 something year old, you should be able to carry a job. You should be able to care for your kids. You should be able to have kids and be a great parent. You should be able to finish your projects, prioritize your different tasks and complete them by level of urgency, level of importance these things that we have been hearing that we should be able to do, and then our inability to do it because of our ADHD creates huge feelings of shame and inner criticism that I thought I was the only one that struggled with and, to be honest, a lot of my Asian American siblings struggle with this too, because we grew up in hypercritical families. So I just thought, oh okay, that is not special to me and certainly that has nothing to do with ADHD, but it does. Adhd folks have a higher rate of anxiety, depression, and it is no wonder because we have a dopamine deficit and we have a strong. We bear strong burdens around shame and internalized capitalism, patriarchy, internalized sexism, homophobia and strong internalized ableism. That contributes to how critical we are about ourselves.

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The next thing I want to showcase is how I thought my procrastination wasn't special to me and how it was something that everyone struggled with. Everyone struggles with, which is not true. Actually, I now realize that my late night, last minute papers that I did in college, staying up all night, my last minute procrastination, my long delays that led to last minute all-nighters had to do with my ADHD, and I thought everyone did this, because people talk about this in college all the time, but for me this extends to life after college too. I have difficulty following through with things. Now I have systems in place which I'm grateful for, but the things that I really don't want to do, I will put it off, and that has little to do with my capability and more to do with my big feelings around it. A skill management less that than it is of a feelings management kind of thing with procrastination. So whenever there's procrastination that's present, there's usually the presence of perfectionism and the feelings that have to do with perfectionism causes the delays in how we approach our work. So now I know that, but I just didn't realize that before and that is a very common thing with ADHDers is we have these shoulds that we internalize and then we want so badly to stick to them and then we delay, delay, delay because we realize we can't do it perfectly and then we just don't do it at all, which is a big reason why I delayed my podcast debut for months, if not years, because I've had ideas for so long for doing this podcast, but I just never stuck to it this podcast, but I just never stuck to it.

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The next thing is difficulty with organization. My home growing up was a mess and I thought that was an immigrant thing. I was like, oh, all immigrants have houses that are messy and I had problems collecting stuff and my inability to throw it away or declutter. I thought was a me thing or an immigrant thing and I didn't realize it actually is an immigrant thing but it's also an ADHD thing because we have an inability to categorize and prioritize what is important and what is not. That tagging system of our internal tagging system, where we kind of tag things as important or not important or less important, doesn't really function as well as folks without ADHD. And now I realize that and I give myself a lot of grace for how sometimes my house is a mess and how I eventually will get around to cleaning it up and disorganize it. I go through phases and what helps me immensely is to declutter my house and to live with less belongings and that's been an incredible relief on my sensory overwhelm and my visual clutter and it's helped me with my work abilities too, so I could really just focus on my work when I need to and do hard things.

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The other thing that was really difficult was maintaining friendships. The other thing that was really difficult was maintaining friendships. I have trauma around my relationship with my parents and I has contributed to how my pre-existing emotional issues were showing up in my relationships as very volatile. So for me, if you looked out from the outside in, you would see, wow, angela is going through a lot of friends and there's a lot of falling outs. And I don't want to blame all my falling out, all my parents or ADHD, but it's a little combination of both and we're not even blaming it. I now that I didn't. I had unchecked ADHD and unchecked trauma around my triggers and I grew up in a really critical and judgmental environment so I do have critical tendencies and that pre-existing with ADHD exacerbating that is a recipe for volatility in my relationship. So I really do count myself as a person who's in the past have had difficulties maintaining friendships and now I really consider myself really blessed because I do have a lot of close friends that I think would consider I would consider them my ride or dies, that they are people who really know me and see me and are really practicing mutual curiosity and understanding and compassion with each other and they really see that I am extra. If you know me personally, you'll get to know me over this podcast, because I'm not going to hide my extraness. But I am extra and I embrace that. I really embrace it and my friends embrace that too, and I hope that that's hopeful for y'all out there that feel really hopeless around maintaining friendships and potential unchecked ADHD.

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Another thing that I noticed that was part of my ADHD that I did not realize was ADHD at that time was a sense of restlessness. I notice in my life that I am constantly moving furniture around. I constantly have this desire for novelty, like in my food and or in my vacations. I just want to go check out new places. I want to get out of my norm, get out of my routines and do new things, check out new restaurants or new vacation spots. But that's something that I didn't realize was ADHD. I thought I was just being adventurous or being open, and a lot of people who have ADHD are more adventurous and do tend to be very exploratory. But for me, be very exploratory, but for me it showed up as a sense of restlessness that led to some maladaptive behaviors. So for me it was restlessness that ended up in impulsive spending, restlessness that ended up in a lot of not thought through decisions around novelty spending. So I will. I could share more about that some other time, but that's. I'll leave that there.

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The next thing that was showing up for me is hyperactivity. I did not realize that I was more hyperactive than other people and now, because the way it shows up for me is that I am high performing, I am high achieving, I try to make new ambitions and new goals for myself and my hyperactivity enables me to basically have this internal engine of ideas and it keeps churning out tons of, in my opinion, great ideas and I just heap on trying to go for it. I had visions of opening up new businesses, new personal pet project, passion project ideas, and I never was able to follow through with it, but it really complemented my high achieving mindset really well because I was rewarded for creativity, I was rewarded for having a lot of great ideas but an inability to follow through, so that hyperactiveness was high performance masked up and maybe a lot of us struggle with that. Maybe a lot of us see that as a gift and don't struggle with it. But I just want to name it because there's this hyperactive component where we don't ADHDers, don't know how to stop because we just have this engine that keeps internal engine that keeps revving and going and going.

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The last thing I will say that is really difficult for me that I thought was difficult for everyone was my executive functioning difficulties and I thought I'm a mom of three, I'm tired. Of course it's going to be hard for me to plan a birthday party. Of course it's hard for me to think about dinner plans or what to make for dinner every night. Of course it's going to be hard for me to plan out vacations or plan out outfits or lunches for my kids for their school. All these things I thought was a mom thing or parent thing that everyone struggles with, and little do I know that it is. It is a structural issue around lack of support for parents, but I also can see that exacerbated when you have ADHD and your executive functioning abilities are stifled.

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Executive functioning is the ability to plan and execute and follow through and organize projects or different happenings in your life, like social events, scheduling events and even the day-to-day stuff like household chores, maintenance, cooking dinner, getting your kids set up for school and helping them with their homework. All that stuff require executive functioning abilities and it was just something that I just thought I didn't have because I was a tired parent, which is true. But again, it is exacerbated by ADHD and sometimes I just found out. I just found myself giving up and not doing that at all, which is why, for me, homeschooling is really good and helpful for my ADHD, because there's less pressure to be somewhere on time. Every morning. I was perpetually late sending my kids to school. Rosie did one year of kindergarten and I was perpetually late. I had a lot of latenesses dropping her off and looking back I was like wow, I was late a lot going to school because my parents had ADHD and they couldn't get their act together to send me off to school on time.

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How did I not know that I had ADHD? Well, for all the reasons that I listed above that are unconventional symptoms of ADHD. That nobody told me about is one of the reasons. It's very easy to like to see that these are just things that everyone struggles with. That's A and B. A big reason that I did not know that I have ADHD is that I'm really good at masking and code switching and assimilating. In fact, all of us folks that are not white or white passing or white identified and maybe some of us who are white identified have a really easy time doing this too identified have a really easy time doing this too, but we are experts in blending in. We are experts at making sure that we're meeting expectations. We are experts at scoping out what is the norm, what we should be doing, and doing it. Another term that I learned recently is the term norm matching, which is you look around and you're like at a restaurant, let's say, and everyone else is ordering drinks or appetizers, what do you do? You also match their behavior and you also order drinks or appetizers even though you don't drink.

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It's powerful what our abilities are to and our attempts to belong are. I never underestimate my attempts for belonging and for me, our desire to belong and to assimilate and to be included and our fears around being outcasted and disowned are strong, and the stronger they are which can be exacerbated if you grew up with immigrant parents because our immigrant parents may have not cared for us emotionally very well so we might be more prone to not having a diagnosis of ADHD because of our desire to have belonging and assimilate, and so the bigger the longing for belonging is, the higher the chance that we will mask, code switch and assimilate and the higher chances of things going unchecked and undiagnosed. So that is a great setup for perfectionism, people-pleasing, and us high-achieving people know what we need to do to make sure we don't rock the boat, make sure we exceed people's expectations, go above and beyond and wow people and prove people wrong. There's a lot of proving people wrong in this, in our culture, in our families, especially when our parents weren't the biggest encouragers of us and they didn't believe that we could make it. And we are proving to them that we are making it and parts of us really want to disprove the haters in our lives. Sometimes the haters are our parents and our family members that never thought we could make it. So I just want to say that we are culturally as BIPOC folks, as Asian-identified folks, set up more to have undiagnosed ADHD as a result.

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Another thing that has happened for me and happens for a lot of folks who have ADHD is that we also have family members with ADHD and our parents or our family members might not have sought diagnoses out and might have lived and adapted very well to ADHD Doesn't mean that it went well for them, doesn't mean there wasn't strife. In fact, there was a lot of strife in my family around my dad's undiagnosed ADHD, but I just thought that was normal. I just thought that was what everybody goes through. It is not what everyone goes through.

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I'm realizing and it was really relieving for me to put a name on this and I'm in the camp where I view having some labels around my cluster of traits as something to be very beneficial for me. Of course, the exception is when it's problematized and stigmatized, but for me I have come to peace with this trait or this difference inside of me. I don't view it as like a diagnosis or a problem. I also don't view it as a superpower, although there are very beneficial qualities that I have with my ADHD that really help me. But I see from a strength space perspective and it's neutral. It's just a difference that I have and I view that as something that I bring in my private practice. So if you have ADHD and you're coming into my private practice, I will see your ADHD the way I see mine, which is it is neutral, it doesn't mean anything, there's no value attached to it around how good or bad it is. It just is and I approach it from a strengths-based perspective, which is different than our culture, which sees ADHD as something to be despised or to be viewed as lazy or to be viewed as something is wrong with you, and I view it as something that is different and beautiful. It can be really beautiful and really something to be embraced beautiful and really something to be embraced.

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The last thing that I want to talk about is what is required to unmask, to show up more as our authentic selves and to get in touch with your, the person that you really are underneath your different identities and traits and your identities and traits are part of who you are, just to be clear. But something that I, for me, that was really important is quiet reflection and pausing, which COVID-19 gave me that opportunity, which was a blessing and also a curse because it was so isolating, but I needed that time to pause and to be like okay, I need to declutter my calendar for just an extended period of time and really just notice what's coming up with Saturn, what behaviors are coming up, what patterns am I noticing that I thought was normal and I'm just going to question everything. I'm just going to throw it all on the table and be really curious about it. That is what that pause allowed me to do, and another thing that was required to unmask and to get in touch with my authentic self was having compassionate, nonjudgmental self-evaluations. So I'm just noticing okay, this behavior is present, this quality is present. Is there a way that I could practice mindfulness around that? Just observe it as if it was neutral and just release it and maybe have compassion towards it, curiosity towards it, understanding towards it. That was something that I had to cultivate as a skill, and as a therapist it didn't. Being a therapist doesn't guarantee that you're compassionate towards yourself. I just want to say that, but that was something that I do have as a work. Added work benefit is I help people do all the time, and so I have all the tools. But whether or not I use the tools is another thing, and so it this pause in the space helped me to use that tool of having mindfulness and a nonjudgmental reflectiveness towards myself.

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I was going through my potential diagnoses for ADHD is and was compassionate. Friends and family, loved ones that I knew loved me unconditionally and love and embrace and welcome how weird I am, how extra I am, and they. I did not reveal to them my weirdness from the start, but as I felt safe and I saw their weirdness, I felt more able to show them my weirdness, and now that helps. I can borrow from that experience to say, okay, my loved ones really love me for all of my weirdness and my idiosyncrasies and my quirks, and I could trust that I could fully unmask with them and be accepted. The last thing I will say is as loving and as awesome my friends are, thing I will say is, as loving and as awesome my friends are, it doesn't compare to having one person that I can meet with consistently. That was, at that time, my couples therapist that helped me to process things in real time on the week to week basis. My friends can do that with me, but they're not going gonna be like practicing the in-depth curiosity that I think that I really needed at that time to keep the self-discovery journey and momentum going.

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So I really invite you to consider do you have these spaces in your life? Do you have the space to pause and to reflect? Do you have the skills needed to practice nonjudgmental mindfulness as self-reflection with yourself, self-evaluation, self-observation? And the other thing is do you have compassionate friends, understanding friends that really won't judge you but really will see you for who you are, practice that curiosity and who are working on their own shit so that they could show up for you better and vice versa? And also, do you have a facilitator. Do you have a guide that is consistent, that's present with you every week? That would help guide you in your self-discovery journey so that when you hit roadblocks that you would normally avoid and practice procrastination or avoidance, they could call you back in. If you don't, I invite you to gather those resources and still pursue your self-discovery journey. Pursue a deepening of that. It is so worth it and the payoffs are immense because you live a longer life and that you get support that you need.

Speaker 1:

I have enjoyed this podcast episode and I look forward to potentially more episodes just like this in the future. If you like what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe to us. That will help us to increase our access to others who really need to hear this too. I love you so much and I'm so grateful that you tuned in. I will see you next time for another episode of. So Now what? I'll see you soon. Take care Bye.