Sarah Wheeler: Tangents, curlicues & life lessons from a nomadic tribe
Women & ADHD
Katy Weber
4.9 • 685 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2022
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 98 with Sarah Wheeler.
“I was like, Why do I have all these ambitions, yet so much incompetence? Like, I know I’m smart. Why can’t I just get it together?”
Sarah is a writer, educational psychologist, and neurodiversity trainer based in Oakland. I first discovered Sarah through her Substack newsletter Momspreading. She wrote a piece reflecting back on her adult ADHD diagnosis, and it was just so compelling and nuanced and thought-provoking and hilarious that I kind of started stalking her a little bit online after that.
Thankfully, she agreed to sit down with me and talk about her own diagnosis journey and how she managed to spend 15 years studying and diagnosing ADHD in children without realizing she herself had ADHD.
We talk about how a diagnosis in adulthood can feel both profoundly life-changing and, at the same time, inconsequential. We also talk about internalized hyperactivity in girls and those good old-fashioned ADHD tangents and long-winded conversational curlicues for which more than a few of us are known.
And we talk about one of Sarah's favorite studies involving the Ariaal tribe of northern Kenya, and how environment and social factors can play an integral role in whether or not someone with ADHD thrives.
Website: sarahwheelerphd.com
Instagram: @thewheeler1
Episode edited by E Podcast Productions
Find the transcript of this episode at www.womenandadhd.com/transcripts
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| 0:00.0 | Hey friends, it's Katie here. Have you spent your whole life wondering why things feel harder for you |
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| 1:00.7 | consult today. And what they found was in the agrarian group where they were all farmers. The ADHDers |
| 1:07.8 | were low status. They were undernourished. |
| 1:12.0 | They were poor. |
| 1:13.8 | But in the group that were still nomads, they were the most successful, most kind of well-regarded members of that group. |
| 1:23.4 | And so these are kind of like the same genes having a very different outcome in different environments. |
| 1:31.0 | And that was really helpful in me, for me, with my work with kids, like really explaining to people and people who work with kids how much the environment matters. |
| 1:40.7 | But also for myself and being like, oh, I'm a motherfucking nomad. |
| 1:49.1 | Hello and welcome to the women and ADHD podcast. I'm your host, Katie Weber. I was diagnosed |
| 1:55.5 | with ADHD at the age of 45, and it completely turned my world upside down. I've been looking back at so much of my life, |
| 2:04.2 | school, jobs, my relationships, all of it with this new lens, and it has been nothing short of |
| 2:10.5 | overwhelming. I quickly discovered I was not the only woman to have this experience, and now I |
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