Hi. My name is Sue and I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder -- ADHD.
Although in my mind, ADHD stands for Absolute Dedication to making Healthy Decisions … for ME.
I was born back when ADHD was a thing, but it wasn’t a talked about, medicated thing.
And this allowed me to do a gazillion crazy things growing up – like when I was 9 years old and my mom moved us to northern Wisconsin from Chicago, I remember distinctly deciding how I would walk into my new 5th grade classroom for the very first time.
First impressions are important, and I wanted mine to be memorable.
So I walked in dragging my feet, with my head down, but looking up as I went to smile and scan the room while raising my eyebrows impishly in contrast to the sad sack character I was portraying.
I also remember that I started speaking really fast to the point where my fellow students would ask me if I was doing it for attention and I was like “no! I’m doing it because I have so many important thoughts I just have to get out!”
The attention was a bonus.
Life up in the Northwoods was a lot different than Chicago. My parents had divorced and mom married a man with four children, so now I lived with my five siblings, four stepsisters, and then my mom had another boy, so if you’re keeping count that was 11 of us in one house. All under the age of 13.
I was living not only between two sets of parents and two states but between two pretty extreme economic and even cultural disparities: Hauling water from the house to the woods in the freezing cold winter before school because our septic lines froze, while on the other, we spent summers in the city and at the same country club at which Michael Jordan was a member and maybe still is. Boxing in the basement with our physically much bigger and scarier stepsisters – the same place where my stepfather hung the deer he shot, versus getting dressed up and going to see Broadway plays like Annie at the Shubert Theatre.
Then high school began and suddenly I was in the same grade and classroom as my stepsister. It was bad enough that my mom had brady-bunched us into sharing a room with our same-aged stepsisters, but now the bullying that had begun at home carried into the classroom and it was unbearable. So I did everything she couldn’t do – AP classes, debate, forensics – and I stopped all social activities and sports.
As you can imagine, I couldn’t wait to leave home for university, and then after that I went even farther, to the other side of the world …. to a completely different place and culture … Hong Kong.
And that’s where I found what felt more like home.
Maybe it was the dichotomy of British and Chinese influences that felt “normal” to me. Or maybe it was how there is not a lot of outward emotion in Chinese culture, and no one asks you your business or they certainly don’t share their own. It was incredibly freeing, and I loved it.
I began to meet people, I got a job, and I met my future husband. I wanted to know everything I could about Hong Kong, so of course I had to learn the language … and then teach it. I learned to play mahjong and then taught that, too.
I worked as a primary school teacher, a writer, an editor, a translator. I am a professional voiceover artist. I have acted in an episode of a TV drama in China. I was a radio DJ and also the weather girl on TVB Pearl. I like to sing and even was paid once for a wedding gig.
I’ve done SO many things professionally, which is so very ADHD, but personally, I tend to stick. One husband – we’ve been married over 30 years and have two children. So I know that I can keep my attention focused on one thing.
And now it’s time to do just that professionally as well. Because there is one thing from my crazy upbringing and my time in Hong Kong that trumps all else, and that is how I’ve learned to ROLL with it.
ROLLing is my framework for happier and healthier relationships with yourself and with others, and your environment, and summed up in what my Chinese mother-in-law taught me:
She said that one must Respect oneself, others and their environment. One must take Responsibility and follow the Rules. One must always be open-minded and objective, for optimal opportunities and outcomes. One does this by Listening, Looking and Learning.
Then you can Love it, Leave it or you learn to Live with it.
I wrote a book called ROLL with it, and conducted seminars which led me to develop The Identity Board and Ball. It led me to life coaching and mind shifting.
When you ROLL with it, life gets easier because you can go farther, faster with better decisions that reflect the real you.
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