Emma Magenta talks about the impact ADHD had on her as a bright girl growing up, and how she's not only befriended that highly creative side of herself, but embraced it.
Emma Magenta is a feminist Life Coach who helps people-pleasers, overachievers, and perfectionists stop being so hard on themselves, and start feeling at home in their lives. As a coach, her North Star is radical self-love. She’s particularly effective at coaching highly sensitive ADHD women, because she is one!
Emma loves dogs, long walks in foul weather, Broadway theater, reading, eating, singing, and resting.
https://emmamagentacoaching.com/
https://www.facebook.com/emmamagentacoaching/
https://www.instagram.com/emmamagenta/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQjr8dG9O40og0JcDeVPjA
Amy Hallberg 0:00
One of the things that happens when you write a book is that you dive deep into your life, especially if you're writing about yourself. And it becomes really, really obvious, certain parts of yourself that maybe you haven't been seeing or acknowledging or never had a name for before. And for me, that was my neurodivergence. As I was writing this into my book, a friend of a friend, Emma Magenta posted something on Facebook, a story about her ADHD as a child, and I knew that I had to talk with her.
How do we listen to our Muses and show up for our dreams? I'm Amy Hallberg, story coach, book writing mentor, and author. And these are conversations with real life creatives. Because if you want to be a real life creative, it helps to understand what that looks like for you. Welcome to Courageous Wordsmith.
Welcome, Emma, thank you so much for joining me today.
Emma Magenta 1:13
Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me, Amy.
Amy Hallberg 1:15
So you posted this thing. You and I have been Facebook friends for a while, thanks to a mutual friend. So I've sort of been you know, like seeing your stuff before I reached out. But you posted something on Facebook that just really spoke to me. And it was the story of a really smart girl, who was also ADHD and so did something a little bit... what, suspect and then felt bad about it. But really, it was just a coping mechanism for ADHD. Do you want to talk about that?
Emma Magenta 1:47
Yeah. So thank you so much for asking me that question. Amy. I'm so glad that that stories struck a chord with you. So that little girl and that story is me. And it's a story about how I as a nine year old or a ten year old with ADHD, I stole another little girl's assignment notebook, because I had been having trouble keeping track of my assignments. And usually like, fifth grade is kind of when people start to have homework, right? So I'd been trouble keeping track of my assignments, and so my teacher told my parents, and everybody decided that I should, that I should have an assignment notebook, which really, if you think about it, it doesn't make much sense, because if a person has ADHD, or at least this is how my ADHD showed up, the same executive dysfunction that made it hard for me to do homework also made it very hard for me to keep a daily record of my assignments.
Amy Hallberg 2:47
So they're actually asking you to do the same thing you can't do.
Emma Magenta 2:51
100% This is a story that a lot of women and girls with ADHD experience, right, this is a really common thing, because a lot of people with ADHD are super bright. They're super smart. I was a very bright little girl. And so people can't really fathom that ADHD could be a problem. People, certainly in Kansas in the 80s when I was a kid, nobody knew what ADHD was. And even now, when people are more aware of ADHD, the sort of stereotype is a really hyperactive little boy, as opposed to a kind of a dreamy girl that can't get her homework done. So yeah, so what ended up happening was that their solution to my executive dysfunction problem was to give me another executive dysfunction task.
Amy Hallberg 3:34
Right. That'll make you better at it, yeah, just pile on more.
Emma Magenta 3:40
So they gave me this, so I was supposed to have an assignment notebook. I couldn't keep it. Like, I think I probably lost it. And then, and my mother after, let's see here, I think what happened was the teacher got in touch with my mother after a couple of weeks and was like I'm still not receiving homework from her. And then my mother said to me, well, where's your assignment notebook? And I was like, Oh my God, I don't even know where the heck it is. Of course, I didn't say that out loud, I thought it. At ten years old, I felt I was in a terrible bind. I didn't know what to do with myself other than to just sort of acknowledge that I had, that I was a terribly flawed person. And so the answer to the problem that my child brain came up with was that I needed to steal somebody else's assignment notebook. There was a little girl who sat next to me in class, who, the way I described her in this blog post was I said her hair was always neat, and her handwriting was beautiful. And she was one of those little girls that always had her homework done. And she had this beautifully filled out assignment notebook, and I stole it.
Amy Hallberg 4:50
Because that was a way out of something else, right? Yeah.
Emma Magenta 4:54
I could not figure out any other solution to the problem.
Amy Hallberg 4:58
It's such a hard thing. I mean because, because I'm thinking about this and I'm like, okay, ADHD people may not be great at completing all the tasks in a linear manner, but we are highly observant. Right, like so we observe how people are responding to us. We are observant of the people around us, maybe not all ADHD people but like, I'm perceiving that that's part of your presentation of it is you're aware of what's going on around you. It's not like you are oblivious to the fact that you're failing people's expectations.
Emma Magenta 5:27
Oh, very much so. And in fact, not all people with ADHD have this trait. In fact, one of the things that's really confounding about ADHD is how, how it shows up in a bunch of different ways and different people. But one aspect of my ADHD or just the way that my brain works is that I'm also a highly sensitive person. And I pick up on signals, I'm very attuned to what I'll just call vibes. Right? That's part of what makes me a good coach. And I felt very keenly what a disappointment I was to my parents. How confusing, how confusing it was for them, how exasperating that was for them. It just felt terrible, like part of why it took me so long to get diagnosed with ADHD, and then it took me a really long time to actually do anything with the diagnosis is because I mainly, oh this is so sad to say out loud, I mainly just thought I had this horrible character flaw. I thought I was defective.
Amy Hallberg 6:31
Yeah, I see that. That makes sense, though, right? You know, smart kid comes to the conclusion, right? This is the way you're supposed to do it, if you cannot do it, must be a defect.
Emma Magenta 6:40
Yeah. You said it.
Amy Hallberg 6:43
So how did you, because that's not the person that you are today. Right? I mean, you're very, very open about your ADHD, obviously, or you wouldn't be posting this on social media. Like, what was the point at which you got diagnosed? Is there a story there or something you can share about that?
Emma Magenta 6:58
Well, it's so interesting to me, when I hear people talk about being diagnosed like in the last couple of years, like there's a couple of Instagram accounts, whose content I really enjoy, who, they talk about ADHD in this very free and open way and then I kind of look back and see when they got diagnosed, and they got diagnosed in like 2020 and I'm like Oh my God, it took me it, took me decades to figure out what was happening. So the journey I took to diagnosis was that, let's see here when I think I was about 16 years old, I was sort of mid to late teens, my mother, who was a doctor, came home one day, and she said, listen, there's this thing called ADHD, or maybe it was called ADD at the time. And she said, and I heard about it, and I've read a little bit about it, and I'm pretty sure that I have it, and I think you have it, and I think these other people who we know have it. And so that was, lets see here I was 16 so that would have been, I don't know, whatever 77 plus 16 is, it was a period of time in this country when people didn't really know what ADHD was, when it was just beginning to be something that people were conscious of. So then, I kind of went along, I learned a little bit about it, but not that much. I don't remember ever really during my childhood or young adulthood ever having another conversation with my mother about it, although I may have. And then in 2012, I went through a very dark time in my life. And as part of that, I went to a therapist who was like, listen, I can tell that you're anxious and depressed. But I think what's underlying it is ADHD. And I was like, oh, and so that's when I actually got a workup and got an actual diagnosis from that person. So at that time, I tried meds. This particular counselor put me on medication, which I did not like at all. And what they said to me was, okay, well, you might do better with an ADHD coach. And I was like, oh, okay, so at that point, 2012 That was 10 years ago, I was 35 years old, which was 20 years after my mother had first mentioned to me that she thought that I had ADHD.
Amy Hallberg 9:15
Can I interrupt for a second to just ask, there's such a misconception, oh, well, you get diagnosed with ADHD and then you just go on the meds right? And then that fixes it. Like I know of people who have been instructed, you need to get on medication. And people, it's an ableism thing. But, but that people think well then if you're, if you have ADHD, you should get onto the meds so you can get with the program.
Emma Magenta 9:39
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg 9:39
Thoughts on that?
Emma Magenta 9:41
Absolutely. The thing is, meds don't work for everybody. Like personally, I have an inattentive type ADHD, that's what it's called, even though I have all the hyper focus strengths that a lot of people with ADHD have. In fact, that's also what contributes to my, to the fact that I'm a good coach. But meds made me feel awful. Like another way that my ADHD shows up for me is that, unlike the classic stereotype of the ADHD little boy who's hyper, right, I have been my entire life, somebody who needed a lot of rest. And even though, like the way that the H part in ADHD shows up for me, is it shows up in the, the rate at which my brain works, and the rate at which my thoughts move, and it also shows up for me in talking, I can talk a blue streak, like I was, in my last career before I was a life coach, I was a yoga teacher for 20 years. And that's a public speaking job, like I public spoke in front of people for decades. But my external presentation is that I need a lot of rest. I'm not a hyperactive person at all. And the way that drugs made me feel, the way that the medication made me feel was, it's like I felt immediately revved up and then immediately exhausted, and they just didn't work for me. And it may be that another time, I'll try a different drug or what have you. Maybe in the future, that's something that I'll do. Because I know a lot of people have to try a bunch of different meds to see what works for them. But then there's some people that meds just don't really work for at all.
Amy Hallberg 11:12
And I think it's important. I mean, so I brought that up, because it's just a thing that I have seen and heard. And I know people where the meds just didn't work, or whatever. But you went from this little girl who couldn't keep her homework coming in to somebody who, you know, you ran a successful business, you are a business person, so you're functioning in the world successfully. So how does that happen?
Emma Magenta 11:39
Oh man, how does that happen? That's a great question.
Amy Hallberg 11:43
The thing that made it impossible for you to feel good about yourself at school probably is part of what you were leveraging as a business person, yeah?
Emma Magenta 11:53
Yeah. It's such a great question. So one of the things about my last career, which is I owned a yoga studio, and I taught yoga, so I owned a business, one of the things about it is that because it was my business, I could organize it and shape it in whatever way felt good to me. And in the first several years of having that business, it took me a while to sort of figure out that it was okay for me to forge my own path and not just copy what other people had done, but slowly what happened is that I shaped that business in a way that became more and more my own, so that it reflected all my strengths, and so that I had support to help me with all the things that were hard for me. So just to give you one example of that, I am a terrible bookkeeper, because that's not my strength as somebody with ADHD, and like a lot of people who own their own small businesses, for the first several years, I did my own books, like I had an app of some kind, and I did my own books. And then after a while of that, after a few years of that, I was like, This is ridiculous, I don't enjoy this, I'm not good at this, I'm going to invest in getting support for the things that are hard for me. And one of the big insights that I have now as more of an adult with ADHD, and sort of a sense that as, as my adult self, I really own my ADHD. One of the big strategies that I use is that I look at things, I look at things that are hard for me, and I figure out how I can get support for those things.
Amy Hallberg 13:25
So brilliant, and why do we have to do all the things anyway? Right?
Emma Magenta 13:29
I feel like that's such a paradigm shift and I'm sure you've encountered this as a coach, too, right? Our clients often come in with this mindset that the things that they're good at, they sort of dismiss and the things that are hard for them, they keep trying to shove themselves like a round peg into a square hole or a square peg into a round hole, right, they keep trying to force themselves to be good or to enjoy, or to follow through on tasks that they don't enjoy, and that they're not good at. And it's a real mindset shift to say, you know what I'm going to play to my strengths. I'm going to get outside help for the stuff that I don't enjoy, and that I'm not that good at. And I'm going to instead focus on bringing my unique strengths to this world.
Amy Hallberg 14:14
And you just touched on something really important, which is, we don't even acknowledge our strengths. We are not taught to feel great about our strengths. You know, we're taught to look at what, look at what's wrong and fix it. We are not taught, this thing that is so easy for you, other people can't do that.
Emma Magenta 14:32
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg 14:33
Right?
Emma Magenta 14:33
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg 14:34
And one thing I was thinking about, as you were talking is the word neurodivergence, of which ADHD is just one thing, but even ADHD is many things. By definition, the point is that neurodivergence doesn't show up the same way in anybody. I mean, like there's traits, there's tendencies, but everybody is unique. That's the point by definition, right?
Emma Magenta 15:02
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg 15:02
So for you, for example, because you are, you know, as you said, you're a coach, you are a writer, you do a lot of writing process through writing, you had this business as a yoga instructor for all these years, what are the great strengths you found in yourself that you've chosen to really nurture and just lay it out there?
Emma Magenta 15:22
Oh, I love that. One of the biggest ones is just my ability to see things from a different perspective than most people. This is the blessing and the curse I think of being sort of an unconventional thinker. The curse is the fact that a lot of my life, and I think a lot of people with ADHD can identify with this, a lot of myself, I have felt like a square peg in a round hole. I felt like an, like an oddball, like somebody who didn't fit in. And the curse of that, or the part of that that's uncomfortable, let me put it that way, the challenge of that is sort of feeling isolated and lonely, right? And that's something that I've dealt with my whole life. But the blessing of that is just my ability to see things in a slightly different way than people who have a more conventional mindset. And that's something that I bring to my clients. Like when I'm coaching somebody, oftentimes they feel sort of trapped in this particular groove and they're thinking, it's my great honor and pleasure to sort of help them begin to look at things a little bit differently, so that they can, and as their thoughts change about something they can, as they observe what their thoughts are, then they can really investigate "Well, is this how I want to be thinking about this? Is this the most empowered way for me to think about the situation or this aspect of myself?" And then as they start to shift how their minds are working, they start to shift their thoughts, then they can shift their actions. So I would say that is one of the greatest gifts that I have as somebody with ADHD is just that my mind works a little bit differently. Another thing that I think that really comes into play is empathy, I often wonder, if I hadn't been carrying around this heavy burden of shame for all my life, based on this sense of feeling like I was defective, right from when I was a kid at school, would I be as empathetic as I am? Like that's the part of it, again, it's like this part where things that maybe were challenges can become strengths in certain situations. And I feel like one way that people with ADHD can approach that condition or that situation is to constantly be on the lookout for well, how are these things that are pathologized by the very name of this condition, right? Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, right? Doesn't sound that pleasant. How can you turn those traits into pluses? How can you learn to embrace them within yourself?
Amy Hallberg 18:02
You know, something you said just, just sort of sparked something for me, which is that oftentimes the gift of, of ADHD is that we and I include myself, but I hear you saying it, we are outsiders in plain sight, but we're hiding. Like, we might look like everybody else, but we are aware we're different. And so we're observing things. And if, which makes, you know, like you said, that's a huge strength in your coaching. It's definitely a huge strength in a lot of the things that I do, if you can shift that narrative so that that is true, but what it means, what we make it mean is not I am an outsider, right? It doesn't mean that I am outcast, that I don't belong. If we can shift that around, what it means is I can sit in a room and I can read the room really well. And actually, I can help people to figure out who they are. I can find people who are my people, you know, like, like it comes from this place of I hear you saying, and I certainly felt it, loneliness, but it lends itself to making friends actually.
Emma Magenta 19:09
So when I owned the yoga studio, which was my last career, one of the things that I was proudest of about it was the incredible vibrancy of the community that I was able to create there. And I think that's a great example of how my feeling like an oddball actually attracted a bunch of other people who maybe felt like oddballs and gave them a home. So I think what you're saying about how that feeling of being an outsider, it actually makes it possible for you to feel like home to a bunch of different people.
Amy Hallberg 19:44
It's nurturing inclusivity and understanding why it matters.
Emma Magenta 19:49
That's right. That's right. It's also it's making a space for people to be themselves.
Amy Hallberg 19:53
Hmm.
Emma Magenta 19:54
It's making a space for people to show up with all of their quirks.
Amy Hallberg 19:59
Can I just do a little life coach-y thing that you're going to recognize the second I do it? Can I just try it?
Emma Magenta 20:04
Yes.
Amy Hallberg 20:04
Okay. So if we were to go back to little Emma, in the school, you probably already know where I'm going with this. What would she have wanted to have been told? And I think it's important to say that like, a lot of times, at least in my family, like, the people I came from also probably were a little neurodivergent and therefore, they didn't necessarily know how to support me, either. But if we could go back to little Emma, what are the things that she would have loved that would have felt inclusive and welcoming and would have felt supportive back then?
Emma Magenta 20:37
Yeah, I think she wanted to know that she wasn't broken. I think she wanted to feel that she was welcome. And I think she wanted to feel that her strengths were not going to be obscured by her frailties. That the ways in which she needed support did not define her. There's a couple of situations from when I was in school, and I went to public school in Kansas so I really feel like I have to be like, I feel very grateful for every teacher who did see me, right, who did see that here's a, who first of all saw that I was a bright kid, and second of all, saw that my brightness and the contributions that I had to make were not canceled out by the ways in which I struggled. But there was one teacher in particular, she was the gifted program teacher actually, at my school, Terry Healy. And I remember we had to write this paper for History Day and I can't remember how old I was, I must have been in sixth grade. And I was writing a paper about an ancestor of mine. And I had done a bunch of research about it, I'd interviewed my father, and he'd given me some objects from family lore, and, but I couldn't actually write the paper like when it came time to actually sit down and write it I couldn't do it. And so what this teacher or this, this gifted counselor did for me, was she sat at the computer, Oh my God I'm like getting emotional. This teacher, she sat at the computer, and she took dictation for me. She took dictation for 15 pages. And I submitted the paper and I won a prize. And the thing that's so
Amy Hallberg 22:29
Wow.
Emma Magenta 22:30
Yeah, amazing, right? Bless her.
Amy Hallberg 22:34
That's huge. That's huge for a kid who needed to have that affirmation.
Emma Magenta 22:39
And the thing that's so wild is that for years, when I thought about that episode in my past, I felt that I had cheated. I didn't feel like oh, wow, here's a great recollection of a teacher who really helped me in a time when I got the support that I needed. Instead, I felt like, oh, man, I cheated writing that paper, I had to dictate it to somebody else, right? Which is a great example of how,
Amy Hallberg 23:10
Well we internalized ableism, we internalize the messages.
Emma Magenta 23:13
The internalized ableism, that's right, that's right. There's only, it's like we take on the idea that there's only one way to do things, that the right way to do things is the neurotypical way, to the extent that like, we can't even see our accomplishments or achievements.
Amy Hallberg 23:31
So given that now, you're very open about "I'm a writer," you're very open about it, and you write and you publish openly what you write, what is your creative process now? Because clearly, you do feel successful about it. Nobody does something that openly that they haven't found a way to really feel good about how they do it. How did you get there? What is that process?
Emma Magenta 23:53
I think that 20 years of teaching yoga really helped me understand that what is most important with anything that you care about and that you love is practice. And that the nature of practice is that when you start out at something, you're not that good at it, when you learn a new pose, you're not that good at it. When you take up a new discipline or a new habit, you're not that good. And the only way to become good, right, this is the difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, right? I learned it through the practice of yoga, but a lot of people know it through the work of I think it's Carol Dweck, who wrote a book about it, right, called Mindset. The only way that you're going to improve is by practicing. So I practice which is, well so that's kind of the answer. I think that's the way that a neurotypical person might think about it. But as an ADHD person, when I say practice, here's how that actually shows up in my life because it's actually twofold. I do believe very strongly in the discipline of practice, because that is what helps me evolve, get comfortable putting my work out into the world. But the other thing about it is that I really honor and look out for those moments of inspiration. Like that ADHD trait that I have, where I can talk a blue streak on any topic, I really notice and honor it when I feel sort of the hurricane of inspiration begin to blow through me. And that's where it's actually a great thing to have a phone. The great thing about smartphones is that if I'm out for a walk with my dog and inspiration strikes, I can dictate it right into my phone. And a lot of those dictations later in the week, when it's time for me to publish my blog, I pull them up and I clean them up, and I, and I hit post.
Amy Hallberg 25:46
And you know, I love that. You know, we didn't have that technology. I mean, we did have tape recorders back in the 70s. But we didn't really have the technology we have now. And I just wonder how much that technology changes how we see ourselves, because probably a lot of people at this point, just record their thoughts, right? That's normal, and it's normal therefore we give ourselves permission, you know?
Emma Magenta 26:11
Yeah. 100% I love technology. I mean, there's all kinds of ways that it can be a problem, but I certainly feel like with ADHD technology has certainly helped me enormously.
Amy Hallberg 26:22
Well, I'm really glad it did because I just love reading your writing and the things you put out into the world. And it's been such a pleasure to talk with you about all this and I hope you'll come back again.
Emma Magenta 26:34
Amy, thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.
Amy Hallberg 26:38
Thanks for listening to Courageous Wordsmith. Today's episode featured Emma Magenta. You can read about her and check out her links in the show notes. Backstage at Courageous Wordsmith my editor is the talented Will Quie and my producer is the fabulous Maddy Kelley. If you enjoyed this podcast, you can help it thrive and grow. Please tell your friends and sign up for my email so that you'll hear about future episodes. And if you're feeling the call to write, join us in our free community for real life writers. You'll find these links right on this page. You can learn more about me and my books and my work with book writers at amyhallberg.com. I am Amy Hallberg and until we meet again, travel safely.