Normal Is…
We come to you with a pivot today and a follow-up discussion to last week's conversation on ADHD stigma. What is normal? Why is it such a charged word? And what can we do to reprogram the world around normal to represent any point on the vast neurodiversity spectrum?
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm right here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone, hello Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Nikki, hi.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hi.
Pete Wright:
Fancy seeing you here on the podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know.
Pete Wright:
Dear.
Nikki Kinzer:
It feels like home.
Pete Wright:
It feels like home. Happy ADHD Awareness Month.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, October.
Pete Wright:
Are you sufficiently aware of ADHD this month?
Nikki Kinzer:
I am so aware, and I am so excited to bring the awareness into the world.
Pete Wright:
So, so aware. I'm most excited for a thing that's happening later in the month, and we haven't done a whole lot of work for it, but I can't-
Nikki Kinzer:
I feel so informed now because I watched a game.
Pete Wright:
Did you? Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
It was so helpful and I'm so excited about this.
Pete Wright:
All right, we're just going to... I don't remember exactly when we're going to do it for real for live, but I think it's going to be a massive team take control tabletop D&D game that is going to be DM'd by Melissa, who is amazing, and has done an amazing amount of work-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my gosh.
Pete Wright:
Getting all of us prepared with-
Nikki Kinzer:
And I feel prepared.
Pete Wright:
To get us the characters, and all that stuff. I can't believe it, are you really?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. You just saying that, I feel like I now understand what you're talking about. Because before I actually saw the game be played, I really did not understand it.
Pete Wright:
Just glaze over.
Nikki Kinzer:
I had something in my mind that was just so weird and dark, and I just kept seeing dragons, because Dungeons & Dragons, so I kept seeing dragons and dark places. But it is not what I expected at all and I'm so excited about it.
Pete Wright:
Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. That's coming at the end of the month, it's one of the ways we're going to celebrate ADHD Awareness Month, Team ADHD, we're going to do for-
Nikki Kinzer:
We're going to make it fun.
Pete Wright:
... the members, we're going to make it fun. That's right, we're going to certainly make it distracting. I'm very excited, I have not picked my character yet.
Nikki Kinzer:
I have not either.
Pete Wright:
But I understand some of us have. I know Marian is already on board.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
I think Marian's a sorcerer. That should be very exciting.
Nikki Kinzer:
I thought she was like a musician or something.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, that's a magic user.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, is that what that is? Okay, see, I'm still learning.
Pete Wright:
Well, there are lots of different magic users. You're still learning, but it's okay, you're excited, that's what counts.
Nikki Kinzer:
I am, I'm still excited.
Pete Wright:
That's what counts. Okay, so we're going to do that. Today we are continuing our conversations, throughout ADHD Awareness Month and today we're talking about what normal acceptance looks like in the neurodiverse community. Before we dig in, head over to takecontroladhd.com, get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website, or subscribe to our mailing list and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest, @takecontrolADHD, but to really connect with us, join us in our ADHD Discord community. It's super easy to jump right into the general community chat channel, just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord, and you'll be whisked over to the public invitation and login page.
But if you're looking for a little bit more you know what comes next, head over to Patreon. Patreon is listener supported podcasting. Just visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast, sign up and for a few bucks a month you will continue to support this show. Once you're a patron at the deluxe level or higher though, you get lots of super secret Discord channels, you get access to the podcast live stream where you can come here Nikki and I talk about deeply personal family things, trauma.
Nikki Kinzer:
Trauma.
Pete Wright:
For 20 minutes before we start recording a show. You can hear also, we also have a regular entertainment clutch, which we didn't talk about today, we'll have to catch up next week. Anyhow, it's lots of good fun, hang out, ask guest questions in the chat right along with the show. So patreon.com/theadhdpodcast, lots of great stuff going on there and more coming. All right, Nikki, let's do it.
One of the things, so I got behind on my editing, Nikki, because of my travels.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And one of the... So I just edited the show that's going to go live, and it's the show with Kody Lukens, where Kody was talking about Stimara and the Stimagz fidget that he and his team have created.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Which are fantastic.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, absolutely.
Pete Wright:
And one of the things that we talked about is a non-trivial part of that conversation was on the stigma.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's true.
Pete Wright:
That comes with being an adult and having things like fidgets, having things that are stereotypically associated with ADHD, and the impact that having some sort of a STEM tool does to what people think about you, how they judge you in the workplace as an adult, or in family situations, or anything like that. And I've been just really thinking a lot about that, what happens when there is a massive gap between how we see ourselves and how we are seen?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, what comes to my mind right off the bat is that how we see ourselves is a much harsher view than what people are actually seeing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think that it's really easy with ADHD, and with anxiety, to think they think the worst, or I must really stand out because I feel different, you don't look any different, but you feel different than everybody else and so I must really stand out out. So I think there is a huge gap there, because you're talking about perception, right? Of what people are, how they see you.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, for sure. I think it can go the other way too though, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And especially when I think about our community, because there are a lot of people in our community who truly embrace the things that they need to keep their brains active, and I like to think I'm one of them. And so I have lots of tools and fidgets around, I still have my Shocktato when I need a little bit of punishment. And so what's important there is that when I feel like I have embraced a confidence in the way my brain works, and then I am judged negatively accordingly. That's the other direction, that's the other side of that particular stigma.
Nikki Kinzer:
And how do you know that you've been judged? Can you think of a specific time where felt like this?
Pete Wright:
That's a great question. Oh my gosh, that's a great question, because all of a sudden I'm realizing maybe I haven't been, maybe I haven't been judged at all and maybe I am just perceiving, maybe it's RSD, maybe it's whatever, whatever it is, I'm being a reactionary to what I think someone would judge me for having a spinner or some sort of a fidget in my hand.
Nikki Kinzer:
Or, so we were talking before we got onto the show.
Pete Wright:
Interesting.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know, see? Done, we're done, the show's done because now we've got Pete Wright thinking.
Pete Wright:
That's right. It's a long walk around the corner, but eventually we get there.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's like, wait a minute, did she catch me with something?
Pete Wright:
I think I just got caught, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think I got caught, yeah. But no, it's interesting because before we recorded I was talking about a comment that was received and it wasn't positive, and if we were to use that one comment and say, "This is how everybody thinks of us, this is what we are known for," we would not have a show anymore because of that one person.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right, that one person is a hate torpedo.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. So first of all, you can't even think of the person that may have said that, but even if you could, even if you said, "No, I can think about it," you're still judging this whole thing off of just one situation, which is really unfair.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because we're not going to close our show down for one comment, that's stupid.
Pete Wright:
No.
Nikki Kinzer:
Not going to happen.
Pete Wright:
There are other podcasts, good luck, find another podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think the gap is big and I think that it starts internally on what we think of ourself.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. That's the trick, is that what you caught me doing, geez, what you caught me doing is creating my own gap.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That's it, I created the gap. I created the gap, and it's a gap I think about all the time. But until I put my name on it just now, that I'm the guy on the other side of that gap. It's like Carl Jung said, I think it was Carl Jung, or maybe it was Freud, everyone in your dreams is a representation of you. You may think you're having a sex dream about having sex with your boss, but really you're having sex with yourself, is what I think Freud would say.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
And so you got to figure out, what is it that is? My recent stress anxiety dream is that I'm having a comfortable sleep and then someone wants to sleep so close to me that they're sleeping on my head to the point that I can't breathe, whether it's my wife or my dog or my cat or my kids, they pile in bed until I can't breathe. And that's like, it's kind of a textbook overwhelm dream.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right, right.
Pete Wright:
I am rudderless, directionless, and have too much to do.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
But the truth is, that's why the anxiety is a representation of my inner self, being aware of the fact that I'm overwhelmed and I might as well be sleeping on my own face, and not being able to breathe. So that, I think, is a really interesting perspective because it allows me to take ownership of that self-inflicted small T trauma. It allows me to take ownership of the gap, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Ownership of the gap, and it was just one question that I asked, so we need to keep asking ourselves those questions. So when we start feeling like we're being judged, okay, wait a minute, from who? Where? How? What's the truth, right?
Pete Wright:
That's not to say... Well, and so I turn it back to you, because you work with a lot of people who come to you with that. I work out of my house, I don't have a lot of people who can see that I'm holding a fidget spinner right now, they can't see that I fidget podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
But what I am most interested in is when people really are judged, there are places where I'm sure people come to you in a coaching arrangement and say, "Look, I'm at a university, I'm at work, I'm really struggling with that, how can you help me figure out what normal is on the spectrum?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, it's advocation, I think, is the biggest thing, is you have to advocate for yourself. You have to think through what it is that you need in that circumstance. So this would be my guidance for someone, so for example let's say that someone is on a review, or one of those for work, they're on a review thing, like a plan.
Pete Wright:
Like an annual review, or a 360?
Nikki Kinzer:
Or they have to-
Pete Wright:
Some sort of-
Nikki Kinzer:
Not an annual review, but you have to do these things in the-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, performance plan.
Nikki Kinzer:
Performance plan, right. So let's say you come in with a performance plan, and this is what they are expecting, and this has happened for me with my clients before, this is what they need to have done before this date. So what we're working through is, okay, what do you need? What kind of resources do you need? What kind of accommodations or help do you need to get to those end points? And that's where you have to go back to the boss or the supervisor and say, this is where I need help to make these goals, so that you come in with a solution.
I think that you can't expect an employer or a professor or any kind of situation like that to know what you need, you have to tell them what you need. And you don't necessarily have to tell them that you have ADHD, but in a school setting you certainly can, because you're so protected that you can ask for those reasonable accommodations and go through your student services and hopefully they're on your side to make that happen. In work it's a little bit harder, but I think it's going in with the information, really thinking it through about what you need and what's going to support you, and not going in blaming your ADHD, but really trying to work with the person on how can I be supported?
That's in a really good situation, if you have nice people who are supporting you. If that's not the case, I mean, then you still have to advocate. And maybe it's not the right job, we've had those conversations before too, that we look at this performance plan and we look at the expectations and the person is just like, oh, this is awful, I don't want to do this work, I hate this, I hate this company, this is unfair. Then the question might be, is this the right job for you? And maybe now is a good time to look for a new one.
Pete Wright:
How do you get into that space? How does advocacy derive from expectation? So I have an expectation about what normal should be in the way I'm treated, in the way I am communicated with, in all of that. How do I find a way to communicate that when I am uncertain about my role as an authority to advocate for myself?
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's practice, I think it's talking to other people about it, I think it's having conversations around it, building that confidence, even role-playing with your spouse or your partner about, "Hey, I want to talk to my boss about getting some extra support, lets role play this. Does this sound like..." You've got to do some of your research and then you've got to practice it and figure out what you want to say, and have it be thoughtful. And even if you're not confident, I think this is the time where you have to pretend to be. It's so hard to answer that question, Pete, because it could be a different response depending on what the situation is and who you're talking to, right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Some bosses are so supportive, some companies are very supportive. I mean, I've had people whose companies pay for their coaching because they really want them to do well. And then I've had some people who've come to me and they've lost their jobs because they didn't perform the way that they thought they should. And that's a hard hit to take, when you get fired or let go.
But I do think there is something about verbally processing and talking about it, I think there's something there to say, hey, let's, in our community, in Discord, let's have a chat about how can we advocate for ourself? And have the community, because we talk about community, have the community come together, because one person has probably dealt with a situation that they can share, and then another person can share their situation, and then now you've got this whole room full, Zoom room full, of knowledge and support that maybe help you guide. So now that we're talking about it, I think community is a huge resource to figure that out.
Pete Wright:
And I think you said it earlier, there's a massive education component to this too. Because if you, and I'm taking at work, or at school, we have an HR role at work, there is a very, the window is all but closed for explicit discrimination against ADHD, it's closed. But implicit discrimination exists, And that's the one where there are massive loopholes, and we've all experienced it in some way, shape, or form, whether we're dealing with it as parents with our kids who are not getting the services they need for some reason or another that is loopholed, that I think that's the important part, is to figure out how to define as a community what normal should look like for those broader communities or microcommunities where we exist and help educate them on what that is.
I look at my kids' generation and what they have done just at the high school in terms of normalizing pronouns, which is a thing that still breaks my brain, only because of habit. I'm trying so hard, and I think I'm getting better. I have been told I'm getting better. But if we can normalize around changing language over the course of a few years, then for sure we can normalize these same microcommunities around seeing neurodiversity as a spectrum as normal, right? As normal.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, because that just drives me crazy when we talk about normal. I mean, I'm reading the notes and it says, "Creating a new normal for acceptance of the neurodiverse community," and oh, that just stings when I see that, because why is somebody that is neurodiverse not normal? I don't get that.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
That just makes me mad.
Pete Wright:
That's why normal has to be, I know, normal has to be representative of the whole spectrum.
Nikki Kinzer:
Of everything, everyone, yeah.
Pete Wright:
When you're normal if means you exist, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, you're human.
Pete Wright:
That is normal.
Nikki Kinzer:
You're human and we're all human, and that's the part that makes me mad.
Pete Wright:
I was scanning, one of the projects I was doing, as an aside, and forgive my little aside, one of the projects that I was doing last week was scanning a bunch of news clippings from a very important story that my dad covered when he was still alive when he was a cub crime journalist. And he had worked on this story for a long time, and he cut out all the clippings from all the newspapers. And I was reading some of these newspapers, and Nikki, I could not believe how far we've come. There are headlines that I have scanned that says, "New Hospital for the Retarded" showing up.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my gosh.
Pete Wright:
That's like 72 point bold headline on the front page of the newspaper.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
So the kind of language that we have actually shed as normal is, it's amazing. We've done really hard things, so I get a little bit fired up when we find ourselves incapable to move a discussion forward around neurodiversity, the spectrum, as anormal, or abnormal.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, it just-
Pete Wright:
That there is an abnormal end to it.
Nikki Kinzer:
It makes me crazy.
Pete Wright:
There is not an abnormal end.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and that's the thing is when you're advocating for yourself, all you're doing is saying, hey, this is my weakness, these are my strengths, this is what I'm really good at, this is going to take me longer. This is just who I am. So the company, they have to adjust to you. Is this a job that's right for you? If you're not the right employee for them, it's not a good match, you move on and you get something different, because life's too short to be in a company that is looking at you as not normal. I mean, that's crazy, because we all have weaknesses and strengths in what we bring to our jobs. And so saying that, hey, I told you this was going to be next week, it's going to take a little bit longer, that shouldn't be judged as not being normal. Yeah, it makes me crazy.
And I think that it's so upsetting too that we can't just go and scream and say, "I have ADHD and this is what I need." But at the same time, I know that there's this wall that's still stopping people from doing that because there is still this discrimination out there, and judgment. But, going back to our original question, do we know that that's true, and where are we feeling that, and where is that coming from? So digging in a little bit deeper. There's so many layers to this.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, there really are, and I think those are the two big pieces for me. The first one is obviously, what is my role in creating a perception of judgment? And I wonder if we ask ourselves that question in a time of peace, when we're not feeling immediately judged, I'll say specifically, how many of us could look in the mirror and say, okay, I am creating, I'm creating the reaction as if I'm judged when the evidence to being judged is thin.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Pete Wright:
That may be a thing. I don't know if it's a thing, but I wonder, if it's a thing for me, I'll bet it's a thing for others.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, and I was just thinking too, if there is real judgment there, then you also have to figure out, how do you work with that? How do you deal with that? And that's a whole nother layering of conversation of still being confident with who you are even if somebody says something bad. And I go back to that comment, we believe in our podcast, we love doing this, I can't let one comment take me away from the work that we're doing.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
So we have to process that and deal with that in some way too so that you can keep moving on and not get stuck in the RSD. So many layers to this, it's pretty profound.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I'm really curious how others deal with this and have dealt with it. We've heard stories over the years of doing this, and I think that, over 10 years we've been doing this show, and my hunch is that dialogue continues to evolve and continues to change, as it should. And so please, let's maybe start a little conversation in the show talk channel, if it spins up we can continue it, we'll spin up another thread elsewhere, but what does it mean to create a new normal for you? How do you create normal as an adaptation to accepting all of you, all of you, in whatever way you consider yourself fluid. I love that, that word has become so important to me, fluid, because it represents so many different things than I think what many assume it to be in current dialogue. Fluid is everything, and the more we adapt to our own unique fluidity, the better we adapt to what is normal for us. I'm normal.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Happy ADHD Awareness Month, continue to be aware of your normal. Your normal.
Nikki Kinzer:
I like it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, maybe there's a shirt that comes out of this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We sure appreciate all of you pivoting with us, we appreciate you hanging out and thinking through some of these issues with us, obviously we don't have all the answers, and we are excited to explore your answers as well.
Thanks for your time and attention, don't forget, if you do have something to contribute, we hope you have something to contribute, head over to the show talk channel on the Discord server, or anywhere on the Discord server, you can get into the Discord server, just start typing about it, we'd love to see you there, but we'd sure appreciate it if you decide to become a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
