Someone Once Called Me a Thought Leader and I Couldn't Hear Anything Else He Said After That

With my new ADHD diagnosis, I re-evaluated a patchwork career I previously thought was a failure.

Listen as you read (I listened as I wrote):

“There’s a little kid inside me trying to remind me that I am a force field…”

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Hi, it’s me.

Wow! I’m super excited about last week’s kick-off to my series on ADHD and Imposter Syndrome! Thank you SO MUCH for the comments, ❤️s, and shares. Clearly I hit on something that resonated, especially with those of us who are midlife and female. Not only were many of our ADHD symptoms overlooked or misdiagnosed in childhood, these days we’re hitting our menopausal and perimenopausal years with crazy estrogen fluctuations that are fucking with us.

If you missed last week’s introduction, you can catch up really quick here:

Kicking Off Season One of Pretend You’re Good At It: ADHD and Imposter Syndrome

And now that you’re caught up, let’s talk about imposter syndrome!

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In the height of my Boss Lady Imposter Syndrome¹ days (or BLIS 😂), I met with a potential client who said to me in passing (as if people said this sort of thing to me all the time) "...and partnering with thought leaders like you…."

This drive-by statement caused me to break out into a cold sweat because just before he arrived at the coffee shop for our meeting, I was distracted by the possibility that I had accidentally tucked the back of my skirt into the top of my tights after using the restroom.

To confirm the tuck or untuck situation, you can’t just casually run your hands across your hips. It requires a slight twist to look over your shoulder with an arched back to attempt a visual, and if that doesn’t work you have to actually run your hands down your backside and feel around a bit to make sure your ass isn’t hanging out. Alternatively, you can bend all the way forward from the waist for a visual and reach back up between your legs to make sure the skirt is hanging down properly.

Either way, there’s nothing subtle about it.

So yeah, when that guy referred to me as a "thought leader,” I missed the next six things he said.

Side Question: Do "thought leaders" keep their phones tucked into their bra when they have no available pockets, and then can't figure out how to remove said phone to check the time while sitting across the table from a man who may or may not be excited/offended that you are pulling things out of your bra during a business meeting? 

For most of my adult life, I walked into almost every professional situation pretending to know what I was doing, but we all knew better. They knew it, of course, but I can’t tell if they knew that I knew it. Who knows, ya know?

One day I was hired by a west coast boutique hotel chain, and they invited me to their downtown Seattle office for a meeting with their whole marketing team. It was a room full of a dozen (?) people wearing suits and suit-like attire, and I was… not wearing suit-like attire, but rather a category of clothing I like to call Professional Lounge Wear because it looks professional but feels like pajamas.

This was long before COVID work-from-home culture identified the difference between “hard pants” and “soft pants.” I was ahead of the times.

Anyway, I did my thing during that meeting with the Very Important People. I think I mostly asked a bunch of questions they didn’t have clear answers to, and I vacillated between feeling annoyed at their non-answers and being afraid I was asking dumb questions. I mean, they were wearing suits and talking about backwards cross-promotional overflow metrics inside a glass-walled conference room while I typically sat at an overcrowded desk in the corner of my dining room getting food crumbs in my keyboard.

(I had to keep a can of air on hand for all the times my spacebar stopped working.)

As I was exiting the conference room, I heard the female CEO/President/Owner say to her team, “Wow, she’s got some talent!” followed by a murmur of “Yeah, she’s great,” and other agreements as the door closed behind me. 

Here is actual footage of me processing those comments as I waited for the elevator:

I can think of dozens of stories like this where I felt like I had no business being in a room, yet when I opened my mouth, people seemed to think I knew what I was talking about. Did I? I always wondered. I was terrified that somebody would finally figure out that I didn’t actually belong in the room.

One of the reasons I achieved Expert Level Imposter Syndrome by the time I hit my 40s was because my path didn’t look like anyone else’s path. My parents both graduated college and had long careers in a single field. I went to a hoity toity high school in Minnesota where the primary expectation was to get a college degree and start a career.

I did not do this. I tried! And I failed.

Instead, I hacked together a self-taught, made-up life, wandering through decades from one thing to the next via a disconnected patchwork of opportunities. As my friend Marina might say, “Is that a feature or a bug?” We’ll come back to that.

In my “career” I’ve done everything from receptionist to accounts payable to personal assistant to writer & producer to project manager to communications manager to stay-at-home mom, blogger, and small business owner. By the time I hit my early 50s, my resume looked like an antique crazy quilt² made from all the leftover fabrics.

A “crazy quilt” made by my grandma and great-grandma.

In November 2023 at age 52, I was diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD (ADD, basically).³

I had pursued an evaluation on the recommendation of my therapist, who spent months listening to me talk about all of my failures and insecurities intermingled with stories about depression and listlessness. She sent me this article about ADHD symptoms in women and how our symptoms often go undiagnosed. 

Though I resonated with most of the items listed, these four in particular caught my breath:

• Do you feel that you have better ideas than other people but are unable to organize them or act on them?

• Have you watched others of equal intelligence and education pass you by?

• Do you despair of ever fulfilling your potential and meeting your goals?

• Are you clueless as to how others manage to lead consistent, regular lives?

I think I actually cried when I read these, not expecting a list of symptoms to be so nuanced and precise at the same time. These statements could have been written by me–they’ve certainly been kicked around inside my mind and uttered to friends in desperation. 

What is wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? I know I’m smart and talented and good at things, so why can’t I succeed the way other people do in business/school/parenting/life?

Since then, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on how my undiagnosed neurodiversity showed up in my childhood, in parenting, and throughout my career.

On one hand, I’m grateful to know this new information about myself so I can form new strategies for managing my time and attention. On the other hand, I grieve all the years I spent feeling broken and inadequate because I couldn’t seem to do the most basic things that others found natural, routine, or obvious. 

Life is full of things we can’t change, but sometimes we can view it differently. I’ve been healing my relationship with my past self—like learning to recognize my brilliance in things I formerly hated about myself, in all the times I innovated and hacked my way into something because the normal way didn’t work for me, and in all the things I learned because I asked questions nobody else would ask.

Turns out these were features, not bugs.

It’s changed how I’ve shown up at work over the last year. I may write about that, but in the meantime:

• 👋 Have you ever experienced a late-in-life reframing of your identity, whether by diagnosis or general realization?

• 🤷‍♀️ Is it inevitable that these things can only resolve and heal later in life as we grow and age? Or is it possible to avoid the angst and just know things when we’re young? 🤣  

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

Until next time,

jen

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Coming up next on Pretend You’re Good At It:

⭐️ Next Week: Installment #2 in a four-part series on how a midlife ADHD diagnosis helped me move on from decades of feeling like a career failure. I’ll share my sad backstory—don’t all heroes and villains have one?!—beginning with my first job out of college.

⭐️ September 25: A community forum where readers can respond to one another’s questions and share insights about ADHD symptoms, diagnoses, and medication journeys in a special Ask Me Anything About ADHD post. I’ll also share my own experience.

⭐️ October 2: Discovering a language around my life’s work and realizing how everything I’ve ever done has instinctively orbited around one North Star, even in my chaotic ADHDness. In other words, I’m not as undisciplined as I thought!

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Me in New York, July 2000.

1. When I ran my own consulting and production studio, one of my girlfriends worked for me (a Friendployee) and used to lovingly call me Boss Lady.

2. Crazy quilts are a real thing.

3. “ADHD is the official, medical term for the condition — regardless of whether a patient demonstrates symptoms of hyperactivity. ADD is a now-outdated term that is typically used to describe inattentive-type ADHD, which has symptoms including disorganization, lack of focus, and forgetfulness. People with inattentive ADHD are not hyper or impulsive” (source).