Speaker #0Hello, and welcome to Nerd Aversion Spot. I'm your host, Sam Marion. And today's episode is going to be a little bit different. As you know, I bring folks on for interviews where I ask them some honestly, pretty personal questions. And I've been amazed at how open so many people have been. I'm humbled by it. Every time somebody opens up to me, whether it's my clinical practice, or it's on the podcast. And today... I'm going to do some of that where I open up with you. Before we continue, I've got a quick disclaimer. This podcast is for information purposes only and should not be seen as a replacement for therapy, healthcare, or legal advice. Now, if you are listening to this episode and you have listened to others, you may sense something a little bit different. And quite frankly, that's my anxiety. I don't always... enjoy talking about the raw stuff, the vulnerable stuff publicly. I don't know that I ever do. And what's driving this episode is the fact that I have turned 40. And I've been reflecting a lot. And it just seemed like the kind of thing that I should do to make a 40th birthday reflections episode. So I'm actually recording this on my birthday, even though you're not listening on my birthday. And so I'm feeling all the feels. But that's what we're going to get today is just some of these thoughts. And I want to start with a line from a movie that I saw, I don't know, somewhere in my teenage years that stood out to me. Now, this is a scene from the movie Varsity Blues, which has... a scene that many of you uh remember almost maybe even iconic but that's not the scene that i'm thinking of instead there's a line where the football coach says to one of the the the main roles there says you're the damn dumbest smart kid i know And that line struck me and it stands out to me still to this day. So what you've been hearing this podcast through all the different episodes is people reflecting how many times have you heard somebody talk about when they understood that they were autistic or ADHD or, you know, whatever neurodivergent identity they're discussing that so much more in life made sense. So today I don't feel like I'm the damn dumbest smart kid you may have ever met. But for many years I did because I didn't understand myself. So I want to walk back through some of that to point just to some times that if I could go back and do them again with the insight that I have now, it would be different. Now, to give a picture of sort of where I picked up my neurodivergent identities, because I have multiple throughout my life. has to start when I was a small child and I was identified gifted. And I grew up sort of as a gifted kid and through elementary school. And this was in the nineties. This was during the era of, you know, books such as, you know, the highly emotional gifted child that I think we now have a different perspective on. But I grew up with that. I grew up to understand that I was smart. But I also knew that I struggled with things that I did not see my peers struggling with. So if we fast forward a little bit to early years in college, I got an ADHD diagnosis. It was a day and a half of formal testing where I was in this little room a lot of time, had like the one-way mirror next to me and all these different measures. And there's some things in that, and I have the results still, they're on my computer now, that are really interesting. They stand out. of how I, there's some things that I did differently than most. There are, there's one task where it's noted that somehow I did a better job doing it in reverse. It was sort of a number recall thing, I think. And I just, because by the time I was being tested there, I had already developed so many strategies for navigating and overcoming things were difficult for me. And ADHD wasn't the full explanation. So I actually rejected that diagnosis for many, many years. I'm pretty sure I wrote a paper in graduate school making the argument that PTSD and ADHD could be sort of without seeing the context, they could be seen as this. confused between the two, right? And we can fast forward a little bit more. Again, struggling a lot of different ways. I was working in my first private practice and had an adolescent sitting in my office who was describing his reading disability and the reading challenges that he faced and some of the support, some of the help that he'd had. And I remember going home that night and I stayed up most of the night reading about that because his description of his experience resonated for me. And I found language had to do with tracking, if you're familiar with that, and reading. And I'd always known that I had a difficult time reading, but I also read a lot. I spent years in my early adulthood where I averaged reading about 10,000 pages of fiction. a year, even though I'm a slow reader and my comprehension is low. Every standardized test I've ever taken will show you that my reading comprehension is notably lower than other scores around it. So that picked up a little bit more. And that was, I was probably in my early thirties at that point in time. And then when I was 37 and I was new to private practice and I was deep diving and autism for different reasons. it became clear and sort of looking over, because I do have the benefit of multiple psychological reports on me throughout my life, I can look back and I can see these traits, because that's part of diagnostic criteria for autism, if we look at it from that perspective, is these traits had to have been there all along. And I have psychologists who their notes show this, going back to I think it was 1991 when I was six, the first time I had an evaluation. So. Um, I can see these traits is existing all throughout. So yeah, when I was 37, picked up, you know, recognize autism piece. And that's when it sort of started to make sense for me. The picture started coming together. And I remember at that time thinking, I probably won't ever tell anybody about this, but I didn't, I was not in the neurodiversity movement at the time. I had very limited understanding. Um. I even landing on the autism diagnosis. I was learning a lot about autism. I was doing lots of online trainings. I was new. I was back into private practice. I had a lot of free time as a result of that. It's building my caseload, building my business. And I would listen to these lectures online and I consume so much content. And I think that resonates, but I hated, hated the way that it was talked about. It felt so. negative, the way everybody talked about all these different traits. And it was really hard to identify with anything spoken about so negatively. But at the same time, as I processed it, it made so much sense. I had the experience. I can look back at moments where I think, oh, that's why I missed those social cues, those moments. Why I didn't quite... get certain things why i didn't understand why people were upset by certain things it explains why when i went to college and i was struggling i couldn't figure out how to ask for help there's a lot more to that um but there's a lot that i'm navigating in college and all along it was so confusing being the damn dumbest smart kid you ever met why was it if i was so intelligent Why was it that I had such a hard time with so many things? Why was I, quote unquote, the smart kid on academic probation at times? Why was I having to meet with somebody, which now I know universities that have a lot better support for people that are struggling academically to identify bigger areas of struggle. But at the time, I just had to like check a box and meet with some lady in an office somewhere in order to continue to take class on academic probation. I had a history of seeing therapists in college that I was really good at telling them what they wanted to hear. I have been high-fived by therapists for doing so great when I was not doing great at all in any aspect. Probably failing classes, probably in a depression over some of that. Yet, that therapist, he felt good about his work and would literally give me a high-five. Masking explains some of that. I look back here from age 40. And I think about, there's no point in time in my life where if you just said, what are you doing in five years, 10 years? I never could have predicted where my life was going to be today. And in some ways, it's hard to even imagine that I was going to be alive at 40 and not from any type of ideation or anything, but just couldn't see it because Any path, because I had a path in mind that I was supposed to follow, had this script in my mind, but I couldn't figure out how that was ever going to work, even though that's what I tried. I got my master's in social work with plans of going into corporate leadership, and I was on the route towards corporate leadership, and I was miserable, completely miserable, because I care deeply for people. But what I found was the higher that I got in a corporate setting. the less my role was about helping people and my role was about making money. And I understand business has to make money. But if you are in a business of helping people and money is a higher priority than providing quality care, that's not the place to be. At least it wasn't for me. And so I kept redefining my role. And it was an interesting thing that I experienced. Where throughout my life, I would have moments where I felt, I think inspired would be the language I would use towards authenticity, but without any sort of permission internally to follow or pursue that authenticity. So I'll give you an example of this is in summer or May of 2015. I was at a trauma conference in Boston. And by the way, if you don't know this, my background was really in trauma therapy, first and foremost. So I was at this major trauma conference. And there was a panel of speakers that were sort of the creators of some of the top trauma modalities. Francine Shapiro, who created EMDR. Dick Schwartz, who created IFS. And more on this panel. So these are big names. And I can distinctly remember Francine Shapiro saying, you can't just know my modality. If all you know is EMDR, you don't know enough because not every client is going to benefit from this. You need to know multiple. And what she said that really stuck with me, she said that if all you know how to do is one thing, then you are a technician, not a clinician. A clinician can take multiple approaches. And that was such a big motivator in my career as early as a clinician at the time. Yet also, I was trying to follow this corporate leadership track. And I kept jumping to more and more, you know, higher up leadership roles. But internally, what I felt, what I wanted to do is be a clinician. I wanted to be a great clinician, but in corporate leadership, which that doesn't work. Those things don't combine together. And so when I got back into direct care as a therapist, even when I opened my first practice, I did it with a name that would imply, that would allow me to grow it around. It was... within Southwest Georgia and had the implication that I was going to grow it across that part of the state. And I didn't like it at all. It was managing people, being responsible for others within a business. It was miserable. It was too much for me at the time. Now I understand things like executive function challenges, of which I have plenty. But I didn't have that language. I didn't have that understanding. Because in social work school, when I got my master's in social work, they didn't talk about this stuff. Therapists don't learn about executive functioning in terms of understanding the different categories. That there are at least six, according to most researchers, that they will identify. We learn kind of the vague language of executive functioning, but not what it means truly. So as I learned more, I gained more insight. In the last several years, I have continually pursued authenticity at a greater level. So I show up in a way where my clients know more about me. I'm not a lot of therapists. I put myself out there. I'm on this podcast. I'm on social media. And I find this balance. Even I don't talk about my family because... I feel very strongly about things like consent. And I do have a spouse. I do have kids. I have dogs. But I don't talk about them because my kids, they cannot consent. They would probably say that they do, that they would love some of these things to be part of some of what I do. However, I don't believe that they're of the age to be able to consent to be in these settings, nor in terms of sharing their personal lives. So I don't do it. But that's me striking that balance around authenticity that's really important to me. And it is hard. It's very, very difficult. And I'll... We live in a space where we don't know what's coming in the future, right? In a lot of ways. And so living authentically can be really scary. I could have sustained a practice, a therapy practice, where what I did was I focused on trauma therapy. And honestly, I'm a good trauma therapist. I tell people honestly that there are very few traumatic experiences that I haven't worked with. Truly, in a wide range of settings, wide range of folks, of clients. But I see this space where I want to have a voice. I want to support neurodivergent individuals, neurodivergent families, as they pursue authenticity in a way that previous generations did not allow. It's cliche, but there's sort of these comments out there you'll see on social media about, you know, isn't it better to grow up knowing you're a zebra than thinking you're a broken horse? I grew up thinking I was a broken horse and I want people to have a different experience. I process this with parents all the time who they want the same thing for their kids. They are understanding their own as the parents, their own neurodivergence, sometimes through their kids first, and they want something different for their kids. And I get to show up every day and work with families like that. I get to be part of helping kids grow up, understanding they're a zebra. And zebras are freaking amazing. They're kind of mean sometimes. But they're really pretty animals. They're beautiful. For years, I actually used to say that I wanted a pet zebra. But I wanted to have it broken like a horse. I think it'd look awesome to ride a zebra around instead of a horse. Way more fun than just a brown animal. But I want people to understand that zebras are okay. It's okay to be a zebra. Sometimes you need to find a herd of zebras to be part of. And I try to create space for that too. So here I am age 40. I thought that I would be a CEO of like behavior health hospitals and like that at this point in my life. I thought I was going to be working probably 50 hours, 50 plus hours a week. Plus, you know, emails and stuff, nights, weekends, checking in while I was on vacation. Because I was on a track where that's what I did. I checked, you know, I sent emails and phone calls, you know, checked in on vacation. But I don't do that now. I keep a little bit of my own business on my way, but not much. I mostly respond to things just to say, hey, I'll be in touch once I get back from vacation. I'll be back when I'm in the office next week. I'll respond to you then. I thought at age 40 that that's what my life would look like, but it doesn't. And I'm so grateful for that. It's so helpful. I'm so grateful that I have language for the challenges that I face and that I deal with on a daily basis. I'm transparent about it. Those around me hear that from me. I get overstimulated. I need space to myself sometimes. Do my kids get more screen time than I prefer sometimes because I need a break? Yeah. And I think that's, I tell families all the time, it'd be better to be, to regulate yourself as a parent and let your kids have 10 more minutes of screen time and then show up in a regulated state instead of saying, oh, no timer's off. So here we go. Right. That's authentic. And I hope that as you listen to this podcast, I hope that you hear others share and realize you're not alone. Because I benefit from that in my work, y'all. I really do. I recognize that I'm not the only one. Because I hear people share stories that they don't tell anybody else. But you're not alone. If you're struggling with things, you're not alone. As a parent, as an individual, as a young person. I hope that you can find other zebras. It makes a difference. when you can find more zebras and you can surround yourself with a herd of zebras instead of thinking you're a broken horse. I promise it does. I hope you can find space to continue to pursue authenticity. It is scary in our country here in 2025 to put ourselves out there, but the world needs us to. I will always take advantage of the fact that I live in a place of privilege. And I don't mean that in a bragging way. I mean that in, I see that as that much more responsibility for me to put myself out there and live authentically, to try to create space so others can as well. I really appreciate your willingness to listen today. I hope that my story has touched you in some way. If it has, I hope you'll let me know. Send me an email, jump in my DMs on social media. It would mean the world to me. I appreciate you. I appreciate you listening. I hope that you'll follow the show. Whatever platform you're listening on, give us a rating. It all means a lot. But I appreciate you. I hope you'll join us again. The next episode coming up, I got to tell you, I'm going to go ahead and plug this. Already scheduled out. I got the chance to interview one of my favorite authors. It is a great time. So come back in two weeks for that episode. Thank you. We'll talk soon.
