In this episode, hosts Ash and Dusty tackle the challenges of “adulting” while living with ADHD. They discuss the societal pressures and ableist beliefs that lead individuals with ADHD to feel inadequate or less capable as adults. The conversation centers around the importance of accepting one’s unique path and recognizing that the way individuals with ADHD manage their responsibilities may differ significantly from neurotypical standards, yet is equally valid. They emphasize the need for self-compassion and the rejection of internalized ableism, encouraging listeners to explore their strengths instead of solely focusing on their challenges.
The hosts also highlight the significance of community and shared experiences among those with ADHD, noting that many individuals face similar struggles, which can alleviate feelings of isolation. They propose a shift in perspective, advocating for curiosity over shame when addressing personal challenges. By recognizing that everyone’s way of navigating adulthood is legitimate, listeners can begin to embrace their own journey without comparison to others. The episode concludes with a promise to further explore the topic of self-knowledge and how understanding one’s unique traits can lead to more effective strategies for managing life with ADHD.
Episode links + resources:
For more of the Translating ADHD podcast:
- Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode
- Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD
- Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I’m Ash, [00:00:03] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:00:05] Ash: and this is Translating ADHD. I have my Purpose course beginning on April 1st. This is a group coaching course intended to bring clarity to questions of who am I or what do I want to be when I grow up or what is my bigger why. For more information on this course, visit www.translatingadhd.com, click on the group coaching tab, pricing information and the application are all right there.Today we’re going to talk about something that definitely just sticks in my craw. It annoys me so much. And Dusty, it sounds like you’re coming at this from a similar place. And that is the idea of “adulting with ADHD”.
[00:00:52] Dusty: Sticks in your craw? [00:00:53] Ash: Sticks in my craw. There’s an old phrase for you. I don’t even know where that one came from. Probably something my dad used to say. [00:01:01] Dusty: When you say it, it sticks in your craw, I assume you mean that it gets your guff and what is that? What is that about? Why does it get your guff? Why does it stick in your craw? [00:01:09] Ash: Because it’s such an ableist way of thinking. If there’s one limiting belief I have to unpack with every single one of my clients that I work with, it’s this, that they are not a proper adult, that they are not doing life “correctly”, and the thing is, is with ADHD on board, we get that message our entire lives. We spin ourselves into not trying harder and harder to conform to what “adulting” correctly looks like to our own detriment, it makes us absolutely miserable. A lot of the work I do with my clients is around acceptance, right, accepting who you are and where you are and accepting that your life as a person with ADHD is probably going to look very different than a “standard typical” adult life. And that’s okay. [00:02:08] Dusty: Yeah, I would say I have a very similar experience with clients. It’s just really normal for my clients when I ask them, “why do you want coaching?” for them to say “I just, I want to feel like an adult”. But I have to tell them – you are an adult, you’re an adult with ADHD, but because so many people haven’t had the experience of being around a lot of other neurodivergent people they don’t realize how normal so many of their experiences are.And like me personally, I spend time only in the company of other adults with ADHD because of my work and also just because that’s how my life is at this point. I think I have 1 or 2, maybe, non ADHD, like neurotypical friends, and I feel like they’re the weird ones. Like they’re like the minority at this point.
For me, I sometimes forget, but I do remember what it felt like when I first started realizing that other people had the same embarrassing crap as I did. The first couple of times that I remembered, like the first time that I heard that somebody had trouble brushing their teeth, and what a mind boggling thing it was to realize that, oh, I’m not the only person who struggles with this, or that somebody else really struggled to manage money or that somebody else was always struggling with lateness and couldn’t find the things that they need.
Just having those conversations and realizing that I wasn’t the only one was so important. And so many people still don’t have that so they just have no idea that most of us walking around out here are doing the exact same thing as them, right?
Obviously on this podcast we address a lot of different aspects of being an adult, like feeding yourself or parenting or exercising, right? But there’s sort of that aggregate everything in between, like attending to your responsibilities in general, and there’s all these small little pieces.
Like I was telling you, Ash, before we started this podcast recording today that I just finally appointed someone as my iCloud legacy contact. So, if I were to die, this person can get all my iCloud stuff. And you can do that on Facebook too, I think I already did do that on Facebook. But, you know, stuff like that, like taking care of your business, having a will, or like, this month my car insurance policy was up for renewal, and they kept calling and emailing me, and I just didn’t have time to look at it. I wasn’t expecting it because usually my insurance renews in June, but I got a different car last year, so I guess that’s why it’s different but I kind of didn’t realize so I wasn’t expecting it.It wasn’t on my mental plate. I kept getting these like emails and these phone calls from some insurance agency and I had no idea if they were just trying to sell me something or if I was gonna have to go in and have an appointment or think about stuff and so I just kept putting it off until the very last minute. Luckily, I was able to do it easily over the phone and they just had to send me a document to sign, but you know stuff like that.
It’s all the little in-betweens of just generally showing up and tending to responsibilities. There are so many responsibilities as an adult, even if you don’t have a kid, and keeping track of all those balls can be really hard when you have ADHD. So my guess is that’s part of where that feeling comes from, that “oh, I’m not a grown up”.
[00:05:26] Ash: I have a really funny one that I haven’t been attending to. The driver’s side door of my car has not opened from the inside or outside for three months. I have been scooting across to the passenger side of my car to get in and out of my car because I haven’t been able to make myself make the appointment with the dealership to get it fixed. [00:05:52] Dusty: Oh, no. Let me know if you need some accountability on that. [00:05:55] Ash: I actually, it’s made. It’s made. It is made. I am taking it in this Friday. Tomorrow, actually. So I did finally do the thing. I finally got there. But it took me a while and I think that’s kind of the point we’re trying to get to today. It’s okay that your life looks different than other people’s. But how do you make your own peace with that? [00:06:25] Dusty: Yeah, that’s a good point. How do you make sense of that identity? And it’s interesting because, I don’t know if you ever have this, Ash, but I’m an ADHD coach. I’m a professional in my field. I’m a grown up. I’ve, you know, had management positions before da, da, da, da, da.But often when I look at other people, even other people with ADHD, I’m worried that I’m still more disorganized than them. Because, like a lot of people, they are really good at appearances. And maybe I’m better at appearances than I think. I don’t know if people, you know, look at me and see the hot mess or if they look at me and think, oh, she’s got it all together and they just feel self-conscious about their own hot mess.
But often when I look at other adults, one of the things that makes me feel a little separate from them is they just seem like there’s this continuity of togetherness. They’re together from the way that they look, to being on time, to having a clean car, to having already sent those forms in, to being ready to get dinner on the table and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
And I think I can nail, like, 60 percent of those, but you know, there’s about 40 percent of those, like my car is really messy or I’m showing up late or I’m showing up looking like this and I haven’t brushed my hair. I’m always mystified how people take care of everything all the time.
So I think part of it for me is getting comfortable with the fact that I can “be an adult”. What I mean by that is I can sort of hit the standard that I feel everyone else is hitting in any of those places, but I don’t have the spoons to do that all the time, every day, in all of those places.
[00:07:59] Ash: And Dusty, this can be such a vicious cycle for people with ADHD because the things we don’t attend to, we are also our harshest critics about. You just described that tendency to compare, right? So comparing ourselves to others, looking at what not to look at or what’s not done. What’s not done is always a bigger signal than what we are attending to.And we are so hard on ourselves. We are the first person to say we are not being an adult here. And so, not only is it more difficult to attend consistently with ADHD, we double down by being really harsh on ourselves for what we’re not doing. And by the way, I have to say that’s an opportunity for change unto itself.
So I just talked about my car door that hasn’t opened for three months, but you know what I haven’t done? I haven’t been harsh on myself about it, right? In some ways, I’ve been at peace about the fact that it hasn’t been done the previous two weeks that I had. I intended to try to attend to this. We had some nasty weather that made our roads pretty impassable here in St. Louis around the time of the week that I would have had time to even not have a car for a day.
And so there were some real reasons that this got delayed so long. There were also some ADHD reasons of just sort of forgetting you build up tolerance to the thing. Like at this point, the maneuver in and out of my car is kind of ingrained because I’ve been doing it for three months. So I don’t think about it as acutely as I did before.
So there’s definitely some matching intention with action stuff there. But what there’s not is shame, right? There’s no shame. My kickboxing coach yesterday cracked a joke about me climbing out my passenger side door. And there is a time where that would have made me feel really embarrassed, right? That, I haven’t attended to the thing, right? And now other people are seeing and noticing it, but I laughed right along with him because he wasn’t laughing at me. He was laughing with me and it was really funny. And so while the thing has gone undone and that has caused its own frustrations, I’m not doubling down on those frustrations by being harsh on myself.
And when we do that, when we double down, that makes everything else even harder to attend to. Well, I’m sucking over here. So why even bother over there? It’s a very defeatist way of living. But when we’re comparing ourselves to neurotypicals, it tends to be what happens.
And by the way, I have a theory about neurotypicals, because as a professional organizer, I’ve worked with a number of neurotypical folks. And while they do not struggle to keep things together the same way that we do, there is also definitely an amount of keeping up appearances that nobody else sees. Nobody else sees when things are chaotic, because that’s often the point that I, as a professional organizer, would be walking into a neurotypical home. This is the stuff that they don’t do, they’ve lost control and they don’t know how to get it back.
When people would ask me to distinguish between a neurotypical client and an ADHD client when I was doing professional organizing, I would say that the big difference between those two populations is consistency. When neurotypical people are otherwise able to be consistent, they don’t struggle with that the same way that we do.
But if they get “life-d” really hard, oftentimes if I was working with a neurotypical client, it was somebody who had a lot of life in a short amount of time, maybe a parent died and all that stuff entered the home and then they had a big move and you know, multiple like cascading events where they’ve kind of lost control of the situation and don’t know how to envision digging themselves back out.
And so my role in that situation was to help them think about how to tackle what felt like a huge project and to hold space for that. But once the space is organized again, the neurotypical person is pretty able to then kind of keep on as if nothing had happened, right? So for a neurotypical, it’s like once it becomes too big of a problem, then I don’t know how to solve it or, I need somebody to help me think about how to think about this. Whereas with ADHD, organizing the stuff often doesn’t solve the problem because the problem becomes about consistency. An organized closet only stays organized if the things consistently go from your body to the washer to the dryer to back in the closet in their proper place. And that is a number of steps with a number of potential failure points for a person with ADHD. And so ADHD organizational systems also tend to work best when they have a little bit of flexibility.
I had a client who works in a school and works with small children, and so all of her school wear is stuff that is wash and wear and doesn’t wrinkle. Like, it does not need to be hung up. It can be sitting in a pile, and it doesn’t wrinkle. And the big challenge she was running into was getting laundry put away into her closet, and so it would pile up on her guest room bed and then guests would come and that would be a whole ordeal to deal with months and months of laundry that had piled up unfolded, unsorted on the bed in the guest bedroom and the solution for her ended up being we put two baskets in her walk in closet. One for tops, one for bottoms. Again, this stuff doesn’t wrinkle – the stuff she wears to school. And so all of the weekly work wear stuff just went into a basket. Why bother folding it or hanging it up when I can just grab it out of a basket. And that was a huge difference maker for my client.
Not just in getting those clothes to a place where they are out of the way, but also it made it easier to attend to the things that do need to be hung up the things that she wore on the weekend or to a party that do need to be put back in their proper place because now she doesn’t have to do all of the work of where stuff is.
So we often think that flexibility isn’t allowed. And I blame consumerism for this too, right. The stuff like The Container Store and magazines show us visions of perfectly clear and beautiful and organized spaces. And we’ve kind of, as a society, we’ve decided that organized means visually pleasing, right? You open your closet and it’s very aesthetic and visually pleasing. Having two baskets permanently in a closet full of clothes, not necessarily visually pleasing, but guess what? It works for that client and it knocks down enough barriers that there’s consistency there.
And so, the point I’m trying to make is with neurotypicals, the problem is not consistency. The problem tends to be life got too big and now I just need help hitting the reset button. But with neurodivergent folks, it’s about finding those ways that we can be consistent and removing barriers where we can remove barriers to action.
[00:15:04] Dusty: Yeah, thank you for saying all that because I often am curious about that kind of thing too, when it comes to clutter and mess. I’m like, where are the neurotypicals who struggle with clutter? Because it seems like it’s always people with ADHD, but as you were talking, I was also thinking, it’s not just that they got “life-d” hard, it’s that they’re probably not used to having a diminished capacity because something emotional is taking up some of that room where that’s just like every day for me. [00:15:28] Ash: I’m really glad you said that actually, because when I was first coaching, I wasn’t exclusively coaching ADHD folks. I built myself as an organizer coach. So I was largely working with people on organizational challenges, and that included a number of neurotypical clients.And that is very true. High levels of stress can cause ADHD-like symptoms and that’s how neurotypical people tend to find themselves in this state of overwhelm in the first place where it’s like, okay, now the problem has gotten too big and I don’t even know how I’ve gotten here. And I don’t know how to think about it because I don’t feel like my brain is working as well as it normally works, which by the way means if you are a person with ADHD going through a similar emotional big life event, you are doubly challenged because you already have ADHD and your capacity on top of that is going to be diminished.
[00:16:29] Dusty: Exactly. And that’s it. My partner is neurotypical, and he lives in a small apartment, and he’s a very tidy fellow, and it always mystifies me, because often we’ll have dinner and go to bed, and he’ll leave the house messy, and I’m like, wait, when are you going to clean that? Like, we have to clean it before bed. And he’s like, no, I’m tired, I’ll deal with it later. He just knows that he’ll deal with it later. Whereas, I have this whole routine where everything has to be clean before bed because if it is messy in the morning – I just can’t. And he sees how much I stress out about it and how hard it is for me to stay on top of it, even though I have a routine.And so I think to go back to this thing about “adulting with ADHD”, it’s that times a million, but like every little piece. There’s just so many little things that we have to keep track of, again, whether you’re a parent or not, right? There’s deadlines, forms to sign, there’s so much random life admin. I’m not a homeowner and I can’t even imagine the repairs and taxes.
One of the things that I’m kind of working to do in my own life as a person with ADHD is to have all of this visual and externalized. Because if it’s not visually externalized, that’s the part that really messes me up. And so I build these systems for myself and sometimes I show them to other people and other people with ADHD either love them or hate them. They either love them because they’re like “yes I get it” or they hate them because they’re like “that is so overwhelming”. I say you’re right it is overwhelming, but it’s just as overwhelming to have it all be invisible and sneak up on me. Like I’m better off seeing an overwhelming amount of visual stuff so that at least I know that nothing is falling through the cracks.
But that’s the thing, to come back to the first thing you said is that’s so ableist, right? That people say, and I’ve only really heard people with ADHD say it about themselves, but I do think that it’s like, internalized ableism in that they discount the fact that they are legitimate adults who are adulting. The way that they are adulting is a legitimate way to adult, right?
And that’s what I always tell my clients. You are an adult. You’re just an adult with ADHD and your way of adulting is not wrong. It’s not worse than anybody else’s way, it’s just a different way. But you are a grown up, I’m looking at you. I am a grown up. We adult the same way. And who made this rule that the way that we adult isn’t right?
But it does come down to a kind of societal ableism, where there’s this assumption that you have a good enough working memory and that you have a good enough executive function, that all these little bits and bobs of being an adult that are invisible just come out of the ether at you and you can somehow just manage those because everybody else can, who doesn’t have ADHD. And that’s the problem, right? The way that we set up a lot of our societal systems of being an adult. They are based on a faulty assumption about people’s capability that doesn’t address people with ADHD which are like 5-7 percent of all people, which I know is a small minority, which is hard for me to believe, because like, seriously, everyone I know has ADHD, and everyone I talk to. It’s hard for me to believe that we’re in the minority, but I get it. I guess not a lot of people need these things or think about these things, but it is another kind of ableism.
Just as much as if I set up a system that’s completely inaccessible to a deaf person or a blind person, right? But I would never think about that because I’m not deaf or blind and I don’t have to consider it.
[00:19:52] Ash: So what does that internalized ableism do to us? It brings on guilt and shame. So just because it’s a good example, let’s go back to my client who used to pile all of her clean laundry on the guest bedroom bed and had this expectation of herself to put it all away in her walk-in closet in a very beautiful aesthetic way.So guilt and shame on one end and an expectation that has nothing to do with what might work for her on the other end. And so how do we unpack that? Well, guilt and shame keep us from being curious, right? How did we get to the basket solution? Well, we did a lot of coaching about it, and I was able to help my client move from a place of guilt and shame to a place of curiosity.
So now we’re thinking about the problem as it relates to my client, as it relates to how she moves through her days, as it relates to what her particular struggles are with the various steps involved with laundry. And we come to this simple, elegant solution that works. And that right there is probably the biggest thing we do in coaching is we help our clients move out of shame around any one “adulting topic” and move into a place of curiosity.
I had another client who really had big shame around financial stuff and she was engaged. Her and her partner were planning on moving in together. She had a lot of concerns around where her finances should be and a lot of fear about buying a home with this person when she felt like she didn’t even have a grasp on what her finances were. They just didn’t make sense to her, right? Like numbers were really hard for her brain, and I shared with her a story about someone else that I knew that struggled similarly. Someone in my family, who I was trying to help with finances because their partner passed away, and the partner was the primary financial person and the person I was trying to help was a very intelligent person, but they just really struggled to understand daily money management, right?
So there’s individual stuff in there as well with the ADHD because daily money management is actually one of the things that I’m pretty good at and always have been. When I was married, I was the one that did that in my household for my co-parent and I taught him my system when we split up so that he could continue using it.
But. We all have our strengths and challenges alongside ADHD. And so for her, there was something really powerful about normalizing that two things can be true. You can be a smart and capable person who just struggles to understand numbers and money and daily money management. That’s okay. And that was the only session we ever had about finances because she already had the resources to get help.
Her fiancé was really good with finances and was absolutely willing to help her. But she needed to be in a different place with her own shame and her own limiting beliefs in order to be able to be resourceful to access support.
[00:23:11] Dusty: Yeah, I think you’re really right. One of the big game changers for me has been just advocating for myself and being okay with the fact that there are some things that are not going to work for me, right? A while ago, I was working with a trainer and I’m not working with my trainer right now, but one of the things we were working on was sort of eating and food. And you know, he at first really wanted me to do this different kind of cooking and eat these different foods and I just had to keep pushing back and be like I can’t do this, right? Like, it is very hard for me to meal plan, grocery shop, get the stuff home, make the time, etc. I have to do what I can do and sometimes that involves 90% frozen food and easy. I’m not trying to shut him down or limit myself and be like, oh no, like I can’t, like the can’t isn’t coming from a place of shame. The can’t is actually coming from the opposite of a place of shame. Just knowing myself and being comfortable with having limitations so that I can do the best that I can in the areas where I can, right? When I say I “sort of can’t”, what I mean is, “okay, I could, but me diverting that amount of energy and brain power to this would cause a lot of other things to fall by the wayside”.And I’m aware of that because I’ve tried it before and I know where my weak spots are and sort of like your client, learning to be comfortable with not being good at everything and being bad at some things I think has been really hard, especially when it comes to money and stuff like that, or something like parenting, there’s so much shame because it seems like everybody else is good at it.
But I promise, people listening to this podcast, if you talk to some other people with ADHD, you will find that there’s a lot of people who are also as bad as you at whatever it is. But just starting to get comfortable with the idea that I don’t have to be good at everything. And what I’ve learned is that like myself and a lot of other adults with ADHD, we’re really good at things that a lot of other, dare I say, neurotypical adults aren’t good at.
Like we kind of, it sounds a bit cliché, but I feel like we do kind of have a unique skillset where we’re not as good at some of those basics, but we’re really better at certain other things. And then those skills are really valuable and really needed and really helpful.
[00:25:34] Ash: And so it comes back to this idea of community, right? Like, maybe you can get the support and the assist in the areas that you’re not that strong at because you have specialized skills and talents and abilities that you’re assisting others with.Dusty, I have so much that I could say in response to what you just said, but we are nearing the end of our time.
[00:25:56] Ash: I will say that a big part of the work that I do with my clients, you were talking about what we’re uniquely good at with ADHD and the biggest struggle there is we see our challenges loud and clear, especially when they’re painful challenges, especially when they’re costing us money because we paid a bill late, or they’re causing us shame because we’ve been criticized for this particular behavior throughout our lives.And we’re really bad at seeing our strengths. That’s a big part of the work I do with my clients, is helping them see and unearth their strengths. Because just knowing that you have strength and unique value, knowing what those things are, being able to see and appreciate what you bring to the table, that alone can be a game changer.
And it can be a game changer in a couple of ways. Number one it certainly helps with that one down, right? I’m not a useless piece of trash. I’m bad at these things over here, but I bring value over here and number two, and more importantly, I think it can bring a more nuanced perspective to the world around us.
We tend to look at neurotypical people and say, why can’t I be like that? And we’re not taking a very nuanced perspective, right? It’s all or nothing. That person is good and so am I. And when we start to think of our own strengths and challenges, it’s just that it’s also easier to see that other people have challenges alongside their strengths that we were maybe discounting or not noticing before.
That’s where I think we should go next time. Talking about ADHD and strengths and possibly some stuff even to do with identity because getting in touch with that stuff, getting to know yourself in that way can really give you some useful information in terms of figuring out what will and won’t work for you – that very visual, complicated system that you described Dusty.
I’m in the category that gets overwhelmed when I get to a point that I have 1000 things that are invisible or unseen. I sit down and I do a brain dump in a Word document and then I organize it and make a little plan to tackle it, but as soon as I’m out of the period of overwhelm and I can retain the things well enough on my day to day basis, I kind of go back to taking things as they come.
Because that is what works for me, which is very different from what works for you. So yeah, listeners, next time we’ll dive in a bit to how you can get uniquely curious about yourself and how you can apply some self knowledge? Because while we all share this thing called ADHD, that doesn’t mean that what works for Dusty is going to work for me.
That doesn’t mean that a hack on TikTok is going to universally work for everyone because of you and your modality preferences. I don’t have a visual brain. So that’s probably part of why a visual system is largely useless to me. Right? So stuff like that plays such a big role and is something that is generally not taken into account when you’re reading ADHD tips and hacks because you’re reading either what worked for one person or you’re reading what an “expert” thinks should work based on what the symptoms of your ADHD are.
[00:29:16] Dusty: Yeah. [00:29:18] Ash: You got any parting thoughts? [00:29:19] Dusty: Yeah, I think everything we’ve said here speaks to that idea that there’s more than one way to “adult”. If you’re over the age of 18, you’re already an adult. There’s no wrong way to be an adult. Your way of adulting is legitimate. It just hasn’t been legitimized. [00:29:37] Ash: Well said Dusty. And when you’re seeking to create change, it should be to make your own life better, not to have your life look more correct or more adult from the outside, which is so often the place we’re coming from as people with ADHD, especially in those early days when we don’t know what we don’t know.And we’ll continue pulling on that thread next week. So listeners until then, I’m Ash.
[00:30:03] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:30:04] Ash: This was The Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
