I'm Katie, I'm Liz, and we're Not Your Mommy. Hey everyone, it's your girl Katie. Just Katie today, as I'm sure you saw in the title, I am going to be speaking with you all about my journey with ADHD throughout my life. Honestly, it's kind of surreal to even be sitting and having an episode purely about this because honestly, if you'd asked me a year ago whether I would be making a podcast about ADHD and my journey with it I would be very confused. Not because I didn't think I had it. I obviously knew I've always had it. It's kind of what makes me the best, but I just never really, I don't know, just something about, it was just kind of my thing. It just like was a part of me and I never really thought that much about it and I definitely didn't think that it was like something I would think more about and that I would actually want to like create content around and share my journey with so anyways it has been really helpful I would say even preparing for this episode and really taking a step back and looking down memory lane and kind of looking at like some of the trends and just looking at like, yeah, how I did go about my life with this being a part of it, with ADHD being a part of it, and just recognizing maybe some of the decisions that I made were really because of ADHD and maybe because of medication or not because of medication. What you can expect from this podcast is obviously my experience. I'm going to start with school because that's a really big part of it, how I got diagnosed when I was younger, what medication I took back then, and then what tools I really learned over the last 20 years. We'll also talk about how I returned back to taking medication now in the last few months, which is literally why we're here today. And yeah, I think the important thing to note, you might be deciding right now, like, I don't really give a fuck, or you might be like, okay, I know this sounds interesting, but I don't know that I want to be convinced to take medication. And I'm here to tell you that this is not a podcast that is pro medication by any means. I'd say it's pro ADHD. It's really looking at like, why, you know, why I love having ADHD, we're going to look at really the different seasons in my life in the last, let's call it 30 years, and what worked, what didn't. And then also sharing what I'm going through right now in my life. I'm going to talk, like I said, about, you know, why I love having ADHD, what I love about taking the meds, what I don't love. I'm going to get super specific and we're actually going to start in high school. I think it's really important to start here because, well, I think it was so fundamental to and such a big foundation to who I am. And then also, I know a lot of parents are listening, who have kids who are heading into high school or who are in high school. And I've had a lot of people message me over the last few months just asking like, what my experience with school was. So I thought we'd start here and hopefully this can be helpful. It honestly was super helpful for me when I was preparing for this. It was like my own little mini therapy session. So, okay, a bit of background about my education. So I spent like preschool to grade four at Montessori. And I think that did do really good things for me. I like to the point where I would actually love if CJ could get into Montessori. I think it is, I don't know if it's for all children, but it really worked for me. I think similar to how being an entrepreneur really works for me. And it's just more fluid. You're able to like roll with your curiosities and your interest. It's not super structured. You're not like sitting in a desk, or at least this was my experience. And you never know if like my was, you know, its own little thing, but I've never done any research on Montessori. I only have my own experience. In fact, I would say that about this entire podcast. I have done zero research. Like I'm not here as a medical doctor or an educator or anything like that. I'm simply sharing my autobiographical. That is not a word. Where's Liz? I need her right now. I'm really just sharing my experience. So yeah, Montessori really worked for me. I don't remember any negative feelings related to education there. I just, yeah, I never thought I was like, not as smart as or not doing things like everyone else. I think we're all kind of just doing our own thing. And it worked for me. And then I was in public school for grade five. then we moved to Singapore for a few years. And I came back straight into public high school. Nothing massive to report here. Like I could go down this hole, but I'm not going to. But yeah, with Singapore, they were obviously super academic focused. Like I literally went to school six days a week. And I don't know. I just was able to get by. It just wasn't really a thing for me I didn't really think about it I will say when I was in grade five it's not like it was the age though because when I was in grade five in public school for that one year before I moved away it was so hard for me it was like culture shock and I don't like I think I like got by but it was really hard for me I do remember that but anyways Singapore nothing really report. It was also when the internet kind of started. And so I was taught things that I was super interested in. If you know me, I'm like obsessed with the internet and like all things, social media and blogging and all that. So it was kind of the time for me to be in Singapore because they were so much more ahead of that. So I was learning things like HTML. I don't even think people had like classroom computers at this point. I don't know in, in Vancouver, but we were learning how to make websites. I learned how to use PowerPoint and Excel and still to this day, again, like I still reference, like I, like my version of Excel equations and also even HTML is like very outdated.