Taking off my mask (but not that kind of mask…)
I mean like a theatrical mask, a masquerade mask, as in, when people “mask” their ADHD or other neurodiverse symptoms to fit in with neurotypical expectations. In very ADHD fashion, I didn’t even realize how confusing that title would be in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic until I got to the end of writing this post. I am not advocating taking off your actual physical, tangible masks!
Photo of a white half-face theatrical mask, a la Phantom of the Opera
When I started this challenge Monday, I did something that was really hard for me. Without including a bunch of qualifications and overexplaining myself, I wrote:
I'll let you in on a secret: if you had to permanently overcome all of your ADHD challenges before you could become an ADHD coach, nobody with ADHD would ever become a coach.
Growing up, I learned to hide and minimize my weaknesses in order to succeed. I was taught this behavior by adults in my life who had good intentions - it’s a survival mechanism for making it in a capitalist society and from appearances, one might say it was a successful one. I managed to earn 3 degrees and become an attorney at a prestigious Seattle law firm, where I worked for 3 years before leaving and going to a high-end wealth management firm with more work/life balance and higher pay.
But I was deeply miserable, and constantly felt like everything was going to fall apart. The things I was good at I was REALLY good at. In school, I might be terrible at studying and getting started, but once the panic set in enough to get me started, I could cram or write a paper in one all-nighter and get a good grade. In my career, if you needed a complex tax law or estate planning concept explained in terms a layperson could understand, you could count on me! For a long time, my strengths helped me hide just how overwhelmed I was trying to manage my priorities and tasks and motivate myself to do work that I was increasingly disinterested in and by the end actively disliked.
It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with ADHD and learned a lot more about it and began to understand my own brain that I realized I was “masking” - trying to make myself seem as “normal” (neurotypical) as possible and hiding my ADHD symptoms. But at the time, because I was afraid to admit my weaknesses to anyone else and was trying to bootstrap my way out of them, I didn’t seek help. In the 10 years between the first time I considered going to therapy in college and the first time I actually went to therapy as an anxious and depressed attorney, I went on struggling, leaning on deeply flawed coping mechanisms, and thinking I was “broken” because I “should” be able to do all these things that are “supposed” to be easy.
I started unraveling these beliefs about myself when I finally got diagnosed in 2017, a full year after starting mental health counseling, but it has taken me a long time to really fully embrace myself and my ADHD brain and appreciate it and work with it for what it is.
And even after all of that work, I recently figured out that one of the things that has been holding me back from blogging is some remnant of the idea that since this is the blog associated with my business, I “should” be writing from a more detached, “professional” perspective rather than being honest about things I’ve struggled with in the past, and ESPECIALLY not talking about things I still struggle with!
But one of the many, MANY reasons I feel coaching and ADHD advocacy is a calling for me is that it’s something I not only CAN do when I’m being my honest, authentic self, I’m BETTER at it because of my own experiences and struggles.
I also believe that sharing stories and seeing ourselves in the stories of others is a major source of human connection and compassion (for ourselves and for others). The more people with ADHD who share their full selves and their experiences with each other and the rest of the world and help “normalize” our experiences in the social consciousness, the better off ADHDers will be, and the better the whole world will be! Imagine if we could all stop spending so much energy trying to “fix” ourselves to appear neurotypical, take off our masks, and use that energy to harness our strengths instead.
So while the remnants of my masking survival mechanism warn me not to be so honest in my writing for fear a potential client might be put off by the fact that I talk about my own ADHD challenges, I don’t think I CAN be a competent coach if I’m trying to pretend that I have reached some impossible ideal. I’m not trying to sell people a guarantee that they will achieve some level of neurotypical perfection which doesn’t exist. I’m selling a partnership assisting my clients in progress and growth towards living THEIR best lives as THEIR best selves. And that includes helping them figure out what that really means to them vs what they think it’s “supposed to” mean. And MY best life includes embodying my values by letting myself show up as my WHOLE self in everything I do.
In the last couple years I’ve used the same strengths and skills I use in coaching to radically change my life, get out of a career that was sucking my soul dry, start my own business, achieve long-term sobriety after decades of using alcohol to self-medicate anxiety, depression, and ADHD, establish a consistent sleep routine for the first time in my life, and start eating healthier and exercising more regularly, if not as regularly as I’d like (I’m still working on it). I’m not perfect (no one is!), and there’s plenty I’m still working on or wanting to get to that hasn’t made it to the top of the priority list yet, and even the excellent coaches I know who have been coaching for decades could say the same. But I don’t need to have mastered every possible area of my own life to help clients with any area in theirs they want to work on. And I’m not going to let fear of some imaginary person reading my blog and judging me harshly convince me to pretend otherwise!
I know I’m getting a little long, but I have 2 more important points I want to make clear. First, I’m not condemning anyone for continuing to mask in some way. Masking is a defense/survival mechanism that may or may not still be serving some needs for any given person. For many people in many situations it may not be safe to “unmask” (whatever that means to each individual) and even if it is safe it can be really hard to reach a point where it feels safe. I believe people are the experts on their own lives and nothing I say here or anywhere is meant as a treatise on how to be, it’s all just my experience and perspective.
Second, in a coaching session, while there are occasional exceptions as appropriate, I generally don’t share my anecdotal experiences because I don’t want to take the focus off my client, who, again, is the expert on their own life and experiences, or make assumptions about our experiences being similar. I try to make sure that I’m using my life experience to help me ask better questions without assuming I know the clients’ answers. Plus I can’t imagine it’s a confidence booster for someone to say “I’m struggling with X problem” and have me say “Oh cool, me too!” if it’s something I’m still working on (though sometimes an anecdote tactfully shared with the client’s permission can be helpful - as with everything ADHD, there are nuances!). I’m also not going to pretend I HAVE figured it out for myself. I don’t see this as being inauthentic, I see it as appropriate to my role in the coaching relationship, which is to focus on the client and what they need out of each session. This blog, on the other hand, is a more self-expressive way that I share my coachy wisdom and ADHD insights both for public consumption and for myself, as a professional AND as a human with ADHD trying to spread understanding and connection with other ADHDers and the rest of the world.
And now I’m going to let go of perfectionism and not read and tweak this 100 more times before posting it. :)
