S2 EP 22 - Growing Up Neurodivergent: Karma Chameleon

How's it going? My name is Suzanne.

I'm Swayne EDS, LMS, W and welcome to the middle school Mary Poppins podcast.

I'm sitting here with my little buddy, mix, breed, albino, friend, lubricant, Steve. Say hi, Steve. Lisa's high. Anyway, so we're sitting here today and I am thinking a lot about growing up neurodivergent in what that means and as an adult or something moderately resembling an adult, I think

about what it's like to get out of school and not have people talk to you about being

“neurodivergent and you have to cope throughout the day with being say ADHD or autistic or”

or or or all the way down the spectrum of divergence. Now, I do believe that the divergent will, in fact, survive the apocalypse, however. It's hard to be neurodivergent, isn't it? I mean, yesterday I was going through some things and I realized, you know, during a meeting that I get thrown to the curb a lot like a piece of trash. Is that happening all?

Do you feel like people just throw you away like you have no value?

Well, I just, I think we need to change the narrative, you know, I think we need to change this and realize that the neurodivergent adult has a lot more power than the neurodivergent child. Same idea as bigger body, more effective. So let me start with a little memory. When I was a kid, we moved into this new neighborhood.

We had an opportunity to buy a nicer house and a, you know, a fancier place, so we took it. It was the 80s, why not? Beautiful home, and we lived a long and canal and things like that, so I could go fishing. But I didn't wait for people to come to me when we got to that new neighborhood.

This is the little neurodivergent Suzanne we're talking about. I decided to go to them and I didn't know that socially, that's a little odd, but I would walk up to houses and knock on the door and ask if the anti-kids there and would they want to be friends. And in my mind, it's made absolute perfect sense because I thought, you know, we need more

friends in the world and why wouldn't people want that? So why don't I just come to your door, like door dash with friends and bless her, bless her little heart. I didn't know any better and I thought that's just how people work. But now I was in adult, I look back on that moment and, you know, I don't feel very embarrassed

about it because I, you know, when I grew up, I was like, oh my gosh, Suzanne, you did not do that. And I was literally holding a care bear the whole time. Friend bear. I was very specific about it.

I just felt curious about what I was thinking about because it wasn't a child being too much. It was a child who has brain prioritized some connection above and beyond anything else. I think a lot of us, especially those of us raising neurodivergent kids, are starting to have more of these moments lately.

Are you? When we look at our child in something clicks and we think, wait, oh gosh, this person is me, this little person is totally me.

“And it's like this fear wall hits you, but you have to remember that you're greatest asset”

as an adult who's neurodivergent is to help kids who are as well, and to be a lighthouse for them. So the moment can be a little bit unsettling when you think about these memories and social things that you did that maybe you went out on a limb, but it's not just what we did though, it's how we felt about it.

You know, being the neurodivergent kid who, I always felt things really deeply and I

overthought everything and sometimes we couldn't even seem to think in the right way at all. Whatever that right way is, but maybe you were that kid who talks too much or not enough or you were the kid that got lost in imagination or that kid who got overwhelmed by noise and chaos and expectation, and I don't know, somewhere a lot of the way many of us were

given labels, you know, you're too sensitive, if I got that one a lot, you're too emotional, you're too distracted, you're too intense. In my case, I was able to figure out people's motivation for doing things and boy oh boy, did that not make me some friends, so I was like, why aren't you doing this just because

“you feel black, yeah, not always the best thing, think don't say, that's a big deal.”

But here's one thing I think did the most image. You have so much potential if you could just blank, you're like, you'd be so pretty if you just, you know, it's one of those things where it's derogatory and people think it's perfectly say, okay, to talk to neurodivergent this way and say, well, you know, if you could just get beyond your neurodivergence, you could do so much more, and I'm like, with

my neurodivergence, I have so much potential. I don't understand why you can't consistently show what you're capable of because life is a roller coaster, and I will have peaks and valleys much like you do, except might maybe more extreme in a firestorm that you know, I think, you know, you're really

So the truth is, many of us didn't understand either, but now we know a bit more about

this, and we know that brains don't all develop in the same way. Thank goodness. In middle school, the brain is going through this massive renovation, think of it like totally redoing a ball.

“The emotional center of the limbic system is really active, and that's why feelings start”

to feel really big. So the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain, this is a part responsible for your planning, and organization, and impulse control, long-term thinking, is still under construction. So you get this kind of, like, mismatch with big feelings and not enough regulation. Your filmy is this you, but now you layer the neurodivergence onto that, see, and brains

is that are the most sensitive to things like sensory input, and emotional cues, internal thoughts, brains don't filter as easily, that's like putting four coffee filters in the coffee pot.

We have to go through many filters to realize whether this is real or not.

We require more proof, but see, then what happens? The world feels really loud and fast and intense, and it feels like people are really harsh when they offer criticism. Like some criticism I got yesterday where, you know, your life is really complicated, yada, yada, yada.

We're going to do this terrible thing to you anyway, and this may be you. I'm sorry.

“I'm so sorry that you have to deal with things like that, because people should be better.”

It's not you. Your neurodivergence just picks it up. I mean, some research points to increased activity at all areas of the brain connected to your creativity and language and things like a sociative thinking, which means that some kids and adults really can tell incredible stories, make those unique connections, and

see patterns others miss. We can do things better faster and more efficient, but at the same time you can also struggle with things like organization or follow through or definitely staying on task, or in my

case going down rabbit holes and never coming out.

But there was a couple of things tend to get a little bit misunderstood. We're seeing this playout in adulthood in ways that are pretty important actually, though. There's been a lot of conversation about young adults who struggle with that failure to launch. In other words, this is where you have trouble kind of leaving the nest.

Again, I don't really love that phrase, but about one in three young adults now live at home at some point in their early adulthood. That's when researchers start to look closer, and they're not finding any kind of lack of ability here, they're finding challenges with executive functioning, things like planning,

“initiating tasks, managing your time, regulating stress, does this sound at all familiar?”

As adults, we are still living with the same stresses that we have as kids, it's just magnified in our adulthood and all of the social rules that go along with being an adult. So if you're a kid and joy being a kid, because you don't have to pay bills really, but there are so many other reasons, too. You will have to be an adult who grows up with being neurodivergent, or you may be a

neurodivergent adult right now. So like for individuals with ADHD, those challenges get even more pronounced. Adult with ADHD are more likely to change jobs frequently, struggle in the workplace, and struggle with expectations and not meeting them, and be seen as kind of inconsistent, but brilliant.

And not because they don't care, and not because the systems that they're in are not designed for how they work. I mean, these systems that we go into don't think of the neurodivergent as being the innovator, they see them as almost a black sheep because they bring innovation that they may or may not want.

Then we have gifted us some of our brightest kids are also the most overwhelmed poster child right here, because they're thinking can be advanced. I had some pretty big questions at a young age, and some people didn't care for it, but their emotional regulation is still developing at a normal typical pace, and this is something I did not understand.

Social skills and things were developing normally, but my brain was just on hyperspeed, and you feel disjoin it. And even as an adult I feel that way, I feel like my brain just goes, and it's hard to stop it. It's actually called asynchronous development when you're brain sometimes develops

that a different rate from all that. So you end up with a kid who can understand really complex ideas, love and war and things like that. They think big to little instead of little to big, so close to them, locus of control. Most kids who are not neurodivergent, they think small to big, so whatever's close to them,

they're locus of control, and what's close to them is one way, but us as neurodivergent folks, we think big. We think love and then break it down into all of its tiny little minutia. But we can understand these complex ideas. We can ask those deep questions, and we can think very abstractly, which makes people feel

But you may still struggle with all of the frustration and organization, emotional regulation, and from the outside, that can look really confusing, but from the inside makes perfect sense.

And this is where I want to pause for a second, because this part actually really matters.

“As an adult, I've realized something about myself, I think.”

I often have way more empathy for the people that I work with than they ever would have for me. Like, I have actually hyper-empty. I have so much empathy for everyone around me that it literally cripples me sometimes. You know, you can only do so much for people, but I can get drained, and kids refill that

meter. It can be really hard, because when you grow up being the person who feels really deeply in notices every thing, let me tell you, and you try really hard to understand others and do gymnastics and you're brain trying to understand others. You don't stop doing that, you just get better at it.

You become very attuned to tone and emotion and subtle little shifts in character. The tiniest little movement, you're like, oh, I know what that means. You read body language more than you listen to words, which is good, because body language is 80% of communication. You really can tell a lot from that.

So it's smart. You're doing the right thing.

“You're learning to read the situation in multiple ways to confirm whether it's good, bad,”

truthful, not. That's a strength, but it's a lonely strength, because not everybody develop that skill. And sometimes you find yourself thinking, like, why can't people see me the way that I see them? I see just potential in people.

I want to see potential in people. I'm a teacher. That's what I do. But I just feel like people underestimate me and talk down to me, and how we said to you guys, what's wrong, like am I not capable and I feel so incapable all the time, that

it becomes really difficult. So is that you, and that question? I mean, is this a lot of neurodivergent people out there, is this what you're carrying quietly? What do we do in a different story, though?

So what if instead of, I was too sensitive, we can just reformulate what we're saying to say, I felt things deeply in a world that didn't explain how to handle that in any capacity. That's fair. What if instead of, I was scattered, you could say something like, my brain was making connections faster than I could even begin to organize them.

That's fair. Speak fairly about yourself. You're probably the most hypercritical person of yourself that you know. Go on inside your head can be evil, y'all fail me there. I know you do because the evil voice is lying.

That mean voice that tells you that you're not good enough and smart enough and all that stuff, it's lying to you, because instead of I was too much, you could say, I was pretty intense and curious, and I was alive, because you see and you feel, because the same traits that make your childhood hard are often the ones that make adulthood meaningful. So that kid who knocked on doors to make friends becomes an adult who values connection

above all else, which is probably why I have such an issue with money, because human

connection can never have a monetary value, in other words, be worth money.

So the kid who daydreamed becomes the adult who creates and innovates. The kid who felt everything becomes the adult who understands people. I don't think that's failure. I think that's transformation. I think that's evolution.

That's becoming. And now we get to do something different for our kids.

“So when our kids struggle and we often pause and ask, what's their brain trying to do?”

But instead of jumping straight to correction, we need to move toward understanding for a modern brain. We can say, I see you and I hear you and your brain works in a really interesting way. Or tell me how you got to that. Explain, have them explain the steps they got through in order to reach one

conclusion. What is their scientific process? And stressing that the thought process is a scientific process through hypothesis and all of those things, it can help to make a lot more sense. And you can see where the linear path of thought goes.

And when we do that, we're not just helping them, we're also healing something in ourselves. Maybe the goal isn't to fix our kids. It's really not. And I find that a lot of therapists want to be fixtures, but I don't think they spend enough time with people's kids to really get it.

To be a teacher, to become a therapist afterward is amazing.

Please do this. If you're thinking in education that you'd love to be a therapist, look into social work, and clinical social work because you understand that it's about helping our kids through the waters of whatever they're going through at the time. So it's not fixing.

I don't want to be fixed. I don't think you want to be fixed. Nobody wants to be fixed. But we want to have more understanding of the waters we're navigating.

So if somebody thinks about next week or so, what's something that you love completely,

“like obsessively, like in the 80s, like what did you love?”

Like I loved Alex Kidd and Miracle World, and I love to play him as Pac-Man.

And what were you really into as a kid, Paula Abdul for me straight up that meant something

you could do for hours, but something that you could do with that. Anyone ever telling you to do.

“That might have not been a distraction, by the way, that may have been your brain showing”

its early stages of superpower. So it is a beautiful day to bust some cognitive distortions. And I want to give you all a little quick update on Miss Tanya, and she is doing well.

“She had her first chemo treatment last week, and it's starting to feel a little bit better.”

So I really want to thank all y'all for your emails and thoughts and concerns and questions. Please come in to Suzanne [email protected] and Miss Mary Poppins.com. If you'd like to make a donation to your girlfriend, you can feel free to do that there. But I want to thank every single listener, wow, we hit number two in the whole country yesterday.

But, so thank you all very much for your listenership. I hope you're getting something out of this podcast.

And as always, Steve and I tell you to stay clever little foxes.

Take it easy. I'll talk to you soon. (upbeat music)