March 2021 Update: A New Logo, and a Whole Lot of Research

Has it already been a month? It feels like it has flown by, but somehow it also feels like I’ve been doing this work for a long time—like it’s a part of me. I’m having the incredibly affirming experience of feeling every single day that I am in the right place and on the right path.

Since my last update, I’ve been continuing with my client work. I’m finding my voice and my style, noticing patterns, applying learned strategies, and feeling out what each unique situation needs most. The experience has been very positive—both for my clients and for myself. I am loving this work.

We also updated our Queer ADHD branding! A million thanks to Jen Thomas—a wonderful graphic designer who I’ve collaborated with in the past on queer community projects. She did a fabulous job designing our logo and selecting our color scheme to become the optimistic-yet-calming container and backdrop for the important work we want to do here. (Personally, I’m in love with this “Q”. I think it looks like a very theatrical mustache.)

We’ve also started evolving our blog content from being solely about my personal journey into a deeper discussion about ADHD. The most recent post about how I’m reserving a zone of freedom in my week is a bit of both—a snapshot of my journey through a strong ADHD lens—and I’m particularly excited about that topic. Reserving a big chunk of time for whatever my mind wants to focus on has become one of my most important havens of joy and relief.

And thanks to the ADHD education I’ve been absorbing like a sponge in my coaching program, I’ve been better able to process one of the more difficult experiences that happened in the last month: I spent nearly a week locked in an unhappy and obsessive cycle of researching appointment booking software. In the past, I would have just called this hyperfocus, but now I understand it was more than that. There’s a type of perfectionism that’s common in ADHD called maximizing, which is an impulse to examine every possible option before making a decision. It’s an exhausting behavior, and often leads to us spending far more time in research mode than a decision is actually worth to us. A perfect storm of confusion, anxiety, and regret hidden behind a story of “doing our best.”  

Fortunately, with the help of some people close to me, I slowly recognized the loop I was locked into, and I started working my way out of it. I talked about what was going on, wrote about the specifics and context, clarified what really mattered, and set new boundaries on my time. I landed on a software decision that is “good enough for now,” and this lets me move on to our higher priorities. It’s uncomfortable for me to accept this sort of tradeoff, but being perfect is the enemy of getting (good) things done, and we have so much more that we want to create for our community. 

So what’s next? Since we’ve been receiving a lot of interest (even before we have a social media presence—which, wow…), our next priority is to start offering a series of group sessions. I have a lot of different ideas for how we can structure these sessions, and I expect even more ideas are going to come from community members as we get them underway, so I’m excited to start simple and flexible, and let it evolve. Stay tuned for more details!

And speaking of our lack of social presence, we’ve grabbed @QueerADHD on Instagram and will be rolling out some content there soon, as well as a newsletter.

In my head, this will all be launched in a week, but I also know my ADHD lies to me about how much time projects require, so let’s just say we’ll get there when we get there. Thanks for being on this journey with us!

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