Hello, welcome to The Distractables, a podcast by ADHDers for ADHDers, talking about ADHD tips and tricks to help get you through daily life. I'm your co-host, Marie. I'm also the founder of Llama Life, which is an app to help people with ADHD get through daily tasks and routines. And I'm here with my friend, Jesse J. Anderson. Hey,

I'm Jesse. I'm the author of Extra Focus, the quick start guide to adult ADHD. And I also write a weekly newsletter called Extra Focus at extrafocus.com.

Awesome. And today we're here with a special guest, our good friend, Crystal Wang. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, which is the number one coaching platform designed for adults with ADHD. And Crystal was also diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and is now on a mission to create a more neurodiverse and inclusive world for neurodivergent individuals. She's also part of and cares very deeply for the LGBTQ community and women and non-binary communities. Welcome to the podcast, Crystal. Thank

you for the introduction. And I'm super excited because I use and am subscribed to all of the things that you guys just said and created. So thanks for being you.

Amazing. Amazing. And today we're going to talk about being late diagnosed with ADHD and all the things that come with that. And the three of us are all diagnosed as adults. Chris, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your background and your relationship with ADHD? Yeah.

So I grew up undiagnosed and in a very Asian family, as you may know, but Asians don't like to talk about mental health. And I think neurodivergence is in some ways, even one level less understood than mental health. And I was also all the things that Asians were not expected to be. I was loud. I was talkative. I was disruptive, constantly getting in trouble everywhere, But mental health or ADHD was never the explanation. The explanation is usually that's a disobedient kid. Like that person is not listening to us. They just need more discipline. So that was a little bit of my upbringing as it relates to ADHD. And I just rebelled against it. And I think I became more of a I guess like a rebel who didn't like going to class because of all the bad experiences that I had around it so I would skip class a lot none of my teachers really liked me they I always got the actually think I might have seen one of Jesse's posts about the high potential if you I'm probably butchering it but like high potential but doesn't apply could do so many things if she applied herself. So I think, I think I might've seen one of your tweets about that. And I was trying to like it like 30 times. And I've now learned that a lot of people get diagnosed essentially when things are not going so well later in life. So I had an inkling, I knew about ADHD. I saw it on Tik TO all that jazz. And I had a lot of structure in my life in my first job. And I think that even though I didn't like it philosophically, it kept me like sitting on the horse and doing all the right steps because it was so structured. And then once I became an entrepreneur and stopped working for someone else and stopped having the structure and was also expected to put structure on other people, that was when everything started to fall apart. And that was when I sought my diagnosis.