An ADHD coach on burnout (Jaye Lin’s story)

ADHD coach Jaye Lin is no stranger to ADHD burnout. As an Asian American former gifted kid with undiagnosed ADHD, her parents thought she was just being lazy and not applying herself. This pressure and shame followed until her 20s, when her anxiety peaked while she was working at a high-pressure job. 

Jaye’s therapist thought she was drug-seeking when she wanted to be screened for ADHD. Now, Jaye builds communities and helps others prioritize what’s important when tunnel vision takes over our lives. 

Related resources

• ADHD and anxiety

• Jaye’s website 

• ADDA Asians with ADHD support group

• The Monoceros Initiative

Episode transcript

Jaye: It felt like that's it. I am like, working myself to the bone and I'm just barely not getting fired. And when I got my diagnosis and my treatment and I started just communicating who I am and what my needs are, my productivity just skyrocketed. 

Laura: From the Understood Podcast Network, this is "ADHD Aha!," a podcast where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they or someone they know has ADHD. My name is Laura Key. I'm the editorial director here at Understood. And as someone who's had my own ADHD "aha" moment, I'll be your host. 

I am here today with Jaye Lin. Jaye is an ADHD coach, speaker, and instructor, and podcaster. Jaye, thank you so much for being here today. 

Jaye: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. 

Laura: I love having ADHD coaches on the show. I think deep down I just, I need ADHD coaches in my life. So you're really you're just here for me. Thank you. 

Jaye: Yeah. I mean, I love meeting with other ADHD coaches too, so I understand. 

Laura: How about ADHD podcasters? How do you feel about meeting with them?

Jaye: Oh, absolutely. All pairs are my favorite. 

Laura: As our listeners know, where I usually like to start is, when were you diagnosed and what was happening that led you to get an ADHD evaluation? 

Jaye: I was diagnosed in November of 2019, and it followed a period at Google where I was working as an administrative business partner for the year before, and I just could not seem to make it work at Google. And I was just in a perpetual state of burnout the entire time. And that spring of 2019, it got so bad that I told my supervisor that I was just going to have to quit. I couldn't take it anymore. 

And she had this really compassionate moment where she said, "Your team is particularly hard to manage because there's just this constant churn. Let's put you on another team. Promos are in a few months, so in the meantime, just support other people. We're going to pull you off the team. And when the promos happen and there are some other executives to support, we'll put you on that team instead."

And during that time, she said "Just try to get your head on straight. So take this time. Do whatever you can so that you can make this sustainable. But just work on you." And so I started seeing a therapist and that therapist that I went to as part of the the EAP at work, she had asked, you know, "What do you want to work on?" And I listed off just this long list of what I consider to be personality flaws. 

And when I got to the end of it, finally, she said, "Have you ever had an ADHD assessment?" And I said, "Oh, yeah. You know, a few years ago I brought this up to my therapist and she said, 'You don't have it. You are an admin. You would not be able to do that job if you had ADHD.'" And, you know, was really tough love. So she also accused me of being drug-seeking and all these other things. 

Laura: Whoa. 

Jaye: Yeah. So I said, you know, that experience happened and she assured me that I couldn't have ADHD. And this new therapist said, "Well, I'm really sorry that happened to you. Being an admin actually has no bearing on whether or not you can have ADHD or not. I'm talking about a thorough assessment with a specialist who knows ADHD," and I said no. So she referred me to a clinic that specializes in adult ADHD with doctors who also have ADHD, and the rest is history. Since then, everything has turned around in my life. 

Laura: First of all, I'm so glad that you decided to get a second opinion. If I have this right, I wrote this down from our pre-interview. Your therapist said to you "Stop trying to find out what's wrong with you and work on your anxiety"?

Jaye: Yeah, so she said "You don't have it." And I said, "Well, is there a test or something that I could take?" And she's like, "Fine." And so, I took the computerized test is basically an X appears on the screen, you press the spacebar. It was ten minutes long. And then afterward I was supposed to go back to work. But just doing that test and paying attention for ten minutes straight took everything out of me. So, I actually had to call in sick for the rest of the workday and go home and sleep. And that should have told me something, but I was just so... 

Laura: But how could you have known? 

Jaye: Yeah. 

Laura: That's why you went to see somebody. Because, like, to help you out, right? 

Jaye: Yeah. And I had told her that afterward because, you know, the next time I saw her, she just kept going and asked me questions without bringing up the assessment. And so, I asked her and she was like, "Oh, you don't have it." I was like, "What do the results say?" She was like, "Oh, I don't know. I haven't taken a look.". 

And so, afterwards, she printed it out. She glanced at it for less than two seconds. It was like, "You don't have it. Okay. Let's continue." And so I said, you know, "I would like to kind of dig in more about this." And she had, first she said, "Are you trying to get Adderall? Is this because you want to get Adderall?" And I said, no, "I started seeing you because I wanted to get off of medication.". 

Like I started seeing the therapist to get off of my SSRIs. And she said, "Okay, right now we have been trying to work on your anxiety. I want you to start working on your anxiety and stop looking for what else it could be."

And, you know, I grew up in a Taiwanese American family that is, maybe not the most classic stereotype of a Taiwanese American family, but in a neighborhood that was 75% Asian. And this whole idea of tough love is, I think, really detrimental to that community because it's what we've experienced our entire lives. This whole idea of "I can shut you up if I make you feel stupid enough" is really common. And so, that was effective. I did shut the hell up afterward. And she hit her goal of me never bringing it up again. 

Laura: I'm sorry to hear that, Jaye. We know that ADHD and anxiety do coexist. It's very common. 

Jaye: Yes. 

Laura: Lot of co-occurrence there. But the impact of executive function challenges on stress, like in terms of creating stress and anxiety is so hard to untangle and so misunderstood, even by highly educated, you know, people in the field and whatnot. It just makes me wonder, and, you know, how many women have been told that they have anxiety when in reality it might be ADHD? 

Jaye: Yeah, and I definitely had anxiety. I had generalized anxiety disorder for, I'd say probably my entire life, but I was diagnosed in my late 20s officially, even though my first full-blown panic attack happened when I was 21 or 22. I still remember it. It was terrifying the first time that that happened.

And when I started on my SSRIs, what I started seeing that first therapist was when I started having panic attacks twice a week, full-blown, really terrible. I started just trying, you know, lorazepam with it, which made it better, but it was still like a regularly occurring thing. 

And when I started on my ADHD medication, when I started taking stimulants, it was such a strange experience for me because I was so used to having this baseline of anxiety that I didn't even know what life could be like without it. And when I started taking methylphenidate, I remember talking to my ADHD doctor and saying, "I mean, I still feel like myself, but I feel completely calm and I don't think I've ever experienced this before in my life."

And I remember him telling me, "Yeah, your voice has actually dropped in intensity. I was like, "Yeah, that's how I feel. Like I just feel really calm and I feel really just like, gentle." 

Laura: This is the start of your podcasting voice, your ADHD coaching broadcasting voice. 

Jaye: This is the start of my podcasting voice. Exactly was because before I was always just like really intense all the time. And it's because I had to be in order for me to do anything, I had to have a higher level of arousal. I had to have more anxiety powering me through the day or, you know, adrenaline, norepinephrine. But when we have those all day long, our minds and our bodies just wear down from it. It's not something that's meant to carry us at those levels for the entire day. 

And so, having this kind of like baseline of calm, but still the arousal level for me to do things was such a game changer that my anxiety levels now, I mean, every once in a while I'll be anxious, you know, hormonal changes and, you know, big deadlines. Right before I'm guesting on a podcast, I will have a little bit of anxiety, but it's a normal amount. It's not going to break me. 

I'm not going to have a panic attack, and the rest of my days are just fueled by other things, you know? You know, adrenaline still makes an appearance a lot in my life, in a good way. I have a meeting in an hour. I'm going to get all this done before I have to show it to them. Good adrenaline and good norepinephrine power my day now and it's less powered by stress like it was before. 

Laura: Or what you could call that good stress versus bad stress, right? 

Jaye: Yeah, yeah. It's still stress, but not in a way that will wear me down. 

Laura: Burnout. Define burnout for our listeners. And tell me what that meant for you. 

Jaye: Well, I'll start with what it was to me in that moment, which it can be different for every single person. But in that moment, I was just in a state of high anxiety all day long, kind of cycling through, almost having a panic attack and being incredibly depressed and not being able to do anything. I was not very productive at all. I was trying to do so much and not being able to do very much. I was just basically one click away from having a nervous breakdown every single day. 

And it doesn't always look like that for everybody. But that's what it looked like to me at the time. And now that I know what I know about ADHD and how we are able to move forward, especially undiagnosed with ADHD, it makes a lot of sense why I would be in that space in a very high-pressure, high-anxiety high, you know, high-performance position and feeling like I'm always behind and I have to do more and more. 

And that's something that I see one in a lot of other Googlers and in a lot of people who just put so much pressure on themselves, especially who have more roles in the family than I do. 

You know, I'm a single woman. I take care of my small dog. I don't have any children. I don't take care of any sick loved ones. So, my kind of household responsibilities are pretty low. But I even see this in a lot of working mothers who are trying to do everything. The burnout comes on really hard, especially with the ADHD, and it can lead us to be kind of low-performing in really complex things. And, just do one task at a time. Just kind of tunnel vision and not be very effective as a whole and just have this sense of dread that permeates the day. 

Laura: That's so interesting. That's what I wanted to, in your particular situation, was the feeling that you were having of not performing, was it matching the reality? Were you quote-unquote performing? 

Jaye: I was performing enough. So, a strange thing happened when I did my diagnosis. It's not strange. It's actually really common with a lot of us to get our diagnoses and start communicating our needs and putting forward boundaries and stuff. I wasn't necessarily failing at anything when I was burned out, but I definitely wasn't thriving. So, on a personal level, I was just working myself into the ground. 

I didn't enjoy anything. I wasn't having, you know, productive relationships with the people around me, but also at work, I was kind of just OK. Even though I was trying to do so much, I wasn't in danger of losing my job, but I was just barely not in danger of losing my job. But it felt like that's it. I am like working myself to the bone and I'm just barely not getting fired. I have to keep working myself to the bone in order to not be fired, right? And the answer was like, no, wrong. I don't have to keep working myself to the bone to keep from being fired. 

And when I got my diagnosis and my treatment, and I started just communicating who I am, what my needs are, how to work best with other people, all of these things to others, my productivity just skyrocketed and I went from CME, which is "you're not going to get fired" to exceeds expectations, and then I got a promotion the next cycle, which is like the fastest someone can get a promo from a CME is two cycles. 

So, like everything that I was doing, it was just like way more effective. All the effort that I was putting into it. And I was able to do that in an eight-hour workday, you know, not working all day and all night like I was doing before, you know, having time to put towards the things that I love, having energy to put towards the things that I love. 

And so, every time I see someone saying like, "Oh no, I have to work this hard, I have to put in 100% of myself and work at night and work on weekends. Because I'm so close to letting all of this slip." I always say, "What would happen if you had enough energy to love things again?" 

Laura: Whoa, that is very powerful. 

Jaye: Yeah, that's how we work with ADHD. If there's nothing in our lives that bring us joy or excitement or any natural dopamine, how effective are we really? 

Laura: Tell me about that tunnel vision, that you were, that you mentioned before. 

Jaye: That well, that tunnel vision still happens for us even after we do the work and all that stuff. And it's because of how our brains work. And so, when we are getting things done, we don't have neurotypical brains. We can't keep track of like five different things at one time. It's usually I do one thing at a time, you know, I have to focus on this thing and then I can focus on this for 45 minutes, and then I can focus on something else for 45 minutes. We can't just, like, go in every direction at once. 

And so, we kind of need to have somewhat of tunnel vision in some situations. But where the tunnel vision becomes, I think detrimental is when the tunnel vision encapsulates more than a short period of time. So, when that tunnel vision is my entire day, or my entire week, or my entire month, I can't think about anything else with this. I just have to, like, charge forward as fast as possible. I don't have time to pause. 

And I, you know, occasionally still experience that. In October and November, I realized that I was getting burned out with everything that I was doing in my life, and I had to intentionally pull away from social media and the podcast and all these other things that I was doing to get my sea legs under me again. And it's really easy to get there because this mode that we're in of like, "Hey, I have to focus on this, I have to focus on this, I have to focus on this," can start broadening out to the rest of our lives. 

And so, it's something that I have to be really aware of, like where are my energy levels? Am I experiencing things like parts of burnout that I can notice if I take a step back and look at it? Am I starting to lose my zest for life? Am I starting to not be excited to, you know, eat my lunch or dinner? Am I starting to pull away from my friends and family? And when those things start happening, it's like, "Okay, this tunnel vision is broadening to something that is now very unproductive and is no longer something that is serving me."

And so, that's something that still happens, but I try to be more aware of as I go, but it's something that I see happen a lot for ADHD individuals. And oftentimes we do this overcorrection a lot where it's like, "Oh, I had tunnel vision. Now I have to look at everything," and it's like, OK, well, that doesn't really work either because we have ADHD and we have to focus on one thing at a time. 

So, if we try to look at everything all at the same time, what happens? And so, the overcorrection is like, "Well, I tried that and it didn't work. And I tried this and it didn't work, so nothing works." And it's like, "No, you try two very extreme things." 

Laura: Yeah. This is resonating really hard, Jaye. I went through a period, even in the last few months where I just, I kept saying to my therapist and to my husband, "The only way out is through. The only way out is through." And it was very similar. And I'm not looking forward to dinner.

I'm not looking forward to life's pleasures. I'm not because it's just there's just too much, and I have to do it all. And you're constantly shifting in between the I have to do the simple task that's like an on-off switch to, "Oh, I have this really complex project that I need to get started on, and I don't even know where to begin," right? 

Jaye: Yeah. 

Laura: So, does that sound like burnout? 

Jaye: It does. And it's funny because there's something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law that I talk about in my learning program for ADHD a lot, and it talks about the kind of correlation between performance or executive function, arousal level, or stress, or how up we are. And so, it's basically a bell curve. 

There is an ideal amount of stress that we can have in order to have the highest performance. And as ADHD individuals, we start to the left of the bell curve. And so it takes a lot more arousal or a lot more stress, adrenaline, dopamine, all these things to get us to a place where our executive function is working similar to a neurotypical person. 

And the challenge is because we have ADHD, we're not the best at determining how long something is going to take or how much it's going to take out of us, and so we can overshoot that with our stress and adrenaline and norepinephrine and dopamine, and get to a place where we are less productive. Executive function is lower because we're so stressed out. And at that time there is another line, and it's not a bell curve. It just kind of keeps, it plateaus at the top and keeps going. And that is for really simple tasks that don't require any executive function. 

So, while we're in a state where we can't do anything complex and we can't figure out, like how to do a project and come up with all of these really intricate plans, we can still wipe the counters, pick up the kids, take out the trash. We can do all of these simple tasks that make us feel like we're still doing stuff, but it's not in a fulfilling way, because it feels like all those really important things are still not getting done because they require complexity. 

Laura: The collision of mental health and executive function is so strong and so powerful and so hard. 

Jaye: So hard. A lot of people come to me and they are at the end of their rope and they're just like, "Can you fix me?" And I'm like, "No, I can't fix you. That's not really how it works. And all of this, you know, you're going to be doing all the hard work ," and they're just like, you know, "I can't spare time. I can't spare any of this. I'm like, barely keeping my head above the water."

And it's in those situations that is really difficult because we feel like we are at, you know, 120% of our max capacity and we can't spare time to look inward or even go to sessions with an ADHD coach or therapist, or take these classes on ADHD that I offer. There's just like, "I can't do that because I just, like, am barely clinging on." I feel for them because I understand what that's like. I've been there. And also without intervention, nothing will change. 

Laura: It's so interesting how self-care tends to be the first thing that goes out.

Jaye: Right? 

Laura: When you're prioritizing your time. I, the first thing that I did was I got to cancel my therapy appointment because I have too much work to do. 

Jaye: Uff. And sleep. Sleep is the first thing that goes too. 

Laura: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I would bucket that under self-care as well, right? And I don't have time to make a healthy dinner for myself, so I'm just going to grab whatever I can find. It's such a vicious cycle. 

Jaye: Yeah. And it's so easy to get to that place. And then it's almost like a snowball effect that just keeps rolling down the mountain. And there's a likelihood that we are doing more than what we really need to right now. It's like, "Will anything break if I stop doing this for a week?" And I would say most of the stuff that I'm doing will not break with a week off. 

Laura: Do you hear that, listeners? If you are doing this, because I'm relating to it, if you're feeling this way, take a moment and think, "Will anything truly break?". 

Jaye: Yeah. 

Laura: What if the answer is yes? What if everything will fall apart? Do you find that that's just tends to not be the case or... 

Jaye: I mean, that still happens, right? And it's one of those things where it's like, I've been working on this for so long, I just need to do this thing or it will break. That happened with me in October, too. It's like I still had to put together my talk for the virtual conference. If I do not do that, my whole career is basically ruined, right? I can't just be selected for a talk and then not turn it in and not finish it and not show up. 

So, I said, "OK, that is something that will break if I don't pay attention to it right now. Is that the only thing?" And that was like one of the only thing, you know, like, I have to I have to feed my dog. I have to take him to daycare. You know, all those things, those things. It will break. If I do not feed my dog, he will die, right? 

Laura: Unhealthy. Yeah. 

Jaye: So, those things, it's like, "OK, I will keep in everything that will allow me to go this week without anything breaking. Everything else really can wait."Aand it never feels that way. It always feels like everything will break if I don't pay attention to it right now. And it's not always accurate. Like one week will not break it, right? Most of the time. 

Laura: That's very helpful perspective. Thank you. 

So, thinking back to the therapist who thought you were drug-seeking and just wanted you to focus on your anxiety, I imagine that was very invalidating. 

Jaye: Yes. 

Laura: I would like to dig in a little bit more and have you share your experience at growing up. How were mental health challenges perceived in your family? And also, I would love to hear you talk more about the Asian experience in the ADHD community and like how stereotypes kind of how those juxtapose. 

Jaye: Well, first I have to say, I probably grew up in a household that is different from a lot of Asian Americans, especially in my area. My dad was a failure analysis engineer. 

Laura: A failure analysis engineer?

Jaye: Yes. 

Laura: I've never heard of that. That's makes me nervous. OK. 

Jaye: Right? Right, just the name is really scary. Yeah. So, my dad was a chemistry PhD, and then he got a master's afterwards in electrical engineering. So, he's like a super smart dude and immigrated here in college as a basically an exchange student in the 70s from Taiwan. And, my mom is an artist, and I will fully admit that I very much suspect my mom of having ADHD undiagnosed. 

And so, I think my life was a little different from a lot of the other kind of Asian kids that I grew up with, but my mom was a stay-at-home mother. She had us in so many extracurriculars. I was in choirs, I learned seven instruments, I did musical theater and played basketball, and all of these things all at the same time, photography. And part of that was because I really had difficulty with schoolwork, and that was especially hard in this very high-performing community that I was raised in. 

So, I grew up in the Cupertino side of San Jose. The high school that I went to is consistently ranked in the top 100 in the country, and it's a completely public school, not a magnet or anything like that either. It's just who lives in the area, all engineers and their kids. And so. 

Laura: Okay. 

Jaye: Yeah. And so, this was a really high-performing high school, basically fed directly into UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Ivy leagues. And I did not do well in school. And so, being part of a community where everyone is doing well in school except for me was really hard. And to add on that, I was a gate kid, and my odyssey of the mind team in elementary school got second in the state. 

Laura: What is that, a gates kid? What is that? 

Jaye: Oh, it's, they give kids essentially an IQ test. And if you have a score that's above a certain level, you're a gifted kid and you got to do gifted kid programs. And that led to a really terrible dynamic, because my sister, who is probably the most intense, high-performing person ever in my entire life, she did not get into the Gate program, and I did. And so, that made the dynamic even worse, because now my parents are like, "You are smart, you are just lazy. You're just incredibly lazy and undisciplined, and you don't want to do this and you are doing this to us," kind of thing. 

Laura: Ok. Yeah. 

Jaye: And I think part of it was probably my parents are both really smart. My mom went to the Harvard of Taiwan, and I think it was hard for them to have a child where they're like, "Well, you're really smart. So it's not because you don't have the intelligence to do well in school, you just don't want to." And that really wasn't the case. You know, I did want to do well in school, right? I don't think there's a child that doesn't want to do well in school. Everyone wants to do well. 

Laura: Yeah. 

Jaye: And I couldn't do it. And so, they kind of like applied what they knew, which was more pressure, more shame. "We are going to punish you," and I actually use this in one of the trainings that I have about the ladder of perception, where we are taking all of these like assumptions about the other person based on our own experiences. 

And so, my dad looked at this and was just like, "Yeah, you know, you are not doing this because you're spoiled, you know, all of these things. And it's because I'm not hard enough on you. And so you don't get to do any of your fun extracurriculars that you seem to be able to do all the time, because you need to focus on school and you need to be less spoiled."

Laura: And those extracurriculars are probably what you need to regulate, right? 

Jaye: Yes. 

Laura: Yeah. 

Jaye: And so, it got sometimes it did get worse because of that. But just being in that environment and not feeling like it was okay to thrive doing what I did best, was really hard, and feeling like even these parts of me are undesirable. And that's that's kind of the reason why I wanted to create all of these communities. 

Laura: Yeah. Tell us about the communities that you are creating. 

Jaye: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, when I was at Google, I co-created with my friend Sam, the ADHD women at Google ERG, and they noticed that when women raise their hand to share, everyone kind of jumped in, like a lot of the men would jump in and kind of take over the conversation, and then it would never return back to them. And, you know, there was no like, ill intent involved. But, you know, as women, a lot of us are socialized to wait our turn in ways that I don't think boys are given the same treatment for. 

And so, we created this ERG just for women, and we could talk about like things that we could never bring up in an everybody situation. We talked about periods, like menopause, being a mother, like all of these things that would make people really uncomfortable in, in kind of like a general frame. And it was so rewarding to see how the people in that group were able to thrive once there was a space that was created for them. 

And we even did a talk at the Alphabet Mental Health Conference on, "Hey, is there not a community for you that you think supports you? Go and make one! We did."

Laura: Yeah. 

Jaye: And we didn't ask for permission. We didn't get a corporate sponsor. We didn't get anything. We just like made one. And everyone's just like, "OK, great. We'll add you to all of our sites and we'll you know, what materials do you have that we can send to everyone?" And so, it's just like, yeah, if there is no community to support you, go and make one. You can. Anyone can. And so... 

Laura: That's great. You didn't stop there too. You, you've started other groups now you... 

Jaye: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I've also well last year for the conference, I gathered the troops and all of the kind of like Asian ADHD professionals that I knew. And I said, "You know, there has never been an Asians with ADHD peer support group or like town hall or anything at the conference. Let's submit for one." And we did get in for that one. 

And after we got the news for that at, which is ADD.org, I've been trying to get them to start an Asians with ADHD virtual peer support group, or a women with ADHD peer support group there. They don't even have one of those yet. 

But I had been kind of like lobbying with them for two years to expand. And they had said, "You know, we are just not in the place to do more virtual peer support groups because of the boom that happened during the pandemic." So, the Asians with ADHD virtual peer support group that I launched with a whole lot of effort —  we launched in October of 2023 — that was the first new virtual peer support group that ADDA has launched since 2019, I think. 

Laura: Wow. Congratulations. 

Jaye: Yeah, it was very important for me to do that. A lot of people asked me like, "Hey, if you want this group, why don't you just make the group? It doesn't have to be part of ADDA." And I said, "That's true. We can do a peer support group for Asians with ADHD, like on my platform or on someone else's platform." But also because of history, I didn't want to do that. And when I say history, I mean Asians were not accepted in the United States as part of the kind of general public for a really long time. And there was a reason why Chinatowns were built, and it was because we were not included as part of the general public. 

And so, I told them "We could do that. But also, I don't want to make Chinatowns. I want us to be seen as equals, to be seen as peers in all of these organizations. I don't want to say it is us and them. I want people to see that they belong as part of the ADHD community."

And so, that's why we started that group. Without that, Asians with ADHD virtual peer support group, there would be nowhere in my life where I don't have to thoroughly explain who I am to someone else. In the Asian community, I have to explain my ADHD. I have to explain all these personality quirks, what makes me who I am. 

In the ADHD community, I have to explain how my Asian upbringing affects the way I am, and even the part where I have a lot of discomfort being in the spotlight because I grew up being told that people who love the spotlight are bad people. Like even that where I have to resolve my feelings about that. 

And in that group, I don't have to explain myself. I can talk about, you know, a challenge that I'm facing or something that I'd like to celebrate. And even if they haven't experienced my life exactly, because no one has, I feel completely understood. And that is for anyone who's ever experienced that, there's no feeling like it.  It makes me want to cry just thinking about it. How I've lived for so long feeling misunderstood in every situation until I was able to create the community that I needed. 

Laura: I think it's so fantastic that you created that community that makes it even more important, even more impactful, I imagine. And I just want to thank you for spending this time with me. 

Jaye: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. 

Laura: You've been listening to "ADHD Aha!" from the Understood Podcast Network. If you want to share your own "aha" moment, email us at ADHDAha@understood.org. I'd love to hear from you. If you want to learn more about the topics we covered today, check out the show notes for this episode. We include more resources as well as links to anything we mentioned in the episode. 

Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people who learn and think differently, discover their potential and thrive. We have no affiliation with pharmaceutical companies. Learn more at Understood.org/mission. "ADHD Aha!" is produced by Jessamine Molli. Say hi, Jessamine! 

Jessamine: Hi everyone. 

Laura: Briana Berry is our production director. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. For the Understood Podcast Network, Scott Cocchiere is our creative director, Seth Melnick is our executive producer, and I'm your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.