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Hi, welcome everyone to this new podcast. ADHD gathering. I’m your host Ying Deng also known as ADHD Asian girl on all social media platform. Today, I’m going to talk about my intention of creating this podcast as well as my own diagnosis story. In case you don’t know much about me, I’m a first-generation Asian immigrant woman living in the United States. I’m an ADHD coach. I’m a meditation teacher. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 26. The backstory of how I got diagnosed with ADHD was in college when I was going through depression and anxiety, that was when I first started discovering meditation and psychology. And that eventually led me become super interested in life coaching and positive psychology. And that’s how I become an ADHD coach and a meditation teacher. All of that’s to say before I recognize I had signs of ADHD.
I already went through recovering from depression and anxiety. I learned a lot about emotional regulation. I understood quite a bit about my own childhood attachment types. I read about how to build healthy relationships. I read about how to design my life, figuring out my strengths.
And I was working at a mindfulness startup. That was at the time I thought my dream job. My coworkers were super nice. I was working towards a mission I really believed which was spreading mindfulness to more people and help people practice mindfulness.
I felt super bored at my job after a year, working at that startup. And also I felt a sense of burnout. So I literally didn’t know what was wrong with me because I have already went through the layers of healing from depression and anxiety, building healthy relationships, understanding my attachment types and finding my strengths.
I thought I had done all of the self discovery work already. Then it was just by chance, I came across a YouTube video by ADHD Jesse. He was talking about motivation tricks for ADHD folks. At the time, I didn’t know anything about ADHD. I just listened through the motivation tips about using interest, using a sense of competition, using creativity to motivate yourself.
And to my surprise, I resonated strongly was the video. So I went down the rabbit hole of figuring out who ADHD Jesse was. I’m like, okay he has a podcast. So I started listening to his podcast and it was through his interview was another Asian woman talking about her ADHD diagnosis journey.
That’s when everything clicked.
I realize, oh, wait a minute. This could be me. Like ADHD might explain why I struggled so much about picking a particular line of work and sticking with that particular line of work. ADHD might explain why I’m challenged and also enjoy the beginning part of any new job and a year into the job, if I know too well of how to handle the job, I get super bored.
And also explains why functioning as an adult or just keeping a baseline level of adult life was super difficult for my brain. And I didn’t understand why that was so difficult. And for other people, it was seemingly so easy.
So I started to sense oh, okay. Maybe I do have some traits of ADHD. I started to read more about it. Eventually I seek a formal diagnosis. And I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, and it just explained so much of my life.
And a lot of, of what I thought I was doing was actually ADHD masking. No wonder traveling was exhausting for me because I was constantly triple checking I have my passport, I have my documents. Because I was so afraid of losing those paperwork on a trip. And that explains why paperwork, immigration, paperwork was exhausting. Because I was mustering so much of of my executive functioning to overcompensate because you can’t make any mistakes in immigration paperwork.
And that also explains why I thought I was really good at listening or really good at participating in conversations. But when I look closer, when people talk about their own emotions or their own relationships, those are my hyper-focus interests. So naturally I can actually focus on those conversations, but if people start to talk about sports or the weather or anything that’s outside of my hyper-focus, I actually zone out super quickly. I just wasn’t aware of it.
I posted a tweet about my diagnosis on Twitter. And it kind of blew up and that kind of started my journey of documenting what I have learned about ADHD, the tips and tricks I’ve came across. And that’s when I realized, oh, I can combine my knowledge of ADHD and my previous training of life coaching and offer ADHD coaching to people.
Then I realize a lot of what I have learned about mindfulness and meditation actually helps ADHD folks for emotional regulation as well as mindful communication or cultivating a more compassionate relationship with ourselves and other people.
ADHD was really the missing piece of my self story. When I discovered that piece, suddenly everything made more sense.
So in a way, that’s why I wanted to create this podcast. The first season of this podcast would primarily be me interviewing other folks with ADHD talking about their lived experiences of ADHD in the world.
There are three key elements I want to establish in this podcast.
The first one is possibility. Discovering ADHD helped me have more possibilities in my life. For the first time, I didn’t have to use the tips neuro-typical people have praised for decades. And I tried to use them and fail miserably over and over again. For the first time I can tune into what actually works for me or works for my body, works for my dynamic energy system and create more possibilities for my own life. And I get to own that my day to day life may look different than what I thought adults’ daily lives should look like. And that’s okay.
So that’s part of my intention. I really want these lived experiences of real people’s ADHD story to hopefully help you my listeners to create more possibilities in your life. So in a sense to radically accept ADHD as part of your story and from there create more possibilities for yourself. Work with yourself, not against yourself.
The second part is diverse narratives. We can look around in the content land of ADHD world and know that the representation is very, very white. And I have this great honor and privilege to get to know a lot of awesome people in the ADHD community either online or through conferences. So most of the people I invite to my podcasts are BIPOC folks.
And we talk about the intersectionality of how our layers of identity intersects with our ADHD and how that impacts our ADHD experiences. I want to amplify these diverse narratives in the ADHD world as well as in the world in general. Because I believe celebrating each other’s differences are like celebrating biodiversity it’s much needed. Moreover, I think if we have more narratives that exists within the ADHD community, then more people out there when they hear different stories, they might recognize, oh, I can identify myself in that person’s story.
And then they might see, oh, maybe I could have ADHD. Or even if they don’t have ADHD they can still use the tips and tricks that are shared by my guests help themselves create more possibilities in their own life.
And the third element in this podcast are strength. I asked each and every one of my guests to share about their strength, how they cultivate those strengths, how they discover their strengths. Too often. I think ADHD is talked about in this negative light. It’s about how we’re not productive enough. How we can’t keep up or how we always felt like we’re behind. For once I want to intentionally help people to tune in to the diverse strength ADHD folks can have and talk about how each person discover these strengths, how they cultivate these strengths, how they use their strengths. ADHD. Doesn’t have to be. And we’re not talking about ADHD as a superpower.
We’re talking about both and. ADHD definitely gives me struggles and I do have some strengths that are uniquely associated with ADHD. So including the both, and not only being rational and talk about how we can compensate ADHD as well as highlighting the strength and talk about how we might use the and possibly change the world to become a better place. I truly think that’s possible.
And that’s my wish for this podcast. And that’s my wish for all the ADHD folks out there is for you to discover your strengths, discover your light. To work with your ADHD, not against your ADHD. To create more possibilities for yourself. And through this process, not only you will yourself, you will the world.
📍 So thank you for listening to the first episode of ADHD gathering.
I will be releasing new episodes every week or so. It would be a very diverse cohort of guests. I have nine guests lined up. And I really hope you will enjoy this podcast. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review on apple podcasts or Spotify podcast, or write me an email to adhdasiangirl@gmail.com. Or send me a DM on Twitter or Instagram. I would love to hear from you.
So with that sending lots of love. I hope you have a good day.