Jeanette G. and Excuse My ADHD

Hi, I’m Jeanette. I am a mom, wife, soccer coach, podcaster, and I have full time day job.

As the host of the Excuse My ADHD podcast, I chronicle my daily struggles and attempts to navigate life with ADHD. Guests are invited to share their stories and struggles with ADHD as well. As I try different strategies to improve my day to day life, I will be reaching out to experts for their advice and guidance on how to navigate life as an adult, a woman, and as a parent with ADHD.  These interviews will be the start of a series of episodes that will take you with me as I experience what utilizing these strategies does for me.

Why I Can Relate

Many people myself included think that ADHD is mostly something that boys have where they just can’t sit still and are constantly moving and being disruptive in school.  Wow, how wrong I was.  After I was diagnosed, I went to the book store and they only had two books about adult ADHD.  The one I took home was “Taking Charge of Adult ADHD” by Dr. Russell Barkley, PhD.  I cannot tell you how much that one book taught me about ADHD and about myself. I am one of the 15 million living with ADHD in the United States. I realized that most of the struggles I had with peers and in school were because of ADHD not because I was broken, I was just different.  I have been diagnosed with ADHD which about 50% of the time brings friends. My ADHDs friends are, OCD, PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, and interpersonal sensitivity.  I also believe I have what is called dyscalculia, similar to dyslexia but with numbers and patterns instead of words.

Why I do this

I first knew that I wanted to do something to help people when working for a Behavioral Health Professor at a University I worked for.  I was just an administrative assistant in the beginning but he pushed me to do more and challenged me to be better.  There were times he drove me crazy but his passion for helping people through his research was inspiring.  It was while working for him that I forged my career path.  It is also while working with him that I knew I wanted to do more, I just didn’t know what the more was.

After I read “Taking Charge of Adult ADHD” I started looking for podcasts about ADHD and found ADHD rewired with Eric Tivers, LCSW. The more I listened, the more I learned, the more questions I had.  I started looking for other ADHD podcasts, specifically ones that were by women.  I found a few they just weren’t quite what I was looking for. One day in my car listening to an episode I thought I could do that.  After weeks of playing with the idea in my head I asked my husband what he thought about me starting a podcast.  I was scared he would think it was crazy.  It was the exact opposite he thought it was a great idea and was all for it. After that I started what has been the last 7 months of planning, researching, and creating my podcast, website, and social media presence.

Fun Facts about Me

• I love the book and TV series Outlander to the point of obsession.  I now make everyone I meet promise to watch it and read the books.
• I was a band geek in high school I played the alto saxophone. Currently I am attempting to teach myself the piano…it is going very slowly.
• When it’s not freezing out side I try to jog as often as I can even if some weeks it’s only once.  The rhythm of it brings me peace and calms my racing mind.
• I love puzzles, any kind from the 100-piece puzzles I do with my kids to just solving a problem at work.  It’s the challenge of figuring out how the pieces all fit together to get the big picture.

Quotes That Help

After Diagnosis:
“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”  ― Elizabeth Edwards

Facing the Past:

“My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present.”  ― Steve Goodier

Accepting your differences:

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring—”

– Edgar Allan Poe

“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” ― Nelson Mandela

“I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find, and impossible to forget.”  ― Erin Van Vuren

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” -Dr. Seuss

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.” -E.E. Cummings

When every thing that can go wrong seems to go wrong all in the same day:

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Eddison

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”– C. S. LEWIS