Show Notes
Matt Klein thought he was dealing with depression. After a job change and the arrival of a new baby, he found himself in a fog. Listless. Unmotivated. And vaguely “off.” He just didn’t want to do anything. His wife noticed the shift, too. But the depression diagnosis never fully explained it. It wasn’t until he was evaluated as an adult that inattentive ADHD and slow processing speed brought his story into focus.
Matt, a software engineer, shares a story about a door that hung slightly askew — and how intensely it bothered him. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. That crooked door became a metaphor for his experience with undiagnosed ADHD: the mental friction, the fixation, the sense that something was out of alignment.
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Derek Sheen spent decades being told he was difficult, a bad listener, not smart enough — while testing in the top one percentile of his state. That’s ADHD for you.
Journalist Lizzie O’Leary spent decades asking sharp questions for a living. Then the words started disappearing. Brain fog. Surprising rage. A head full of buzzing bees.
Jim Leitch could intubate a patient in the middle of the night — alone, short-staffed, smiling — and feel completely calm. Ask him to follow a pasta recipe? That’s where things got hard: Everyday tasks and executive function challenges.
A former boss once described their first meeting this way: “She showed up late and disheveled, and I hired her anyway.” That’s Sabrina Caluori in a nutshell. Sabrina is the chief marketing officer at Chief, the largest private network for ambitious women. Diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, she describes herself as a contradiction: “High achieving and a hot mess in equal measure” — a leader who can hold an entire company’s strategy in her head but can’t manage her own calendar. Sabrina shares what it’s like to be gifted with ADHD — twice exceptional — and how that experience bonds her to her 2e child. She gets into ADHD burnout, self-doubt, and how the things she once considered character flaws turned out to make her exceptional at reading people and leading teams.
From the outside, Susie Owens looked like she was gliding. Straight-A student, entrepreneur, devoted mom — and exhausted in ways nobody could see. When you’re an ADHD high achiever, masking is a whole job.