I am so soothed by the colour blue. The last few days I was on a short cruise. The best thing about it for me was the colour of the ocean. I could have stared at it all day…actually I did 😅 It was so relaxing and rejuvenating. And then throw in a few humpback whales and a beautiful sunset or two and there you have it…a weekend of refreshment 😍

I am at the great start but the next day is more trouble. Sunday is planning day but Monday is rarely action day.

I am here to meet myself through meeting you.

Well that just blew my mind and I am so excited for the challenge! Hi everyone, I’m Jeanna. I’m a career transition and workplace development coach in the Orlando area, and I specialize in helping ADHD and neurodivergent professionals navigate job searches, career changes, workplace challenges, and all the other fun that comes with having a brain that refuses to follow the standard instruction manual. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 40s, which triggered the usual reverse-engineering of my entire life. I’ve learned a lot about ADHD since then, but knowing something and consistently applying it are two very different beasts. I joined this challenge because I want to better understand the conditions that help my brain function, build scaffolding that doesn’t disappear the second life gets messy, and make the positive changes I’ve recently started creating actually stick. I’m also hoping to stop dismissing the things I’m already doing well and start trusting myself a little more.

THE MIRROR "The version of myself that could've been was the price I've paid and the time lost is like interest on top." Amber, most people can't say a sentence like that. It's not a complaint, it's an accounting. You did the math on your own life and came out owing. And notice the shape of the words you reached for: price, paid, interest, time lost. That's the language of someone who has spent years quietly balancing a ledger where you were always the one in debt, always the one who came up short, always the one who had to make up the difference. What you don't see from inside it is that you never took out that loan. It was handed to you, with terms you never agreed to, at an age too young to read the contract. Everything that follows comes from your own words. I'm simply going to show you what you couldn't see from inside the experience. YOUR STORY - AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANS You came here newly diagnosed, at 2 in the morning, "researching and studying to find new and useful information." That timing matters. When the name finally arrives after 39 years, the mind doesn't rest, it goes hunting. And the word you used for how the diagnosis felt was "relief," which tells me something important about what came before it. You only feel relief when you've been carrying a heavier explanation, and yours was the one you named so clearly: that being different came from "personal shortcomings" rather than a brain that is "simply wired differently." For most of your life, the story wasn't "different brain." It was "something wrong with me." Here is the thing you've never quite been able to say out loud, so let me finish it for you. You didn't fail at the things you tried. You were being measured with the wrong instrument. There's a picture Jim uses: judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree and it'll spend its whole life believing it's stupid. You were a fish, handed climbing report cards, at school, in social groups, at work, and you believed every grade because no one told you the test was rigged. The diagnosis didn't rewire you. It changed the test you'd been graded on the whole time.