How I Got Here: My Journey to Coaching

Photo credit Lindley Ashline, Body Liberation Photos

TL;DR version: reading the bold paragraphs gives you all the highlights!

I’ve always been an anxious and emotional high-achiever. That was something I knew about myself. I frequently ended up sobbing about AP homework assignments in my childhood bedroom at 11pm when no one else would know. When I got to college I thought I couldn’t keep up because there was something wrong with me. My life got infinitely more complicated with work and school and relationships and figuring out how to feed myself independently for the first time, and my mental health took a nosedive. I didn’t yet know that I was neurodivergent, I just thought I wasn’t good enough.

This part of the story probably looks familiar to many of you, because it is WAAAAYYYY too common for late-diagnosed ADHD and autistic folks. The structured expectations and lack of responsibility in childhood make it easier to mask my way through life, and you assume everyone else feels the same way you do about small talk and fluorescent lighting and feels completely exhausted and ready to cry at the end of every school day, and then you get more responsibilities and less support and you hit a wall and wonder why you suddenly stopped keeping up and started failing at everything. 

I had therapists starting in freshman year of college, but none of them clocked the neurodivergence. That’s not necessarily their fault, by that point I was so heavily masked and overcompensating at all times that I likely wouldn’t have been diagnosable anyway. I was lucky enough to have a roommate who’d been diagnosed with anxiety that watched how I said I liked to connect with my housemates and then hid in my bedroom for two months and called bullshit. She pulled me aside, told me about her journey, and we got me to a clinic where a primary care doctor diagnosed me with anxiety and depression, gave me a prescription for an SSRI and told me to read a book about cognitive behavioral therapy. I got halfway through the book, and I ended up going cold turkey off the meds a year later after several dosage shifts because I couldn’t deal with an insurance shift and I didn’t like how the meds made me feel. 

Disclaimer: I want to be clear that I’m not anti-medication by ANY means, the SSRIs gave me valuable distance from my emotions when I desperately needed it and helped me build up some coping skills, and meds are a vital part of mental health care. I didn’t hit on the right med for me because I didn’t have the right diagnosis, but I should have approached fixing it differently. Please DO NOT go cold turkey off SSRIs and talk to your doctor if you think your med isn’t the right fit for you, what I did was not safe and I’m lucky that it didn’t go worse for me. 

Talk therapists continued to help me figure out my brain for several years after that, and I will be forever grateful for all the tools I picked up to understand where my thoughts and anxiety were coming from and unpack how my childhood experiences were carrying forward to affect my present self. Thing was, I kept hitting this wall where I knew this tool so well that I could therapize myself. I could tell you which parent said what and when and why that meant I was in tears now, but I felt like this was just my life now and I couldn’t do anything about it. 

And then in 2020, with a new relationship quarantining with me in my one-bedroom apartment and a feeling that I wanted to crawl out of my skin, I discovered a podcast by a feminist life coach (Kara Loewenthiel’s podcast Unfuck Your Brain) and realized that I might be able to change my relationship with myself after all. Thank GOD. Through cognitive coaching tools (what I just call thoughtwork), I started to internalize that the thoughts that were plaguing me might not always be objective truth, and were in fact just sentences my brain made up. And with the right framework and a little patience, I could shift the thoughts causing me suffering to thoughts that would serve me better.

After years of hating the way my body looked in the mirror, I finally had a breakthrough where I shifted to “this is a human body” and felt TOTALLY NEUTRAL ABOUT IT. I remember a weekend where I sat down to rest and enjoy hobbies, which had always meant there was a constant narrative of what I should be doing and shaming myself for being lazy, and instead that day my brain just gave me “It’s possible I am allowed to rest right now” and then it was SILENT. 

So it’s safe to say I drank the Kool-Aid and dove deep into the coaching culture. I joined a coaching community, did lots of coaching courses, went to a live coaching event on the other side of the country, the whole shebang. And I loved every frickin second of it, because every day I was blowing my own mind with what I was able to shift in my life.

Past me would have panicked when someone told me what I was doing sounded “a little cult-y.” New me trusted myself enough to know that I could keep myself safe and sane, and if it turned cult-y I would definitely peace out, so they could be wrong. Past me bought into all the terrible thoughts about being an imposter at work and was constantly scared that the next mistake would get me fired. New me is able to find proof that I am safe in the fact that I’ve never been fired for a mistake before, and even if I were fired, I trust myself to find a way to a new job without losing everything. Past me looked in the mirror and thought “I’m so fat and ugly” and got trapped in disordered eating cycles trying to “fix” my body. New me looks in the mirror and thinks “my body is a frickin work of art.” They hear someone say “you might need to diet to fit in your wedding dress” and calmly say “no, I’m not going to compromise my relationship with food and myself for clothing.” Past me scrambled to get away from every uncomfortable emotion and resisted my anxiety and tears until they exploded. New me uses every negative emotion as information, leans into meltdowns, and holds myself with love and compassion as I sob on bathroom floors, knowing that every emotion will pass and no matter how scary it feels, I am safe, I’ve got my own back, and I can figure this out. 

Imma be real, it’s been a journey. I still have a human brain, and it still serves me the old patterns about having a gross chin or meltdowns being dangerous sometimes. But I’ve still noticed massive changes in my relationships with others, how I handle uncertainty and crises, and how I talk to myself.

When I unpacked all of my body image issues, I realized there was still dysphoria under the dysmorphia, so I came to terms with realizing that I was nonbinary and deciding what I wanted that to mean for my life (hilariously, my gender journey also helped my wife realize she was trans). When I stopped resisting every emotion and forcing my way through life, I realized that the noise in movie theaters and crowded places felt physically painful, as did forcing myself to make eye contact with people, and I walked down a whole path of discovering that I was autistic, self-diagnosing, beginning to unmask, and eventually getting officially diagnosed (although self-diagnosis is entirely valid and you don’t need a doctor to prove it to you!). Realizing that I am nonbinary and autistic would never have happened without thoughtwork, because I was searching so desperately for safety that I would never have allowed myself to be that “different.” I’m getting misty-eyed thinking about how much more rich, authentic, and joy-filled my life is as a result of embracing these parts of my identity. 

What I realized when I was trying to sort through autistic tendencies and sensory overload was that the coaching community (and self-help tools on the whole) sorely under-serves autistic adults, and I had to cobble my own resources together mostly from scratch. I found a teacher who focuses on somatic techniques, because trying to think my way out of a sensory meltdown is just Not The Vibe. ADHD focused tools are a little more available because of slightly less stigma, and I was able to adapt some of those concepts to help me, but for the most part I was building my own bridge as I crossed it. And that was exhausting. Rewarding, but exhausting. I also discovered in my coaching community that I loved helping others sort through their own brains, and when I went to the live event I got to the end of the weekend and was still jazzed to coach anyone who wanted it. 

So in this whole journey of learning my brain and understanding socialization and biology’s effects on my brain, I also discovered my passion, my hyperfixation, my life’s work. I don’t want this journey to be as much work for you as it was for me. I want you to have someone who gets where you’re coming from and can sit with you and help you build your own bridge. I want other autistic and ADHD folks to have the tools they need to heal and thrive in a world that wasn’t designed for us. We still live in a world that’s disabling and complicated, but if I feel safe with myself and can give myself the compassion that my inner child needs to heal, the rest of it gets a little easier to manage. 

Coming in the next couple weeks, I want to tell you about a couple of the tools that have helped me improve upon the standard self-help tools and move towards neurodivergent-friendly patterns. Subscribe to my mailing list if you don’t want to miss out!