A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD: Embrace Neurodiversity, Live Boldly, and Break Through Barriers Paperback – July 1, 2019

We ADHDers do things differently. We feel things intensely ( I feel negative emotions as physical pain). We are excited by the things that interest us, and avoid ( like the plague) the boring stuff of life.Our lives can be very, very messy and chaotic, and some people have problems with that. Society puts a ton of pressure on us to be a certain way, wake up between certain hours and have certain types of jobs.I don't know what it's like for every ADHDer, but my symptoms are on the more extreme end. I was diagnosed at age 37 ( a few months ago) so for most of my life, I wondered wtf was wrong with me and tried desperately to hid my flaws from others. My two most embarassing things about myself is the fact I have a very abnormal sleep schedule ( delayed sleep phase syndrome) so I honestly come alive at night, like Nosferatu or something. I then sleep in late ( don't ask what time) and I have to have family come in to wake me up because no way in hell I can do it myself. The other issue I have is I'm messy as hell. I don't personally mind this. I'm not a hoarder and I have an order to my disarray. But my Mother- who still seems to live in the 50s- places a woman's self worth partially on her cleaning skills.Anyhow, I was married to someone for 14 years who accepted and validated me...until he had an affair and left my daughter and I to fend for ourselves.It was that low point in my life where all of a sudden my flaws became magnified. What if I had been normal? Would he have cheated on me? What if I had been less emotional/irrational?This was a challenging time for me and I'm still trying to figure out how to get back to accepting myself WHILE simultaneously improving myself.That's where this book comes in.The book isn't actually about changing who you are. It's about accepting yourself, with all of your ADHD quirks. It does this while simultaneously acknowledging our struggles. It's honestly not healthy to fight and judge yourself based on the fact you have an overactive nervous system and brain.This book teaches you how to love and accept yourself, and to question the 'shoulds' that society forces upon everyone.Highly recommend this book to anyone struggling right now with both accepting themselves and with fitting into society.

Never in my adult life as a woman, have I found a tool so useful and empowering in regards to my ADHD, which has been absolutely debilitating in the past. I recommend this book to everybody I know who struggles with ADHD symptoms, as well as to the people who love them and want to understand them. My perspective on ADHD has shifted to the point that I hardly notice it as an inconvenience. I feel much more acceptance, ease and joy in my life, and a general sense of optimism and excitement for the days to come.The authors, having ADHD themselves, normalize and empathize with the ADHD brain, using authenticity, life experience and deep knowledge/understanding.The thing is, you will have to invest time into this book since it is a workbook, I know that’s not easy for the ADHD brain, I just set a timer 20 minute timer to read and reflect on the prompts every morning that I woke up and finished the book in about a month.Better than all the other therapy I’ve paid for, combined!

I purchased this book a few weeks after being diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, at 23. I did feel validated from being diagnosed, since it made so many struggles of my life make sense. However, it also made all of the "fake it 'til you make it" and "you don't want to be lazy, do you? GET UP" strategies that I'd been using to motivate myself for most of my life completely stop working (since I now had a diagnosed, medical reason for it), and I felt like I was drowning in my inability to do basic things. In the first 5 or 10 pages of this book, I felt so validated and heard, I almost started crying even though I was reading the sample in between sets at the gym. So I purchased the book (make sure you get the hard copy, as it is a workbook that you're supposed to write in), and I just finished it today, a few months later. And this book and medication gave me exactly what I needed to overcome that feeling that I would never be able to do what I wanted to in my life because of my ADHD. I can't even put into words how much better I have been able to accept myself with ADHD using this book. If you're newly diagnosed, or just in general struggling with accepting all of the negative aspects of having ADHD, I really can't recommend this book any more strongly.The only negative aspect for me was that this book is definitely geared towards women who were diagnosed later in life, and who probably already have established family or career lives. I almost feel like this was entirely unnecessary- sure, women may have an extra hard time accepting themselves as a whole in today's society, but the idea that the important thing is to accept yourself as an ADHDer with both your strengths and challenges is true for all genders. But I think this is pretty easy to just not pay a whole lot of attention to, and that this book would probably be useful for newly diagnosed men and non-binary people as well if you just ignore those bits.

I started reading a couple books after diagnosis that were more physiologically driven and they made me feel more overwhelmed and worse about my differences. I picked this book up from the library and purchased a copy for myself half way through the first chapter. It spoke to my emotional self which I feel I needed to address first and foremost. Some parts of the book are difficult to work through and I really had to sit with the emotions that surfaced. It is a "there is nothing wrong with you" book in a sea of "do these things to survive in our culture" books. I highly recommend buying this book if you want to focus on a lifetime of masking and the shame and negative self talk that comes along with undiagnosed ADHD.