ADHD & The Power of Creative Expression (Part 1)

You're listening to the ADHD Support Talk Radio Podcast. ADHD Support Talk is brought to you by ADDClasses.com. Visit www.ADDClasses.com and sign up for free webinars and online events today. Well, hello and welcome back to ADHD Support Talk Radio. I'm your co-host Lynn Idris, and as a productivity and ADHD coach, I help overwhelmed professionals reduce procrastination, improve time management, and get more done with less effort so that they have more time, energy, and more bandwidth for what matters most to them. As you guys know, I'm a woman with ADHD myself, so I have been where so many of you are and I've come out the other side, so to speak. I've gone from living in that constant state of chaos and overwhelming underperformance to live a life of more success and fulfillment that I once dreamed was possible. And I believe that every single one of you can share the same success yourselves. You can learn more about me, what I do, and the programs and services I offer at www.coachingadvantages.com. And if you'd like to join my next online productivity and time management workshop, you can simply text the keyword "Productivity" to the number 33777 to find out about the next free event. Well, today I have Danny Donovan with me. Danny and I had so much fun when we were recording this episode that our time blindness got the better of us and we talked for a good bit over an hour about some really good stuff. So rather than torture you guys with an hour long recording or cut out a bunch of stuff that I thought you would find really helpful, I split this into two episodes. So this is part one where Danny and I talk about ADHD and the power of creative expression and the importance of community. Welcome Danny. Thanks for having me. Danny and I met at the ADHD conference. It was in Philly in the fall. And I just love the message that you bring and the work that you do. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. So tell our listeners a little bit about you. For those that aren't familiar with you and the work that you do, tell our listeners a little bit about you. Yeah, so I make ADHD content primarily kind of comics and infographics and more recently TikTok videos that are a little informative but mostly cathartic. So I talk through all the complicated emotions and feelings of having ADHD in hopes that it can help people with ADHD to understand ourselves better. And I kind of take a look at processing, oh, those are real feelings and I haven't had a name for them or a way to explain them. And then giving them tools to be able to share with loved ones, kind of what's going on in our heads so that they can see, oh, it's not just you. And for us to feel like, oh, it's not just us. And that's huge, right? That sense of community that you've created, I think it's really absolutely amazing because you're reaching a whole new audience, right? A whole new group of people who haven't had a whole, you know, I always call our our peeps a tribe. They haven't had a whole tribe that they identify with and feel comfortable with and feel safe and at home and all of that stuff. So tell our listeners where they can learn more about you and what you do and see your work and all that fun stuff. Yeah, so if you'd if you'd like to support my work, you can go to patreon.com/dnidonivan D-A-N-I-D-O-N-L-V-A-N. And my work, some of my work and kind of a shop where you can get prints and posters is ADHDDD.com. And I've got work on there. I've got a lot of work on my Instagram and my pinned tweet on Twitter, which are both just my name. But yeah, I've got quite a few comics. And then I'm also like I said on a TikTok where my content is a little bit more, I say jokes and humor takes on memes. And so I've really loved being able to see the difference in, I say, communities because we are like one community. But my favorite is kind of getting in there, especially on TikTok. I've had a couple that have gone viral recently, which are kind of uncommon ADHD symptoms that people might have not put together. And there's been a lot of people now who have said, oh, I didn't even think I might have ADHD. I thought that I was just weird or lazy or whatever it is. And then they come back and comment, oh, I want you to know because you're TikToks, I went and talked to a doctor and I got diagnosed and I'm starting treatment. So I really think that you did not ask me this, but I'm just going off on a tangent, which is very on-brand. I think one of the biggest things that are, you know, kind of neurodiverse squad community has been able to do is talk through those experiences and reach people who might not even know they have ADHD. And then I realized that even when I got diagnosed, I was not really looking up resources yet. I knew I had it, but I wasn't looking up how to deal with it. I was in spotty in therapy and taking medication, but it wasn't until, you know, I started this whole journey of what they self acceptance and creative expression that I fully came to terms with how much it affected my life. And so to have people kind of find one tweet or one TikTok video and then do as we ADHDers do and go down this rabbit hole of losing track of time, clicking through all these different things and finding, whoa, these all resonate with me. This is a thing. I thought this was just just my personality, you know, finding people where they're at, where they might not be expecting to see ADHD content and kind of giving them this little like nibble, where they can then go and find more. And then we get really like invested in discovering more about ourselves is what I hope to kind of achieve with this. Right. And that's so important. Understanding what's going on with you. Most of us, I often say like nobody gets to ADHD and adulthood adulthood unscathed. Like, like, there's a lot of crap that we've all gone through. There's a lot of pain that we've all gone through. There's a lot of stuff that happens to our self image and our, our sort of how we feel about ourselves and all of that, that stuff that comes again, it's a lot of pain. Once you find out what's underneath that, it doesn't make the pain go away, but it gives you something concrete to look at. It gives you something concrete to learn about. And then I think one of the things that's so beautiful about the work that you do is now all of a sudden you've got this whole community. And there are something like 15 million, I think, with ADHD, who are having very similar sort of life experiences to each one of us. And when you can really start to see that and, you know, kind of in the public and talk about it in public space, like social media, or whatever, I think that's really super powerful. So tell our listeners a little bit about how you got started. I mean, it was your sort of like an accidental story, but it just, it's so funny that it did happen truly by accident. And this kind of big career shift for me. So I've been, I'd known I wanted to be an artist since I was really little, I wanted to become a graphic designer since I was in middle school. And then surprisingly, I stuck with that. And the only things in my life that I would say has been a constant has been my love of design, my passion for it. So I went, you know, through school, I got a degree, a bachelor's and visual communication and design. And I've been working in house firms, you know, design firms kind of designing all these different brand materials. And most recently, my job had been at Gallup, whereas in particular, I was doing a lot of infographic design, you know, charts and that kind of stuff. And I had been working there, I think two and a half, three months, and I'd never had co-workers who just liked me. I was used to being kind of the odd one out, usually the youngest on my team, feeling really judged because I had very like old school co-workers who would just like brag about how many hours they did that week and they came in it. 630 in the morning, and I was like rolling at like 915 and so feeling very judged and past past jobs and this new job feeling accepted. And we would sit out and kind of work on our laptops on the couch and discuss things and one time someone had brought a therapy. And I just never heard people, everyone was just talking about it, talking about what they were learning in therapy and what they've been talking about. I was just, I have not even talked about therapy, like with my best friends. And this is incredible. And so we just kind of created this really open environment and I told them I was like, I have got an HD, which I'd also never told co-workers. And they all just kind of, yeah, we know, the surprise zero people. And so then it kind of became this running inside joke about how I told stories because I very much will have a point. But then every single thought I have on the way to getting to that point seems really important. And so I just, there's this conductor in my trade of work. thought named Donnie Danovan. He was very sleepy at his job and just went off the rails all the time because the train of thought was not, was taking too many detours or just falling off the rails. And so every time I kind of get way off track at a story they'd be like Donnie, bring it home, you know, and it didn't feel like this angry, judgy like thing that they were laughing at me, like we were all laughing kind of together because I had kind of come up with his name and stuff. So I decided to make this little flow chart infographic showing, you know, well this is how other people tell a story and this is how I tell a story and it's this big convoluted flow chart that goes back on itself and there's just lots of twists and turns and unrelated topics. And I wasn't going to post it actually. I sent it to my coworker and she thought I found it on the internet somewhere. She was like this is perfect. This is just like you and I'm like yeah, I made this because why? And so I, I mean, I didn't have a watermark on it or anything because I didn't, I thought maybe I'll post it like maybe 10 people will like it. I didn't want to put it on Instagram or anyplace my boss might see it. So I posted it on Twitter because I didn't have that many Twitter followers and I didn't want to like out myself on accident and it blew up instantly. So the cat was kind of out of the bag at that point and I just watched this thing go viral so quickly and it was this amazing feeling but also this feeling of fear of like people I know are going to see this. People I know are going to know I have it, you know, there's still that deep shame right? I spent 10. I didn't get diagnosis to a freshman in college but I had this deep shame for 10 years and didn't ever talk about it or think about it but reading the comments of people with ADHD because the last box, you know, isn't just end of story. It's apologize and that was kind of when a lot, myself included a lot of us started to realize that I feel the need to apologize for being myself. I need to apologize worrying that I'm annoying people. I need to apologize for talking too much. I need to make myself smaller. I'm not good the way I am right. And so I saw the response that that got and kind of thought to myself, well, I can't just stop here. I've got a lot more things that I would like to discuss and so it kind of I've been an art therapy a little while but this really felt like expressing myself and expressing my feelings in a way that I actually hadn't really realized I'd already been doing. So I went back and looked at some of my old doodles and I've been making stuff like the event diagrams of what I'm supposed to do and what I'm actually doing and that's how I kind of process mentally the dichotomy of my life and it's all rooted in this comparison of what I think other people are like and then what I'm like and my whole life is just this big series of me feeling different and me feeling like I do stuff differently or I'm not doing stuff the right way and so a lot of my comics I think the reason they resonate is it really they really show the difference between how we perceive ourselves or how other people perceive us and what the experience of other people is like. So now I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of these kind of take off and helped form this you know community of people that we can all share these bonded experiences knowing that we're sharing the same feelings. So it's just incredibly powerful and motivating but even as I was making these comics back in my brain it was going well how long are you going to keep this up for right how long until you quit this like it was a very real I don't want to get my hopes up that this is going to be continuing to be a series but thankfully the dopamine hit of instant validation is enough to make my brain light up and want to make more comics so. And yeah because you've got a huge audience now like a huge audience so if you guys don't follow Danny on any of the new platforms follow her the thing that I think is so incredible is it's really hard and I've been doing what I do for more than 15 years now and I've known I've had ADHD for a long time and part of like what I'm good at is explaining things to people but it's really hard to explain what's going on in your brain to somebody who doesn't get it right and it's really hard so I've always talked about things like you know I my son has ADHD my daughter does not she's funny and she would always I would say something that seemed random and she understood like from when she was very young that like my thought trails is what I call them are different than everybody else's thought trails and she would say like show me that or tell me the thought trail map mommy like you know like how to how to get theirs you know anybody else would yeah what the hell you know where did that come from. Well we skip point B we go from like A and we don't say the it will our brains work so fast right and we don't have time to just like tell you necessarily ever it's like oh did I not say that out loud. That was all fun that's where I went in my head so I she you know I was thinking of this one example and your sort of storytelling thing made me really you know one of the first craft like comics that I saw years or one of the first drawings that I saw years really like it spells that out for someone so I can say to my daughter in a state place okay you said you know Joe and that made me think of Joe and that made me think of Joni who lives in the neighborhood where all the townhouses are and when all their you know decks are all lined up and they all have Christmas lights on them how beautiful that is so it went from you know mommy I saw Joe in school today to mommy saying and don't you just love the Christmas lights and I had a whole you know a whole logical trail that my thoughts took in that instant that anyone else would have thought I wasn't a pain attention what she said being like making any sense talking completely randomly and I can explain that to her but that's a really hard thing to explain to someone to get it and that's one of the things that shared common experience that you bring out in your designs is so incredibly powerful and it's done in a way that I think like even if it's not a specific challenge that you have as an individual it's done in a way that you can totally relate to it it's done in a way that helps you give it words that helps you understand that it's okay and that you're okay and that you're absolutely not alone which is huge for our our tribe and I think that shared experience that commonality that whole it's cathartic just to see it I can only imagine how cathartic it would be to actually create it it's one where I I wanted to make the kinds of comics that I wanted to see because I knew so jema karel who's a really talented comic artist who actually got to meet in california like a little over a year ago which has a whole different funny story but she makes some funny you know comics about like pugs and puns and stuff like that but she has a whole kind of other side that she does anxiety and depression and so those really resonated with me she's also does a lot of introvert ones and I'm the opposite of an introvert but they helped me kind of better understand my introvert friends right and so I kind of wanted to do with you know that feeling of understanding but for ADHD because I hadn't seen a whole lot of them and more than anything I make these comics for myself true to me processing my experiences because like no one can tell me I'm wrong about how I feel and so I don't make anything that because there are some ADHD symptoms that I simply do not have my husband has bigger you know issues with them and I have issues with other things that I can't speak for anyone else's experiences and so I think that coming from this place of like you said kind of processing my own stuff and also that I think using obviously you know pictures where that thousand words kind of a thing but I use a lot of visual metaphors and I use a lot of these informational chart type things because I've read somewhere I don't quote me on this but that people with ADHD forum associations really quickly which makes sense for what you know you were saying and so I think oh this you know reminds me of this and it kind of sparks this idea for a comic but for the informational design I think that it's really easy to simplify and design something that doesn't have a lot of work that has some words but not a lot of words and people can get the point because people know how to read charts right people know how to read these types of you know information and so it's been great because my comics have actually been translated to like eight different languages as of right now and including like I had some the ADHD Society of Saudi Arabia did like 20 of them in Arabic and had someone you know they have to read it like backwards and all this stuff but to for them to say you know this isn't just something like Americans have right this isn't something that you know white people have this is a global thing and it's not talked about in a lot of countries and or it's dismissed and it's not they might not have the same. even knowledge of what ADHD is. And so I think that reaching a global audience has been something that I've found continues to drive this purpose of, well, we don't talk about ADHD enough, but there are people who don't talk about it at all. And so I think getting to that point where again, doesn't matter, I was like, what language it's in, math is math and charts are charts. And so it helps with, I think, that language, our own name is a barrier, but it's a continuum to hold that process, that flow of information in a way that still makes sense. Yeah, in the context of what we're talking about. Absolutely. And I think the other thing that it being more sort of visual and image-based also allows people to interpret it and feel it in a way that relates to them directly and personally. So if it were, I used to be a writer like a million years ago. And of course, you read things and you can infer and you can make your own sort of personal associations. But the visual aspect of the work that you do, I think also makes it more personal and more open to interpretation for every person that looks at it. I think too that one of the things I wanted to do is always make it so that people can see my comics and understand them without having to zoom, without having to read a lot. And I always, for my captions, always posted to Twitter first because it limits me to 280 characters or whatever. So other ones, I'll just go off on this whole tangent. And us 80-years are notorious for not wanting to read giant blocks of text. Yeah. And it's hard because now, I'm better about it, but I don't want to read long articles and I have a hard time paying attention to even podcasts said to any on a podcast. But consistently doing something that requires a lot of mental effort versus a comic that I can kind of look at, engage with, understand, save, and send all within a minute. I think that's really an attractive thing to a lot of our brains. Absolutely. I think absolutely. Anything you want to share with the listeners, like, you know, last loss to them, again, tell people where they can learn more about you, tell, you know, give out your website, the Patreon, that stuff. So I guess my closing thoughts are, you're not alone and you don't have to do it alone. And I look forward to seeing anybody who's listening to this, you know, kind of in the comments or on the Narrow Diverse Squad hashtag on Twitter and let's start some conversations. I love it. I really love it. And oh, finding me, I almost forgot ADHD brain. So you can find me at adhdd.com, dandiedowninthe.com also forwards. And then patreon.com/dandiedowninthwitter. Everything, if you just go to adhdd.com, I've got links to all the things. So I really appreciate you having me on and love talking to you. This is so much fun. This is fun. Thank you so much. And guys, if you found this helpful, if you found it fun or enjoyable or whatever, visit us on iTunes and leave us a review and some comments. So that more people can find us as well. And this is important work. And you're doing a great job, dandied. Thank you so much for being here. I'm glad we could connect. And I really enjoyed chatting with you. - Thanks so much. - My pleasure. And thank you all for listening. As always, I appreciate your attention and we'll catch you next time. - I hope you'll come back and join us for part two. And if you find this podcast helpful, enjoyable or fun, please visit us on iTunes and leave a review so that more people can find us.