How did I get here ?

You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, and you may find yourself in another part of the world, and you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, and you may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Those are the lyrics from the song Once in a Lifetime the Band was Talking Heads. You're on the bumpy road to freedom. This podcast is about navigating this journey called life, finding freedom while living with ADHD. From those that have traveled it, and for those of you just discovering it, welcome.

This is Simon speaking. I'm in a bus, and this is our first ever podcast. So if you are familiar with that song once in a lifetime, sorry, going back to this again by talking heads back in the eighties, it goes on to say, how do I work this? Where is that large automobile? That is not my beautiful house.

And this is not my beautiful wife. Sorry, beautiful wives out there. And you can relate to those words and you may be an adult living with ADHD and questioning everything, and this podcast, well, it just may be for you. And this podcast is sponsored by Bumpy Road Coffee, roasted smooth by yours truly. And if you're only going to have one coffee a day, spoil yourself, make it a good one.

Visit bumpyroadcoffee.com.au. Now you can subscribe to Bumpy Road Coffee and I'll send you fresh coffee every month if you like, because that's what keeps this podcast going. So it's a win win for coffee lovers and the bumpy road community. But for today, have a listen. And if this podcast resonates with you, please join the journey, our ADHD community, and maybe help others find their freedom by sharing your ADHD experiences in the comments, the good, the bad and the ugly, to make this journey called life with ADHD that little bit smoother.

Hey, so welcome back to the bumpy road to freedom. This is Simon speaking. You're probably asking yourself, well, who am I? Well, that's a fair question because you're listening to this podcast right now and you need to know these things. Well, firstly, if you've heard that song and I go by music a lot guys, I just love it.

Whoever heard the song, the dumb things by Paul Kelly. Well, that's me. That's my life. And that's why I've kind of made my theme song because it resonates with me. I'm doing so many dumb things in my life, but it's a fun song too.

And so life has been fun, but really why me? Look, fifty years of ADHD and like some of us that may be listening here today, ADHD wasn't a thing when I was young and growing up, it was all very new. It was the crazy kids in the classroom that just couldn't seem to concentrate that they stood out a lot. And for some reason they seemed to be in the same detention classes that I was in and the remedial maths classes that I always seemed to be in as well. And it was awareness that eventually came to this point because I learnt and anyone with ADHD tends to bluff in a certain way.

It's like anything that you are lacking in life, you tend to make up for it in other ways. If you lose a certain sense, make up in another sense. And I think with your brain, if you have bad motor skills or you can't concentrate and you're unable to do certain things, well think about this, the brain keeps developing to about twenty five years or twenty six years now. So when you're going through school, brain is developing along with the fact that you are also learning. So there's things that you don't understand that you then adapt.

I became a little bit of a comedian in the classroom because writing for me just wasn't something that I could actually do. So I was a little bit of a class clown. And in other ways, people get even worse than that. Know, they may turn to crime because things that they aren't able to do well. Look, we live in survival mode.

We are born to survive. So after years and years and years and becoming aware of something was different about the way I thought, which I just thought was my unique personality, I was a bit of a larrikin, I became an entrepreneur, I failed as an entrepreneur, and I just put a lot of those failures, not only just in business, but in relationships, in family, in responsibility and financials. I put that down to something that I was just never taught properly, or I was too busy doing something else, or I was one of those creative types just wasn't my bag. You know, it's not my thing. Everyone has a specialist thing.

I get it. However, as we understand with ADHD, which everyone has a certain amount of that in them, but it is more so. So it's accelerated in so many ways. But I came to a point in my life when you start evaluating things and that's how the whole bumpy road thing started where I'm going, what is life all about? And why are we here?

And how do I get to this spot in life where I'm sitting by the beach, shit's gone bad. I'm thinking, again, seriously, after all these years? And I went in this process of trying to work it out in a way that didn't even involve any understanding about ADHD at all. Moving forward, I was reading a book about ADHD because I thought somebody I knew and I was close to had it and they were having problems. I thought that if I did a test, which I did, and read a book, then I would understand that person a lot better because I'm looking at this person and they've got problems.

It turned out that that was me. So when I did the test, it was kind of crazy because I was answering these questions in a third person, as a third person. And it was great. Was multiple choice. I didn't actually have to write because I couldn't write a test, but it was the first test I ever passed in my life.

So, hey, that's a good thing about it. So going on from there, I reflected back on a lot of things that went wrong. So I went through the whole diagnosis process. Now that is a whole different story in itself. There are so many elements you've got to get through to this point and diagnosis is not that easy.

Not if you want to get it done properly and it's worth, I tell you, it is worth getting it properly. I had two years, three different doctors and specialists that I went to that gave me completely out there answers to what was going in my life. I was told that I was depressed. I was given some pretty crazy drugs because I was being treated with depression and that wasn't the thing at all. And this is a common thing.

If you've gone through it, fantastic. If you haven't and you're listening to this podcast, this can be something that's quite helpful for you because it was never there for me. I never understood any of this. So I like to say that I've got about fifty years life experience with ADHD. So in an academic sense, I'm a life ADHD er.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist or a counselor or anything like that. And anything that I say here, it's from my perspective. It's from my experience in living with it. And moving forward, I am planning to do podcasts and interviews with people that have lived with ADHD and become successful.

There's people that have studied ADHD that don't have ADHD, have but done it from an academic point of view because I think it's really important to get it from different perspectives, not just one. Even to the point of I was listening to a TED talk about brain scans and it's really interesting that by scanning the brain, can actually see what ADHD is all about. And not just ADHD, there's a lot of other conditions out there that people are just guessing. So I really want to get into that, but about me, as I said, I'm a life expert in my own way and this is my opinions that are here. I will introduce other people's opinions.

You don't have to take my advice or anything like that, but there may be one thing or two things. It might be like learning about where to go for a diagnosis. It might be with your writing skills or things like that or understanding that what happened in your past by just knowing that and identifying that can then help shape your future, which is what it did for me from the story that I'll tell you about when I first started school and how ADHD really shaped my life. And it destroyed it in so many ways without me even knowing, but then also now becoming aware of it, it can then create a new life for anybody that's in this situation. And there's another reason I started this podcast and I know that ADHD became a big thing during COVID and I believe there's reasons for that.

One is yes, we are becoming aware and our lives have changed and all of a sudden we stop and think, Hey, what's going on here? How did I get here in this life? Hence the theme song for opening this first podcast was how did we get here? And when we stop and we evaluate things and we go, Hey, something's not right. We've got time.

We're out of our bubble of life or what we've become accustomed to. And we go, Okay, maybe something's not right here. Also, had the time to actually get that telehealth appointments. You could actually just get in on zoom and speak to somebody, a specialist. That's if you could get in.

However, the thing that really irks me is it became a bit of a trend word in some sense, ADHD. Why is everybody got ADHD? And a lot of people that I don't believe that are qualified in any way jumped on the bandwagon. And I'm talking about social media, I'm talking about apps and we know we collect things. My phone was full of apps with ADHD that were just not relevant at all.

And all it was was companies jumping on that bandwagon again, Sorry, companies jumping on that bandwagon and saying, have you got ADHD? We have got a fix for you. Are you an ADHD entrepreneur? We've got things to help you. And what really irked me more than anything was all I was doing was getting more stuff.

I didn't need more stuff. I needed to fix my problem, understand my problem and work out how to deal with it. I didn't need someone adding all these things to my list of something that I had to go back to every day and do this, this, and this, and this, and this, when it was just creating more of a problem anyway. Isn't that generally what is a problem in life now is we've just got too much stuff. And the last thing we need with ADHD is more stuff.

And there is some advantages of course. Hey, the fact I'm doing this podcast, I couldn't have done a podcast like this ten years ago because the technology wasn't there and I wouldn't have understood how to do it. So there is advantages to it. However, I just got inundated with crap and as my psychologist says, rubbish. And that annoyed me.

So I wanted to do something that was real that also helped me because talking here and understanding and reevaluating and going back and talking to other people about what happened to me helps me to improve. It's a little bit like when you're coaching someone, you have to learn yourself. Right? So where do you go from here? And this is where I decided was once I got to a point where I thought that I'd found freedom with my ADHD, I'm like, I had a choice.

What do you do? Well, my choice was to take that and use that knowledge because I was pretty dumb at everything else anyway. So I'm good at this. I love talking and I love sharing knowledge about things that I've done and experiences, but I also know about it now. So why not use it and share it with other people from a real life experience?

So I guess the question is, how did we get here? Well, we did. Sometimes we don't even know how we're going to get through the day, let alone how we got through this part of our journey to this particular moment. But we did get here and we survived. We might have bluffed.

We used instinct. We created personalities and personas. We went through the system and we got to this point. Somehow we did it. Were we successful?

Maybe, maybe not. Did we achieve so far what we wanted to achieve when we started off in that first grade in primary school, during those pretty little pictures of the house and the flowers and wife holding hands and the two little kids. Look, I don't know, but we got here and we've gone through the journey and we've had our challenges along the way. And you know what? We've become very good at who we are.

Now that might be right. That might be wrong. We might be good people. We might be really bad people, but we've become very good at who we are. And that's how we've learned.

Do we want to change that? That's a question you need to ask yourself. The challenges have changed. Back in school, as I mentioned earlier on, you know, you were sort of treated a little bit differently because you weren't learning very well or you're stuck in a corner. Now that there's a lot more out there awareness, I guess, for younger people growing up with ADHD.

However, two things here. One was that we now live in a whole new life with technology, etcetera, that we were once experiencing. The other thing is is they never believed that ADHD was something that continued on through your adult life, which it does. It changes in certain ways. We might not be so hyperactive in one way.

We have learned to face our different challenges in the way that our brain thinks. And as I said, we adapt and we survive. However, we've now discovered something. And our challenge is, is it wasn't really something that has been worked with. And if I go back to the point of myself, when I discovered my experience, when I tried to get help, it was very, very hard to find because it just was not recognized.

So that is a couple of the challenges there that, you know, we really got to face nowadays. I've started to say, well, what if we know from our past that can help us now? So for example, I have dysgraphia and that has limited me from doing so many things that I wanted to do from my younger school years. Firstly, dysgraphia wasn't very well known and still isn't very well known. You've probably heard of dyslexia.

That's quite well known. Dysgraphia is so dysgraphia is affects my ability to write. So my writing is absolutely shocking. My whole sentence structure is really bad. And so the challenge for me was trying to learn how to write and thinking there was something wrong with me because I was lazy.

However, no matter how much tutoring I was giving in writing, it was never really going to be any different than what it is today. Yeah. I can improve on certain things and I have methods and whatever else. And in saying that today we have computers and things like that, so we can do that. But what it did affect me was it was just my way of dealing with who I was myself.

So I wanted to be, let's say I wanted to be a police officer, which there was a stage where I thought I would love to join the police force. And because I was riding to horses, wanted to join the police force group. And then I was into my diving, so I thought I could be a rescue diver. But the thing that stopped me was, I knew I would have to do a written test, a written exam, and I couldn't do written exams. And also throughout my work, would have to be doing reports and all sorts of things like that.

So to me, anything like that was completely out. I just wasn't going to be able to do that because I knew that just like every day in school, that writing for me was my biggest challenge. So that was the way that I sort of when I when I was growing up, I'm thinking, well, I can't do this. I can't do this. And I can't do this because I can't write.

However, no one could really help me because no one actually really understood that. They just thought that I was lazy. Now I know that that wasn't me being lazy or stupid or dumb or anything like that. That was just something that I was born with. If that's the way it happens, we still don't know where that it comes from.

That's for another podcast. So now that I know that I can look back and go, actually, you know what? I wasn't that stupid. I was actually okay. So where do I go from here?

What if we know now from a past that can help us now? It can simply be something as confidence. So you might not be confident. So I was never confident in writing in front of other people because of the problems that I had. And confidence goes a long way in life.

Now let's say let's say something might be easier to relate to. So you've got bad eyesight and you didn't realize you have bad eyesight. You go and get it tested. And all of a sudden you get glasses or contact lenses and you can see, and all of a sudden it's like, Oh my God, I can see this is amazing. Life's completely different.

And you're no longer feeling like there's something wrong with you because you now know exactly what is going on with yourself. So I put down, I put this down to the first thing that I really want to get through in this first podcast. And I said, that's what it is, is basically awareness. It is such a simple thing. Once you're aware of something, you can then make changes to fix it in what way that it's affecting you.

So awareness generally comes up when we have a bit of a wrong turn in our life and we ask ourselves why. And we start to become aware because we're starting to wonder. So awareness is a big thing. Here's an example that we can all relate to. COVID.

COVID gave us a massive segue in life because it stopped everything on the way that we knew it, and we were forced to have to think differently. We were no longer in a routine that was created for us from our time of growing up and everything sort of worked into a formation. Like, you get a job and eventually you just get into this routine and that's what you do. Completely taken away. Some people went out there and they protested.

Other people sort of did cooking shows and became famous on YouTube. It changed so many things. So many lives were affected, good and bad, because of COVID. Apparently, everyone had ADHD when COVID was on. It became the new buzzword.

That's for another podcast. You know, some people learnt this whole freedom thing where they became workers from home. They started offices at home and they all of a sudden got this quality of life and realized, hey, I don't need to go to the office for forty odd hours a week and travel on a bus or free transport or sit in a car every day to try to get to work five days a week, I can do this from home in half the time. So all of a sudden people realized that there was a quality of life out there that they were missing the whole time. Now COVID obviously had a timeframe where once it ended, everyone was like, okay, now to get got to get back to normal now.

Everyone's got to go back to work. Some people are protesting about that and they say, no way. I'm not doing this anymore. Some people really found themselves. And but you finding your purpose or your awareness or what it is about you or discovering yourself is finding a freedom.

It's a lifelong thing. It's a lifelong condition that you all of sudden are saying, hang on a sec. I'm doing is not really suited for my life, or I've been going about life the wrong way and there is an easier way to do things or is an easy way to understand things. Or there was a reason why that I wasn't able to do what I originally wanted to do. Now I'm aware of it.

I can change that. I can work on ways to fix it and use it to my advantage. Some people out there that have become very, very successful because they've realized there's certain things they can do, but there's things that they can do very, very well. And when they do them, and we call it a hyper focus. However, you learn to channel yourself in a certain direction once you know the direction that you want to take and that what you're capable of doing.

It took me failing hard as an entrepreneur to realize that I was pushing shit uphill in certain areas. It was never going to happen the way it happened like I imagined in my mind because I wasn't built that way. And so I learned a very, very valuable lesson. Knowing what I wanted to do, knowing what I could do, and knowing what I couldn't do, and also choosing the right people to listen to, which is another thing. I was listening to the wrong people that were totally inexperienced in how my brain worked.

But that's for another episode again. Sorry. So what do I want to drive home finally in this podcast is that simple one thing is awareness. And look, we can use a fancy word and we can call it mindfulness if you'd like. And then we can get into manifestation, which is action.

But it's just such a simple thing to move forward. And in every journey, you need to be aware of where you're going first. And when you're having a great time and life is fantastic, you're pretty well oblivious, aren't you? You're oblivious because we live on a day to day thing and it's like, I'm oblivious to what's going on in the world because everything is so good. But when it's not, we start to question ourselves why.

So we need to become aware before we can go forward. And that's the reflection on this journey, looking back at it, looking at all the different segues, the roundabouts, the dead ends, the ups and the downs and the wrong turns is simply about being aware. It's time to progress forward. And that's what this podcast is about with people that have done the journey, who have been there and experienced life like that living with ADHD for themselves. And this is Simon speaking and I'm in the bus on the journey of life living with ADHD on the bumpy road to freedom.

Thanks for listening. Don't forget, follow us and we'll talk on the next podcast. Throw your messages in below. I'd love to hear your feedback on what you think. If you want to have a coffee with me, bubbyroadcoffee.com.au.

If you're going to have one coffee, make it a good one.