Episode 1: A Touch of Imposter Syndrome

Hi friends, join me for the first-ever episode of Odds & Ends of a Thirtysomething ADHDer! I touch on my constant struggles with fitting in and feeling like I belong in my culture, my sexuality, and discovering my ADHD diagnosis. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:10

Hi. Uh, I'm Sammy. It's nice to meet you after 17 different intros that you had to listen to to get here. I'm hoping that you listen to my intro episode because it took forever to get right. Uh, that's kind of the theme of the day. Perfectionism and imposter syndrome. And you know, sometimes you think that things are gonna be super easy because you've seen a million people do them when everybody has a podcast and everyone has a show and everybody has so many thoughts and they're always just chatting. Maybe that's not everybody else's experience, but it's definitely mine. My husband and I are chatty chatty people, and we don't often need someone around to listen, so this podcast format is probably pretty good for me. So when I thought about this podcast, it had been coming to me for about a month, maybe. I am a clinician working in the behavior support specialist field, we're called behavior consultants, they keep changing our names, but basically, I help people to find their goals, usually their parents' goals, more often than not, and we are trying to get them to function better in society. So, my issue with my job position and/or the description that I have to work on is using behavior support and or behavior consulting to quote unquote fix somebody. As an ADHDer, I take some offense to that. So often it's trying to get people to fit into this box of societal acceptance, and that's not super easy. As an ADHDer, I really, really struggle to fit inside of boxes like that. So we're gonna go on a little little journey back through my life. I think when all of this journey started when I was in elementary school, everything was super easy for me. I was always, always underchallenged in school. I don't know if underchallenged is a word, but we're gonna go with it. I was just bored. I was bored all the time. I learned to read super fast. I was always getting in trouble for reading at night. My parents worked really, really early in the morning, so maybe four or five o'clock, and they would always come into my room and see my little light on because I was like just far enough in the book that I had to finish it. I didn't have a choice. I was almost there, I couldn't just put it down for the next day. No no no no no. Doesn't matter that I had to get up for school. Doesn't matter, who cares? I need to finish this book right now. So I was that kid. Interesting fact as well, as an adult, my eye doctor said that one of the reasons I'm so blind is that I read in dark rooms a lot. He can tell. I'm like, well, I am. I made myself a nerd. Thanks. Much appreciation. I was always getting in trouble for reading. When I was at home, I spent so much time at the library, my library card was my gold. I love to imagine, I love to get lost in all these stories that, you know, people had created for people like me. Uh, you know, I grew up probably middle class, lower middle class, so there wasn't like a ton of money lying around to just do whatever. So I spent a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time imagining. I have two older brothers, uh, four and eight years older than me. So our lives were in pretty different positions. I was usually running around playing with my Barbies, playing with my teddy bear Shermy, who I still have. Um, imagining Harriet the Spy was my absolute favorite movie ever. So I went around trying to solve crimes that didn't exist. That is one thing that I used to spend a lot of my time doing. But back to school. So I remember maybe my second or third year, um, I had teachers that were suggesting that maybe my parents should move me to a gifted program. I went to public school. There's nothing wrong with that. My, you know, I was just, I was just a little further ahead. Um, so they suggested that I go to a private school. Uh, the only private school that we could think of, and or that we knew of was our Catholic school. Now, growing up as a Catholic kid, my mom was a CCD teacher. I was in CCD classes every Sunday. I was not vibing. I just didn't want to do that. For whatever reason, I didn't want religion to be every piece of my day. Um, I didn't want to have to go to mass in the middle of class because I it was bad enough to go on Sunday. Uh, I'm not that great of a Catholic. I'm a cultural Catholic, as my husband likes to call me. So I did not end up going to this other school, and I just went to my school and I suffered. And that I suffered, I didn't suffer at all because everything was really easy. Uh when I got to seventh and eighth grade, I was expecting to test into our gifted program, and I did not. I ended up in, I believe it was called block A. Um, block A was kind of where all the leftovers went. That I think that was my first imposter syndrome kind of experience. I really thought that I was hot shit and that I belonged somewhere else, and I did not get into that program. So again, I was in a, you know, kind of base level program learning at the same pace, and I was bored, and uh I was just not getting very far. So, you know, fast forward. High school. I get into some A B classes, I was living my life, and once I got into my AP English class, that's when I started to realize that things might have just been a little bit harder than I was expecting. I think something that I really ran into was not having the same frame of reference that a lot of my friends did. For example, I believe we read Hemingway at some point. Sorry, no shade to the Hemingway people. I think Hemingway is so boring. It's awful. But in this particular story, we were supposed to find the cultural references. Um, I'm sure they have a better name, but I don't remember what it was because I wasn't paying attention. So, you know, they talked about places in New York that were like pretty well known to people, and I had no idea what they were. Everyone was laughing at me because I was like, oh, I totally missed that that reference to this thing that is real. How would I know that? Like, I live in Elkhart, Indiana. I don't understand how I'm supposed to know these things. How do you guys know these things? So I don't know if it was a class thing or just not being raised or uh included in classes where I had to like learn about all this literature and do harder things that I just wasn't aware of so many things going on. So as we went on and I had to do more and more complex things, I was realizing that while I got like pretty decent scores, it seemed so much harder for me than everyone else. For when it came down to doing projects that I just like didn't care about, I really had to dig so so deep into my toes to find the motivation to go through. We read the Iliad, and we had to go through one book at a time and pick out every single character and every single setting and every single theme for every single chapter, and that was the bane of my existence. I remember my mom coming in and watching me do that, and I was just like face down on my desk because I just didn't know what to do, and or I didn't care. I really did not care. One thing that was really humiliating to me, and I actually just told my husband this story the other day. I was reading the Eliad or some other Greek classic, and it was my turn to read out loud. So everybody was going, we were going around the room, and you can kind of you know imagine, okay, well, they have this paragraph, they have this one, so I was kind of counting down. My paragraph was full, chalk full of Grecian names. Let me tell you, that shit is hard. That shit is so hard. It's so hard. So I was just going through sweating, sweating bullets because I knew what was coming. So I started, I like stammered through the first one, I stammered through the second, and my teacher was trying to stop me every step of the way to correct my pronunciation. Ma'am, please. She she was really just like going to it. If you can imagine what Professor Umbridge was, this was kind of my English teacher. She was kind of a monster. Uh so she stopped me just every two seconds, and everybody was just laughing and having the great old time watching me struggle. And so I just started making shit up. I just made the lines even more crazy. I I added more letters, and she was trying so hard. And I believe at some point I just told her, please, for the love of God, just let me finish. Please let me finish this paragraph so I can be done. This you this is painful. It was the worst thing. Uh it was not good. It was not good at all. And that's, you know, I don't know how everyone else in the class just was able to pronounce Gracian names just perfectly, roll off the tongue. Um, that's not that was not my vibe. That was not my bag. I believe as I went through high school is definitely a little bit harder. Um, I didn't realize, you know, there are so many things that I know now looking back. I spent a lot of time alone because I was not just like interest, I was not interested as a lot of people were in the things that we were doing. For example, I was in marching van. I had been in van since I was in fourth grade. I played the clarinet. I did not want to play the clarinet, I wanted to play the saxophone, but my band teacher told me there were too many saxophones on our team. We only had like six people in van, so that's some bullshit. Anyway, so I was not able to play the saxophone as I wanted to, and I was stuck with clarinet. It was fine, you know, it's a perfectly respectable instrument, but saxophone is cool, you know. You can be in a jazz band, you can just add it into random songs, it's awesome. Clarinet's not like that. Clarinet is not as cool. I'm just gonna say it. It's not as cool. I practiced a little bit when I was younger. I was a practicer, but once I got to high school, I had already been doing it for so long, and it really seemed like everyone else was putting it at the top of the priority list to be like Primo Ballerina number one when it came to musician ry. It was like, oh, I really I really want to be first chair, and I was like, I really don't care. I really don't give a fuck. This is very boring. What is going on with you guys? I was too busy like trying to date boys and listen to music and spend time with my friends. I didn't care. I didn't care about whatever it was that they were doing. So always I think something I've struggled with in my life is not being all in on anything. I'm like halfway in on a lot of things. I'm uh, you know, that jack of all trades, master of none. That's me. That's me. I'm sure I'm a master of something. I'm just not master of a lot of things. I feel like I'm mediocre too moderate, and most things that I do. And again, imposter syndrome. I know that I am much better at my job than a lot of other people are. I think I have more qualifications than some people. I, you know, I think I can kind of look outside the box at things a little bit better because I am part of this neurodiversity circle. I think as a person with ADHD and neurodiverse mind, it's easier for me to kind of sympathize with people. So I work with a lot of people um on the spectrum, and you know, a lot of sensory issues and like like frustration tolerance is pretty low. And I look back at my life and realize that I really struggled with a lot of those things as well. I was not diagnosed until I was in my 30s, uh, and a lot of things made a lot more sense to me. So growing up, I remember I would come home from days where I was really overwhelmed, and I'm pretty sure my mom has ADHD as well. Usually it's genetic. You get it from someone, I'm pretty sure it was from my mom. So I would come home in a tornado tizzy, ready to complain about everybody, and everybody who was frustrating me, and all my teachers who were stupid, and all these people who were just like tapping on the back of my chair because I just could not handle it. It was like every day was the end of the world. Uh, I was fairly chill, honestly, but like just when I got home, I needed someone to talk to, someone to understand what I was going through. Um, and for my mom, again, who has ADHD, I'm sure, and she has all of her own stuff going on. So she's at work, she's a manager, she's dealing with all this stuff, high pressure situations, and I'm pretty sure that we were butting up against each other at that time because we had the same needs and neither one of them are getting met. I would just get really overwhelmed with people talking and you know, like not even noises necessarily, but I spent a lot of time on my own. Something that I really enjoyed was being a library assistant for one of my TA positions. So I uh I got to sort books in the library, and usually that was pretty fast for me because I knew what I was doing, and then I would take a nap. I would go and hide somewhere in the library, and I would take a nap. Naps are my favorite thing, that was awesome. Uh, another TA position I had for pretty long in high school. Um, I TA'd for my photography. Sh. My photography teacher, Mr. Grove. He was awesome. I got to run passes, I got to be in the dark room all by myself a lot of the time, just reading books, developing film. You see, children. I went to school in the 2000s and I used a camera with film. So we had a dark room, and I got to go in there and be a little mad scientist. It was really fun. Uh, thinking back to it, it's really unfortunate that people don't get to do that anymore. Um, unless you know you really have the equipment and the money to do it. But the process of doing that is that you have to grab your film roll, you have to go back in this absolutely dark room to turn the lights off, and you have to pull, you have to like pop the top off of your film canister, pull it out, you have to wrap all of your film around this little ch thing. I don't even know how to explain it, but it's like a big roll that you have to like roll your film into because it needs space for the developer. So you have to do this all by yourself in the dark. And if you get it wrong, you gotta take it out and start again. You're completely you can't see anything. So once you do that, you have to put it in another canister, you have to close it, you have to put you have to put your little tight lock on it, and they can turn the lights on, but you have to make sure that everyone in the room is done. And usually there were like eight of us in this little closet, and it was great fun. But you put that in, then you can put in your developer, la la la, it has to sit for so long, then you can take your film out, and it's uh you gotta hang it up to dry. The next day you cut it up, you put it in a little sleeve, you can make a contact print so you can see it all, choose what you want and do your enlargements and then do more chemistry. You gotta put your big paper and the developer and the wash and the blah blah blah. Anyway, it was super fun, hyper focus, very serious. So that was one of my favorite things to do having that position as a TA. It was amazing. I got to write a lot, uh, which was kind of a a godsend because I am a not a closeted writer. I'm a writer, but I was much more active in writing back then. I've had a lot of goals in my life, but one of the main things is to write a book. I still haven't done that. My mom tells me all the time that I need to, and I agree, but I just can't get there. My issue is that I have great stories and I start them wonderfully, but then I realize, once I read them back, that I have to finish them. I'm the person who has to tell you how the book ends, and that's the hard part. I can always get it started, but I can't finish it. Um, you know, things to be done for another day. I went to school for magazine journalism. That was another place. Imposter syndrome loomed large. Uh, so I was always into creative writing. I was a really good writer, very creative. My brain was always going, you know, imagination is strong with this one. So I decided that instead of going for creative writing, I would go for journalism because it seemed a little bit more respectable and that it would make it easier for me to get a job. Spoiler alert, my friends. Uh the digital age came. My magazine journalism major is not worth shit. I mean, it's worth something, but it's definitely not worth what I thought it was gonna be worth. Uh, I had an internship at a magazine in Fort Wayne, which was really cool because my my magazine was very small. There was only like six or seven of us, and I got to write cover stories, I got to write all kinds of stuff, which was amazing, but after college I just could not find a job. Not a lot of magazines hiring in El khart, Indiana. So I did not go far, and I also remember asking my professor for a recommendation, and he told me, Well, I don't really have anything to say about you. Your writing is not that special. Um, so I know that magazine journalism slash journalism in general was not really my bag. I think photojournalism probably would have been a better choice for me, but I didn't didn't have any writing involved. So I did photography as my minor, and that actually was really fun. My minor was digital publishing. In digital publishing, I got to learn how to do graphic design. I got to learn how to work more with photography, I got to learn how to do screen printing and all kinds of cool stuff like that that I still use to this day. So I ended up graduating with my magazine journalism major. I had a digital publishing minor with Spanish and sociology. So I was into sociology, I was more into psychology. One of the things that I didn't realize until I was in my senior year of college was that psychology was the lane that I was supposed to be in. I had checked myself into therapy after having a pretty dramatic breakup with the person that I thought I was gonna marry. We were together for about three and a half years, and you know, it just fell apart. He was not interested in the way that I was interested, and I had a lot more motivation than he did. Let's just call spay to spay. So I checked myself into therapy because in the six months that I was kind of trying to make it work, I told this guy, you know, if you don't see a future with me, it's time for you to go. And he said, no, I want to stay with you. In that six months, he did not want to stay with me, it just kept getting worse, and I kept trying harder and harder and losing myself. So at the end of all that wasted time, I decided I need to go to therapy. When I was in therapy, I really realized that, you know, talking to people and giving people that space to advocate for themselves was really cool and really interesting. But that was my senior year. And by then I had taken a psychology class or two, but I was like, you know, I can't reroute my entire life at this point. I've already been here for four years. I was getting really stir crazy being in school. I was just not having fun anymore. I really needed to get out. I took my magazine journalism major interlect. Um, luckily for me, after I came home from college in 2011, I stayed there for a little while. I was a barista at Starbucks. I was barista for a lot of places over my college age. That is something that I am very good at. I am not mediocre at being a barista. I am top-notch. I uh stayed in Indiana, nope, still in Indiana. I stayed in Elkhart for about maybe a year, year and a half after I graduated. I went to go work in a photo studio, which I was really excited about. It was my first big girl job. I was making decent money for a college graduate, I was doing what I liked. Um, there wasn't a ton of creative freedom. It was just a family portrait studio, but I got to go to North Carolina for a training, which was really hard and awful. But I got to travel for work, which made me feel really cool. I had this photography job, and I kept it for a while. I used that job to kind of piggyback me down to Indianapolis, where I still live today. Great choice. So I moved down to Indianapolis. I started working at this photography place. And one after another after another, I just realized what I was doing was not where I needed to be. So I went from that photography studio a year after something like that. I went to a temp agency. Um at that tape temp agency, I worked at Wiley Publishing, which was awesome. Uh well, I thought it was. It was a publishing house, and that was part of my dream to go work in a publishing house, either to edit or to write or to do graphic design, whatever they they would take me for, I would do. So I was doing book returns as a temp at this time. And I was just happy to be there. I was just happy to be involved. I wasn't really making a lot of money. I wasn't really doing anything that took a lot of brain work. Um, but eventually they opened up a position to like a permanent position. And I applied, I got it, but in the interview they asked me, you know, why do you want to work here? And the position was basically a customer service position. And I was like, well, it's a publishing house, you know, get my foot in the door of someone, something I really want to do. And uh they were like, well, you know, we're really looking for someone who's really passionate about customer service. Like, ugh, who's passionate about customer service? Okay. So I had that in the back of my brain, and it's really seemed like they wanted to pigeonhole me and keep me in that position for the rest of my life. So I was actively interviewing somewhere else. So instead of getting or ta instead of taking that job, I decided to work at an insurance company that a friend of mine had gotten me into. Um, at this insurance company where I was for so many years of my life, I got to reconnect with my college roommate, and she's one of my best friends now, so I'm happy that that happened. I got to meet two new best friends, who again I'm still very involved with. Um, it was another one of those big girl jobs. I get paid a pretty good salary. I worked in the call center, which was hell, and I hated it, and I only worked in the call center for about a year and a half, but boy oh boy, it felt longer than that. People are awful. They are so rude, and I do not enjoy talking to people. That was my nightmare. I would get in trouble all the time at my job because I could not adhere to time. So we were like very locked in to our schedules. So you had a break at this time, and your, you know, your pee break was here and your lunch break was there, and this was your off-the-c off-the-phone time to work on stuff. I was always out of adherence because agents obviously didn't care about our schedules. So I was always getting in trouble for that. Um, my other issue was it was one of the people who took the mouse claws on the floor consistently. And they're like, Why are you so fast? Like, because I don't want to talk to these people, bro. I would get on the phone, I would solve their problems, I would get off the phone. I don't know what the rest of y'all are doing. Like, what what a waste. What are we doing here? I said, Oh yeah, you should be staying on the phone longer. For what? I was taking calls too fast, apparently, even though I was solving all the problems. My quality was great. They just didn't like that I was never in adherence. That was one of the first times that this went sideways for me. From there, I transferred into my job. Uh, same company, but I was working for insurance cleans. That was a lot less chaotic. I didn't have to talk to people, I got to sit in my cube and listen to my iPod all day. That was pretty dope. Uh danced to saying, I decorated the shit out of my cube. I love to personalize the space. Um, so I did that for about three years. Uh and I always, always, always struggled with productivity. Again, not ever something that I had to think about in my ADHD uh journey because I didn't know. I didn't know what it entailed, I didn't know what it looked like, didn't know that ADHD for women shows up in really different ways. So I was just struggling forever to be productive. Um, I think a lot of that was that I was too busy connecting with my friends. Um, you know, I had some close friends there, and we spent a lot of time just I aming about our life and trauma and all these other things we probably definitely should not have been doing on our company servers. Uh eventually, after struggling with productivity and doing all these other things, whatever, whatever, I was let go. Not necessarily for any fault. Of course it was my fault, but not necessarily for that. I got caught on some technicality and it was dumb. They laid off like 300 other people about a month after, so they were just dreaming of that. So that led me into unemployment. Unemployment for four to five months. Let me tell you, unemployment for someone with like rejection sensitive dysphoria is really awful. It feels good after you're in it for a while to know that you can just kind of do whatever you want to. But when you get let go, it is just the worst feeling. It's so demoralizing. You know, you like measure up all of the things that you think you're worth, and you just kind of knock yourself down and think all the time, well, if I hadn't done this, if I hadn't done that, oh man, I really, you know, this just doesn't feel good. So for four to five months, I was unemployed, just kind of flitzing around doing whatever I was trying to do. I was trying to make my time worth it. So I would volunteer every now and then at a food bank to remind myself that like I have a home, I am not too desolate, you know, I have unemployment, whatever, whatever. Should I have been getting food from the food bank? Yeah, probably, honestly. But just trying to keep things in perspective. I did that for a while and eventually I ended up at another insurance company. So in training, this was like March 2020. Hmm. Think about that. So March 2020. I was talking to someone who was helping our training class, and she was letting me know that the company will pay for your education. And I was like, what? She's like, Yeah, I'm getting my psychology degree and the company's paying for it. I was like, oh my god. So I started looking into that. We got sent home for COVID, of course, and never went back. So I worked I worked from home for three years. Uh, just like at the height of COVID, I was in the office for like a month, and then they sent us home, and yeah, that was that. We never went back. I had decided to look into getting my master's degree, and I wasn't sure if I could get my master's in psychology because I had definitely not studied much in my undergrad. Um, so I applied at an online college, and they said, yeah, it's okay. If you, you know, your undergrad could have been in anything, it really doesn't matter. You just have to take some intro classes and then you'll be good to go. So I enrolled in my psychology program. I decided to do organizational, there was another word, oh my god, industrial and organizational psychology, which is basically HR stuff. Um, just to keep it, you know, kind of locked in on work and make it relay back. So I took that. After five years, I got my master's finally. Took a long time because I was only taking one or two classes a term every other term because that's all they would pay for. I was at that company for a while. I ended up leaving and working in a nonprofit. Um, that's kind of where all of this behavior management thing started. I worked in a school-based situation for about three years, and then maybe last year or the year before, I transitioned out to a company where I work with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I love it. It was a great transition. Long of the short, my friends, is that all of these paths that you take that seem so unrelated, and you're jumping through all these hoops, and you just don't feel like you belong where you are, and everything feels kind of pointless and meaningless, and like this whole is never gonna end, it's probably gonna lead you somewhere, correct? I never thought that going to school for journalism, I would end up where I am. Right now, I am making a lot more money than I ever have before. I make my own schedule, I really enjoy the flexibility of my job, and the crazy craziest thing about this is I've had production issues at just about all of my jobs, like having to stay focused in things I don't care about, or I'm just not interested in at the time, is really, really difficult. So for this particular job, if I don't work, I don't get paid. Which makes sense. So, you know, I have to do billable hours, I have to set everything up. If I'm not seeing people face to face, then I'm doing podcasts or whatever. Um, and that's kind of a wonderful thing because in every other job that I've had, I've had to research on my own time, essentially. So I have had to research off the clock, I would never be able to get like production hours for these things, and now this job that I'm in currently has all of that included, so I can research my little heart away. As long as it has something to do with my person and their needs, I'm good to go. So basically I get to do everything that I love for money, and I love it, it's great. Long story short, I have made a lot of stumbles in my life, so I thought. And as a 30-something, I tell people all the time who are younger than me, you know, I lived life, I don't know if I'd say it to the fullest, but I lived life pretty unapologetically. So I had, you know, that that dude that I said I was with in college after that, my senior year. I was single from 2007 to 2017, maybe, something like that. It was a long time. It was a long time. A nice spread of about 10 years, and in that 10 years, I did some traveling. I saved up enough money after being in a really weird financial situation, and I bought a house. Um, my nice condo that I still live in. It's wonderful. Um, you know, I wasted some time with some guys who didn't deserve my time. Um, I also discovered in 2017-ish, nope. 20. It doesn't matter. Late 2020s. Um, I really leaned into the fact that maybe I wasn't so straight. Um, there have been signs my whole life that I missed a lot. I would have dreams about kissing girls, and I'd be like, that's weird. Hmm, I don't know. I remember the first crush I had without really realizing it was a girl that I worked with at my first job in a hotel. She was just so pretty and so vivacious, and I would look forward to going to work every day to talk to her. And I don't know why it was just like, oh man, she's just wonderful. Like, I just you know, I really look forward to going to work and make me smile because she's there. And I was like, that's a normal thing, right? Yeah, kind of. Uh but you know, if you think about it too long, you might question why. So, you know, just some things I didn't realize. And funny enough, as my friend group transitioned into adulthood, we had all been friends since college. There's like 10 of us, oh, a little core group of ten of us and their prospective partners over years over the years. So, one after another, our friends started to discover that that straight word was not really what we all were. So some people came out, um, they were dating each other. Uh, we found out in other more traumatic ways for some other people, but long of the short, of our group of ten, about nine of us are not straight. We're definitely a little bit in the middle to all the way on one side of the Kinsey scale. If you don't know what the Kinsey scale is, it is a scale of sexuality from one to six, essentially. So one is like pretty heterosexual, and six is like pretty homosexual. I personally don't believe that anyone is a one or six. I definitely think people kind of fall in the middle somewhere. Um, but maybe that's just me. As a bisexual person, I can't imagine being any other way. I can't imagine kind of like only thinking this way. Um, and I think part of the issue that I run into in my adult life, not with my friends so much, but other people, older generations, it takes longer to explain to them that yes, I am married to a man. I am in a straight presenting relationship. However, that does not detract from the fact that I am attracted to females as well. Something that I learned as I was getting closer to like a gaming group. That's kind of the nice thing about my generation. Uh, over COVID, I found a a couple on TikTok. I found them on TikTok and they were really funny, and I just really admired their relationship because they're so silly together, and you know they're best friends, and it's just really interesting to kind of get opened up into their life. And I remember thinking these people would really be cool to have be friends with, and I actually am friends with them now, which is awesome. I went out to see them a few years ago that TikTok led us there, but Preston was a streamer, like video game streamer, and I started to follow this uh I was in his gaming community and the Discord, all that stuff. And in that community were a lot of fellow bisexuals, and I had somebody kind of explain to me the fact that even though I was physically attracted to women, but not necessarily romantically attracted to women, I was still on that bisexual scale. And I was like, holy shit, really? Oh my god, that explains so much because I just didn't feel like I belonged. And that imposter syndrome of my life, it's all or nothing. You know, you're either all the way into dudes or you're all the way into girls, but if you're in the middle, you just you're just whatever, you're experimenting, blah, blah, blah. Um, I had a night in college where one of my friends, who's now married to a woman, was telling me, you know, I make out with girls all the time. And I had always had that in my brain that I wanted to do. And I was like, that's totally unreachable. Like, that's just not something that can happen. And we talked at night and totally sober, she's like, it's fine, we'll make out today, we'll knock it off your list, it'll be awesome. And I was like, fuck yeah, great, love this for me. So the night went on, and I was just like, okay, when is this happening? And it happened, and it was awesome. And I was with another one of my friends who had also never kissed a girl, and she kissed me, and she was awesome. And I was just making out with everybody that night, making out with girls all over the place, and it was the best night of my life. And it never happened again after that in that particular situation. I was like, oh damn, that was really cool. What have I been doing this whole time? Wasting my time with boys. Ugh. Um, so I went on in my life, kind of again, being fully aware that that was really awesome, but like having this kind of confusion of the fact that I didn't really want to date a girl. I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but that's called aromantic. I am not romantically attracted to females. Um, I did try to date one girl one time, ever, and I got really stressed out. I got really stressed out really fast. And then uh on the other hand, she also had never been into girls. Um, but we kissed at a wedding, and she was telling my friend that I was really cool and really sweet and really sexy and all that, whatever. And so we reached out and we were gonna hang out. And for whatever reason, I think she got spooked on her own self and kind of like accused me of being like some crazy lesbian who was just forcing this on her. And I was like, girl, I don't even want to like date you like that. You're the one who talked about us hanging out. So, anyway, that was like my one foray into trying to date a female, and that went really, really sideways because she said a lot of mean things to me, and she didn't even really know me. Anyway, the funny thing is that, you know, growing up I didn't really feel like I fit in one category or another. And so finding that out and finding out that like I mean, just having my identity validated when I was in my 20s, 30s, however old I was, was really powerful. In the same way that being diagnosed with ADHD was really powerful because so many things in my past just started clicking together. And I was like, oh man, this really makes sense now. Like, you know, not even the fact that this is like my whole life and liking girls is not this the top of my priority list for everything, but it's just good to know pieces about yourself. It's good to know the whys behind all of these things that made me feel like such a freak, you know, in the same way that ADHD, like really trying hard for the same results for everything, everyone else, when it just came so easy to them was another ADHD thing, and like feeling really stuck inside my body sometimes, just with sensory issues, and I don't I can't wear this shirt because it's got tags, and I can't wear these socks because I feel like I want to rip my skin off, and you know, like all those kinds of things that just made me feel fucking weird all had an origin, and that was pretty wonderful. Um, still feel like an imposter sometimes in the scale of not straightness. Um, but as my friends have all kind of gotten on the same level as me, it's nice to feel like we're in this together and we can just we don't have to explain it. I don't have to have a label that anyone understands, I don't have to come out to anybody, I don't have to keep it a secret anymore. Like I came out to my parents and they were like, well duh, we've known. I'm like, well shit, why didn't you tell me? So, you know, there were just so many things that I was like only half living all my truths that I didn't know about, and it was really validating to get labels for these things. Again, not that you even need labels, but finding all of these explanations for things that just felt so loose and flying in the wind are really wonderful. Imposter Syndrome. It's all gonna come back to that. That's that is the theme of our day. Um, something that I've really struggled with was getting this podcast going. I I mean I've had the equipment for maybe a I don't know, a few weeks now, and I've been putting off starting because I was terrified that I wasn't gonna have anything to say. I love talking, I'm so good at talking. I knew I was gonna have lots of things to say. But is anyone gonna want to hear them? You know? And if they don't, then that's okay. This is just something I'm doing, you know, for me. I don't need anyone to validate me for this. But if they do, awesome. You know, I think I have experience in a lot of different places in my life that something I say somewhere is gonna connect with someone. Um, even just telling my friends that I was gonna do this, they were really excited to hear it. And I know a lot of my friends are uh also in ADHD and probably on the spectrum and have asked to come and join me someday, which will be really fun, I think. But you know, just having thoughts every day that make you feel just so weird and out of sorts, it's nice to have somewhere to put them. Something that I also struggle with, and I think that I'll I'll kind of expand on all these things a little bit more down the line. But one thing, part of my identity that I've always kind of struggled with. Uh I'm a Puerto Rican who was born in Indiana. I know there's a lot of us because a lot of my cousins were born here. But as a Puerto Rican born in Indiana, you have a lot of questions. We are part of the diaspora, but people from the island look at us differently. I grew up in a house with my my two brothers are named Cesar and Jesus. Very, you know, not white names. My name is Samantha. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that doesn't quite fit. My last name does, but my first name not quite. So already there, you know, you can say it with an accent, but it's not a Puerto Rican name. It's not a Hispanic name by any stretch of the imagination. So growing up, my dad has always, always, always had a pretty heavy accent. He was born on the island, and he came here when he was about 15, maybe. Uh he went to Chicago from Puerto Rico, he was there for a while, he met my mom, etc. etc. Somehow they ended up in Indiana. My mom was born in Chicago, also Puerto Rican. We are all 100% Puerto Rican. Uh she was born in Chicago, spoke English as her first language. Eventually, her parents decided to move them to the island because they were not learning Spanish, so they moved to the island when they were young, kind of lost. Other English and had to start over again. Eventually, my mom moved back to Chicago with the family, and her and my dad met somewhere along the line. So Spanish was always spoken in my house. Always, always, always. I knew Spanish fluently, probably when I was like four or five. The story goes that my parents were talking about a surprise party for me. Um, they were talking about the details, and I was sitting in the backseat just listening, absorbing everything. And at some point I asked them about the details for my party. And I was like, oh, that's where we're going? When is that happening? And they turned around me shook. They were shook. They're like, oh shit, she understands us. No. How will we lie? So I understood everything really well. But when it came to speaking, I don't know if it's because I didn't learn it when I was little and I wasn't switching between the two. I wasn't like super fluent in speaking. Um that kind of stunted me going forward. And it wasn't for lack of trying, I guess, but none of us really spoke well. My brothers didn't either. You know, we we could if we had to, but you know, we didn't speak it super fluently. So as I was growing up, I remember my mom really trying to get me to speak, and I'm just so stubborn that I really don't like to be corrected. I mean, who does? But I'm just really bad at it. So I remember once upon a time, I think I was in seventh grade, my mom took my phone away for a week because I wouldn't speak to her in Spanish. So I just didn't. For a week I was just hateful, and I spoke so much English, and eventually I had to give in and say like three words. And she thought that that would that would do it, but it didn't. My mom sent us to Puerto Rico for the summer for like two or two months when I was in seventh second grade. Sorry, not seventh grade, second grade, so our grandma could teach us Spanish, but she was so excited to have someone to speak English with that she did not teach us a lick, not one lick of Spanish. So to this day, I have taken Spanish in school, and uh Spanish that they teach in school is not remotely the same as Puerto Rican Spanish. We have a flair about us. We speak Spanglish, we make up words, our words are not the same as other people's, our dialect is very different, even on the island itself. The dialect is different from San Juan to the Bajios to wherever to you know the poorer areas and whatever, whatever. But like San Juan, they're a little bit more uh a little bit more formal, and everywhere else they're not. So even just in the island, which is not a huge place, Spanish is very different. So I have never really spoken, I think, just out of spite. And that doesn't make me feel good. Um, you know, when I've met other people, other Hispanic people, they've kind of been like, it's part of your culture, you have to embrace it, you have to accept it. It's such a wonderful thing. And I'm like, you know, in theory, yes, but I'm so spiteful that I can't get over it. It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm like so far gone now. I'm so in the weeds that it's like really hard to switch course. Um, my best friend is very, very white, white man from Cincinnati. He speaks Spanish wonderfully. My parents love him, he's always spoken better Spanish than me. Um, my husband is an African-American man, also speaks pretty fluently. But I got the lick on him because I can understand a lot more than they can. Uh, I think the problem is that everyone tells me to practice, but I'm really self-conscious. I don't like getting things wrong. I like being the smartest person in the room. I'm often not. I'm not the smartest person in the room, but I like to feel like it. So when I speak and I get things wrong and people correct me, I'm like, forget it. I'm never speaking Spanish again. Forget it, I'm done. So that's been my issue my whole life. And as a Puerto Rican in Indiana, these kinds of things come up pretty often. Um, we're also in a time right now where being Hispanic or brown is making you a pretty big target. Uh, not that that hasn't always been the case, but you know, with this administration, being brown is a weapon now. Um, you know, something that I'm definitely probably going to do a hundred percent is speak about politics. Because I am I mean no one is unaffected by politics. If they think they are, they're lying to themselves. Um, but let's just get on the table in case you hadn't put these things together yet. I'm a pretty liberal person. I am not a straight person. I am not a white person. I am not a person who is about taking rights away from other people, uh, or removing them. Uh, to places that you think they shouldn't belong. I have uh an imposter syndrome, I guess, with my own skin color. My whole life I've been lighter than my brothers, my parents, my family. I am one of the lightest skin toned people for whatever reason. Um, I've got green eyes, I'm like the black sheep of the family. My brothers and my parents both have brown eyes, I have green eyes, like my curls are more curly, whatever, but my skin is lighter. You know, Puerto Rican, if you don't know, uh, we are a mix. We're a mix of everything. Uh, we're a hundred percent mud, as some would say. I in my genetics, I have I have African roots, I have Spanish roots, I have indigenous Puerto Rican roots, I have kind of roots from I mean, I have a lot of Mediterranean in me. Um I'm kind of a little bit of everything, a little bit of everything. So it's really difficult on the census and things when they say, what is your race or what is your ethnicity? And I can't mark a box because uh Hispanic is like its own category. And when it comes to race, they say that Puerto Ricans are supposed to click white. We are not white. We are, yes, we have a lot of Spanish dialect to be fair, but we are also a lot of other things. We are indigenous people, we are from Africa, we have a lot of DNA, and it's really hard to debate that with people who don't understand. And I'm like, I do you want to see myancestry.com? Because I'll pull up my map for you. I will. I am not a white person. While I am white passing, I am not white. Also, I have my winter white on right now, so come summertime, people will start to see me the color that I'm supposed to be. I was born in Indiana, man. I I don't see the sun very often. I can't help it. I can't help it. Also, I burn really easily. But that has always been an issue. The wonderful part is when I go to Puerto Rico, because Puerto Ricans are every color, every size, everyone just talks to you like you belong there. So when I'm there, people speak to me in Spanish and I get so excited because my people know me. My people know that I belong there. Uh, but here I run into kind of not fitting nicely into any box. When I was growing up, I had a few Mexican friends that I hung out with, but like I didn't quite fit with them because I couldn't speak Spanish well, or I just, you know, I refused to. So I was kind of on the outskirts of that group. Even I had white friends that didn't quite understand, you know, the Hispanic parts of me. I grew up in that same box forever. You know, I was surrounded by a lot of white friends, and they didn't quite get all of the things that I was going through. Um, I remember getting into an issue with my, not even my friends, with people in the honors English class. We were reading a letter and somebody had really, really poor English, and everybody was just cracking up and oh my god, this person is so illiterate, and whatever, whatever. But the way that it read to me was like a person from somewhere else, another country of origin, another language of the first, their native language was their first language on English. That's how the letter read to me. And in this class, I was the only one to say, excuse me, you guys are laughing and hee-hee ha ha ha ing about this person, but I don't think that you understand. If you were dropped into another country, you wouldn't know shit. You wouldn't know how to speak, you wouldn't know how to write, you wouldn't know how to read, and you'd look like the idiot, and nobody would give you any extra help, hopefully. Like, you know, you're just no in-between, and they just said, Well, you're being dramatic, who cares? This doesn't even matter. I'm like, well, my dad has a really heavy accent, and you know, like people don't always understand him, and they're like really ignorant about it, and you know, just because you can't speak English perfectly doesn't mean you're stupid or whatever it is that you're implying. So I was always really sensitive about that, and people thought that I was just being dramatic about it. Kind of circling back while I was growing up, the other thing that was happening in my schools, I was pulled out of my classes every year, multiple times a year, to prove that I could speak English. I do not speak Spanish well. That has never been an issue for me. However, my last name is pretty Hispanic, and on my attendance record or whatever school records, we had clicked that we spoke Spanish in our house. So, because of that, every year the school system would pull me out and put me through this really stupid test with really innocuous questions. Um, one thing I will forever remember. Uh, because I, you know, you don't think about this when you're young growing up. Uh, there were some pictures. So, like the tip of the anchor, they were pointing to the very tippy tip of the anchor. There's a name for that. I still don't fucking know what it is. You know, they were like, oh, you don't know this name. Hmm. And then there was like, you know, the step on a ladder. A rung. I know that one now. But uh at the time in elementary school, I don't fucking know what a rung was. It was a ladder, is it a place to step on? It's got a name. Whatever. So there were a lot of questions like that. That like seemed kind of impossible to pass if you I don't know. I don't even know what your quality qualifications are to pass this thing. Um, I had to take tests like that every year, forever. And my maybe my junior or senior year, I think it was my senior year, they went to go pull me out of my algebra class. My algebra class is very difficult. My teacher wasn't she went too fast, she didn't make any damn sense, and I could not afford to miss a minute of her lecture because I would not follow what the fuck she was saying. So they pulled me out of class, and I said, No, I won't be going. One of the things about this, they said every year they would send a letter to my house saying, Well, you know, it's really recommended that you take English as a second language courses because you're not fluent. Pitch, I don't even speak Spanish. What are you talking about? So every year they would tell me that I should take ESL. And so, yes, my senior year they went to go pull me out of my algebra class, and I refused. I said no. And they said, Excuse me? I said, no, I'm not going. You guys are wasting my time. I am fluent in English, I don't speak Spanish, really. I'm in a Spanish class. Like, I'm trying to learn how to speak Spanish, but you're not wasting my time anymore. I'm not going. They're like, well, it's really gonna affect our schools, blah, blah, blah. I don't give a book. I'm going back to class, bye. So I went back to my algebra class and carried on with my life. And I started telling other students of the Hispanic variety what I was doing, and they all started refusing as well. This is where my life as an activist started. So, you know, every time that would happen, I would call my mom, she would call the superintendent, she would tell them, leave my daughter alone. Like, I don't understand why you're pulling her out of class every time she doesn't speak Spanish. You guys are suggesting we take these ESL classes, you're wasting her time. She is trying to learn, and you keep pulling her out of class to make her take these stupid fucking tests every goddamn year. My mom doesn't curse, so I embellished a little bit. Goddamn, it's like her least favorite curse word. Sorry, Mom. So that was something I had to deal with every single year. I also remember my freshman year, we had an African-American principal, shame on him, who decided to pull all the Hispanic people out of the class and into a lecture hall to tell us how far behind the rest of the school we were from everyone else. I'm in English classes, I'm an honors English student, I'm an honors a lot of things student, and I asked in this thing, in this particular presentation, excuse me, did you pull out the low performing Caucasian students? No. Did you pull out the low performing or any performing African American students? No. Did you pull out anybody else for anything? No. Also, it's not about low performing versus high performing Hispanics. You just pulled us all. Yeah. Why? So I had to have a nice chit-chat with my mom again. She called the superintendent. Um, I don't know if it was because of what I did, but that principal no longer worked at our school after that year. I'd like to think I had something to do with that. Probably not. You know, whatever. All my life has been fighting this fight of not being Hispanic enough and being too Hispanic for some people, being white passing, being brown passing. It doesn't really matter. I'm not good enough for anyone's standards, it seems. I uh um have always struggled with again being white passing, and you know, people who are darker than me saying, well, obviously you're gonna have it easier than we do. And I'm like, okay, well, while that may be true, you also need to realize that to people who are white, I don't pass at all. Like, I have a very brown last name, I have curly hair and darker skin. Okay, darker, no caramely skin, you know, I don't look white. I get asked all the time if I'm mixed, which I mean technically as a Puerto Rican, that's what I choose anymore. Just I hit other on the uh the race category because I don't fit anywhere else. So, you know, I I someone always thinks that there's something off about me or something different, and I constantly have to prove this. If I'm Hispanic enough, I'm Puerto Rican enough, I'm white enough, I'm straight enough, I'm not straight enough, whatever. So my life has just been constantly a race of people trying to put me in a box that I don't belong in. So that is kind of the reason that we're here. Um I have a lot of thoughts in my brain all the time, and they kind of just roll all over the place, and you know, disjointed, jointed, whatever jointed. I just really want to reach out to people that might be in the same situation as me. Not even necessarily, you know, a brown person or whatever, whatever. Just just feeling like you don't fit and knowing that eventually you're gonna make your own lane. I have made my own lane my whole life. I've always been my own person. I, you know, have given a minimal flux about what other people think about me. I've always worn bright colors that don't match much to my brother's chagrin. They were always upset because they were very serious about people liking them in their appearance, and I'm over here showing up to school in bright colors with flowers in my hair, and they're like, what is happening? You went to school like that? I'm like, yeah, whatever. Also took my uh my school picture like that once. So my hair with my little halo of flowers is forever mortalized to my yearbook. You know, I've always just marched to the beat of my own drum, and I think a lot of that has to do with never really fitting into those traditional roles of anything, even in our house. Before I met my husband, I met at, you know, I moved into my house by myself, and I have friends that have helped me, you know, to do some around the housework because I can't do it all by myself. My dad helps me too. But my life has constantly been how can I do this by myself? How can I fill in these blanks by myself? Because I don't like asking for help. I don't like not being able to do something. You know, I'm gonna fill in these gaps, I'm gonna do it on my own. So I have done a lot of housework, I've done a lot of home improvement alone, you know, pretty much anything. My life, my mantra in life is ah, I don't know how to do it, but I'll figure it out. That's it. That's the whole gig. I'll figure it out. When I did meet my husband, I in the beginning was really scared that I wasn't gonna be able to mesh well with another person because I have been independent for so long, living on my own and doing whatever I wanted to on my own. But the magical part was I married the right person who is the same. We had both really been kind of on our own wavelengths doing our own thing and never really fitting. And he too has ADHD. Our flavors of ADHD are a little different, so you know, we kind of click or kind of bash heads on that on sometimes, but you know, there are bigger problems that people could have in life. I found the right person. I found the right person who could stay in my lane. We created our own lane together, you know. We're really weird. We are always singing and laughing, and it's like a big sleepover every day. It's pretty wonderful. But I got lucky to find the right person that I didn't really have to make a lot of changes for, and that is something that I kind of bring up to a lot of the people that I work with, you know, like we are so ingrained to just rush to the finish to find whatever it is that is gonna make us feel okay right now instead of waiting and developing a life that you want. Like, you know, taking jobs that we don't care about or being with people we don't care about or spending time with friends who don't make us feel good. Uh, you know, it's just preach the whole time to just like make it work for now or whatever instead of like making your own path. And that is something that I will always, always tell people to do. You know, I was single for a long time in my 30s, and I tell people that I meet now like women in their 20s or 30s that I work with or friends or whatever. You know, this time in your life will sometime come to a close. I promise. You know, but until you get there, do what you want, dude. Stop worrying about what other people are thinking, do the job, go on the trip, listen to the thing, go to the movie by yourself, go to a concert by yourself, wear the shit that makes you feel weird, you know. Like if it if you think you look good, wear it. Who cares, dude? The it life is too short. Life is way too short to care about what other people think, and I was conditioned for that very early, considering my brothers thought I was a big door. So I got I got training pretty pretty early, and uh I've always kind of done my own thing, and I will continue to do my own thing. But yeah, I was glad to find a husband who is also a weirdo. We're equally weird and we make it work. So in my older 30s, I think my imposter syndrome most of the time is, you know, I can talk myself out of it, knowing that everything that I have gone through and everything I worked for, I earned, you know, through sweat, blood, tears, humiliation, wasted time. I've earned it all. And, you know, the rooms that I am in are rooms that I have worked for. I've been seeing a lot of TikToks lately. Um, on this beautiful side of TikTok where a lot of first generation Latinas are getting either their bachelor's degrees or their master's degrees, and you know, we kind of all put the statistics out there that at least, you know, a little while ago, we're 8% of master's holders were Hispanic or Latinas. There's so few of us. And I have that, you know, I worked for that. I did what I could. I went through school in my undergrad. I made a lot of money. I put in the work while I was working full-time, I earned that. I belong in the rooms that I walk into. And the fact that my voice is loud and my voice is strong, not everybody likes that. I'm not everybody's cup of tea, whether at work, whether in relationships or friendships, you know, like I take up the space because I earned it. And like at the end of the day, I know that that's the truth. But on the days where it's hard and I'm doubting myself and I'm feeling like shit, it's hard to remember that. And the fact that, you know, I did go to school and I did work through all of the things that I work through and I've experienced all of these things in my professional life, my personal life that have given me all of the tools I needed to scrape my way out at the bottom and make something happen for myself. You know, I belong where I am. And this is not the end of my trajectory. I think that it's important to always try to better yourself, to learn more, to be more compassionate and be more smart and be more emotionally open and just, you know, there's no such thing as like a finished product. I'm always grating, like bone. So I think that my rambling and my bouncing around has been many. I think that as we go along, things will get more focused. Maybe, probably not, honestly. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me. I hope that you join me in the future for all of the things that are coming. It's been real. Bye guys.