There are dozens of half written blog posts behind this calm-seeming, mustard yellow exterior of a website.

Not just on parenting, on all sorts of areas of ADHD that I have thoughts, tips and brain farts about.

Since becoming a parent I have slowly been winding back my consumption of social media. It’s not a particular moral stance – I am wary of treating technology like it’s a person capable of morality – but I do get infected by some of the messaging, including what the algorithm has decided to feed me, especially ever since it has known what stage my pregnancy was at, and now what age my child is, not because I told it, but because it inferred it.

I often decide what I think as I write. Which is why it’s hard to hit the post button, as what I think is always changing. So I’m going to try and publish posts and hope they are received with the below post in mind.

This post is about becoming a parent, others will continue too be about executive function in general, organisation, workplaces, and how we connect.

Postcard from Planet Parent #1 – Allowing yourself a change of mind

Five or so years ago, I was at a random speech at a random convening of people. It was dry, full of powerpoint presentations and piles of muffins and mints. I hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but even then I was perched up the back, standing up and sitting down at random, having manufactured reasons to linger up the back by helping to set up.

At a certain point in the speech, the speaker paused, and then, as if half to himself, said:

“We need to allow people a change of mind.”

It stuck with me, and I have done my best in the ensuing bumpy years to massage the inflexible scar tissue that resists that thought.

It had never sat well with me to hear anyone say “I’m the type of person who…”

And it jarred even more in the years leading up to my diagnosis. As I explored how I felt about my life in my mid-thirties, when I would experiment with ideas around different ways of living, someone, or myself would start to say to me, “but you’re not the type of person who…”, which would make me second guess myself.

I have said that learning about my ADHD was like picking the camera up on my life, and shifting it a metre over. Post-diagnosis, patterns I wasn’t happy about repeated, but I was able to see that pattern from a different perspective. This meant the next time the pattern repeated again, I was able to tweak how I interacted with it a little, and see what happened.

Moving towards, and then landing on, Planet Parent was the same – and after landing it was like moving the camera again. But I’d at least been through the gargantuan process of looking at my life differently through my ADHD diagnosis, of allowing myself a change of mind. I knew that big change, while at times painful, could also be magnificent.

By deciding to try and become a parent, I allowed myself to accept I was able to do something with the surfeit of love I had to give. And so, when that camera moved a metre again, I was able to roll with the change – it was familiar, and yet so different, and so awesome.

It’s why I like the strengths-based nature of coaching – this style is folded in with that resilience, the ‘being knocked down then getting up again and trying again’¹ that, I believe, is intrinsic to ADHDers.

What can hold someone back is the pushback that can come with a change of mind – but by letting go of who you think you should be, stepping back and observing what you see when that camera is moved over, you can start to get a bit of freedom to experiment, to compose your life, to hope to have it look more the way you’d like it to be.

¹ Apologies if you now have Chumbawamba in your head but also not because they are awesome.