Hyperfocus: Two lifelong friends, two very different ADHD stories

Rae Jacobson has been friends with Katherine Martinelli since they were 6. In the classroom, they were polar opposites: Katherine, a star student; Rae, scrambling and struggling with then-undiagnosed ADHD and dyscalculia. 

As they grew older, they both became mothers and professional writers and editors. Rae got diagnosed and found the support and systems that worked for her. 

When, well into their 30s, Katherine called to say she'd been diagnosed with ADHD, Rae was shocked: “My queen of competence has ADHD?”

On this episode of Hyperfocus, Rae digs into what made her and Katherine’s ADHD experiences so vastly different. 

We love hearing from our listeners. Email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.

Related resources

• ADHD and women: The essentials 

• “Understood Explains” podcast: ADHD diagnosis in adults

• How ADHD is diagnosed in adults

• “In It” podcast: When your child’s diagnosis leads to your own (podcast)

Timestamps

(03:56) Martinelli’s diagnosis

(07:27) Memories of Rae in school

(11:39) Hyperfocusing and other early signs

(15:39) “Am I an ADHD imposter?”

Episode transcript

Rae: You ready to talk to me for a podcast?

Katherine: So weird.

Rae: So weird.

Katherine Martinelli and I have been friends since we were six, and as long as we've known each other, I've done this thing — something she probably is just hearing about for the first time — I've stared at her head. I've stared at her head and I wondered how she did it, how she managed to be who she was because, she will hate this, she's pretty amazing.

As a kid, she was great in school. Teachers loved her. She was even-keeled, involved, and just good at accomplishing things. And it wasn't just that. It was that she could do this other almost unconscious set of things that felt totally mysterious to me, like be on time or do her homework and then find it afterwards. And as we got older, she seemed able somehow to do the stupid teenage things we did, like cutting class and other things I will not mention here and not totally fail.

Me? Not so much. From an early age, my ADHD and dyscalculia — undiagnosed back then, but absolutely rampant — meant my school years were not like covered in glory. But back then, undiagnosed and scrambling, I didn't know why. Why were my friend and I so similar and so different? Why couldn't I just will myself to be more like the Martinelli's of my world? The people who seem to just be able to do it.

I didn't get it. So, I stared at Martinelli's pretty brunette head and wondered how the gears turned inside because it seemed like if I could just figure it out, just learn that secret, everything would fall into place.

And back then, the conventional wisdom was that ADHD wasn't something women and girls had. That it was rare at best, nonexistent at worst. Not true, obviously. But that meant that even after getting diagnosed, I only knew a few other women who knew that they had it. And in that all too human way, part of me assumed that other girls with ADHD would be like me, struggling, barely keeping about the surface of the water. But that's not true. And the more I learned about it, the more I understood how different ADHD can look from person to person.

But still, when Martinelli, of all people, called me a few years ago to say that she had been diagnosed with ADHD, I was floored. Seriously, my queen of confidence has ADHD? I wanted to know more. I had a lot of questions. And Martinelli, gracious and lovely human that she is, agreed to let me ask her them on air.

Katherine: My younger son wanted to know what if this podcast has a name.

Rae: It does have a name, and I can say right now, which is welcome to "Hyperfocus" with Rae Jacobson. So Katherine Martinelli, tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do? How you came to this podcast?

Katherine: OK. Yeah. My name is Katherine Martinelli and I am a freelance writer and editor. I guess I have two kids and a husband, and I have known Rae Jacobson my entire life pretty much since we were very little. We went to elementary school together and then I always remember the first day of high school — we went to a ginormous high school — and outside was a huge crowd of people and we saw each other before going into the building on the first day.

Rae: I forgot about that.

Katherine: Yeah.

Rae: My God. Yeah.

Katherine: And we were like, "Oh my God!" And then we were best friends again.

Rae: Yeah. And have stayed best friends for, I don't know, so many years. Over 30 years.

Katherine: Yeah. Very long time.

(03:56) Martinelli’s diagnosis

Rae: In my memory of you, you were, like this unbelievably capable person who seemed sort of effortlessly just to, like, slide through school in a way that I genuinely couldn't understand. But as we got older and we're lucky enough to continue to live our lives in tandem. You were eventually diagnosed with ADHD. How long ago was that?

Katherine: That was, let me think. 3 or 4 years ago?

Rae: Yeah.

Katherine: So, let's say like pandemic 2020-ish.

Rae: And I remember vividly that phone call when you told me about it, and I was genuinely shocked.

Katherine: Right.

Rae: Like, because, you know, when you have your own experience, it's kind of hard to see outside it. So, to look at you this like, paragon of competence that I was like, "Oh, Martinelli could do anything. It seems so easy for her." So, if you wouldn't mind, would you tell me a little bit about how you got your ADHD diagnosis? Like, how did you end up where you ended up?

Katherine: Yeah, well, I think a few different ways. Primarily, of course, is the fact that I, one of my kids, at least one of them, maybe both, but probably at least one has very, very, very severe ADHD. So, I've been very immersed in that and learning about how his brain works. And it's brought me down all these, you know, rabbit holes about neurodiversity and or divergence in general and just learning more and more about ADHD.

I was seeing a psychiatrist already and brought it up with her. The data, the possibility of ADHD, and the first time, you know, she sort of went through the questions and really sort of blew me off and said basically that I was just an overwhelmed mother, essentially.

Rae: Oh nice.

Katherine: So, and I was like, "OK, all right. Yeah, that seems sure. Yeah. OK you know." But then I just, I kept reading and kept and I was like, "No," like and just like, as we'll talk about, just started, like, thinking about things and putting them together and looking back and being like, "Oh yeah," you know, I'm part of a big movement of adult women who have been diagnosed in the past few years like this is, you know, it's like a joke at this point.

But I think because there has been more information available about the ways that it can look and the ways that women in particular and anyone you know, but can sort of overcompensate for it or, you know, try to find these workarounds and not realize it's not supposed to, it doesn't have to be like that or that that's not just...

Rae: It doesn't have to be that hard.

Katherine: Yeah. And my husband has ADHD as well. And we all, like all three of us, it's kind of funny because we all sort of do have very different flavors of it, and different, it looks different on each of us. And then other family members have since, like in the generation above older than us, gotten diagnosed and realized, "Oh wait." So, it's been this really interesting ripple effect. It's been kind of cool and interesting to see that happen to see even the older generation be like "Oh."

(07:27) Memories of Rae in school

Rae: So, when you talk about like, you know, all the sort of trickle down of information that like led you to where you were up to the point of getting a diagnosis, which was after your son was diagnosed, did you like... When I look back at the you that I knew all our lives, it is very hard for me to read that version of you as somebody who has ADHD because it was so different from my experience.

Katherine: Right.

Rae: And this is a weird question because it's weird to ask somebody what they remember about you, but like, do you remember what it was like being around somebody who had the kind of ADHD that I had, which for the record, was like failing out of school and, you know, sort of always being like a little bit off the ball. So, does that something that like, like registered for you when we were younger or is it something that only now you're like, "Oh I can see that. In retrospect."

Katherine: I mean, I knew that you had a hard time in school and I didn't know why because you were, like, one of the smartest people I know and still are. So, I knew it was really hard for you, but I didn't know why. And not in, like, a judgy way. Just like in a like Rae is totally capable. Like what, you know, what's the disconnect?

Rae: What is the problem?

Katherine: No, what's like, you know...And I remember being so happy when you found Landmark College. And I remember you telling me about a class you had there. It was like, right when you started. And they, like, taught you how to, like, take notes and how to do a planner and how to organize like all of these like basic executive function stuff, but that like, needed to be explicitly taught. And once you had that and like then it helped you like, build systems. Am I remembering that correctly?

Rae: You are. So, for clarity, Landmark College is one of the many colleges that I went to — and surprisingly, there were some hiccups on the road — which is explicitly a college for kids who have ADHD and learning disabilities. And they have a class among others, which is basically an executive functioning skills class. So, you learn how to keep a planner and you learn, you know, that you should keep a planner and how to organize a binder and how to make sure that you have the things that you need through systems. It's a very well-thought-out thing. It's something that I wish was taught everywhere in every school.

Katherine: Yeah. Yeah.

Rae: Like I think it would have been wonderful if we had gotten that when we were kids. But it did. It was hugely changing for me. I mean, to just learn things that to me seemed so obvious to everyone else. Like how do you keep your homework in your backpack and not lose it? You know, it seemed like basic information that everybody appeared to have that I did not. But I think that was a big turning point for me. It's true.

And I feel like one of the things I remember very different thing in school is that almost all of our friends, with the exception of maybe 1 or 2, did pretty well. And luckily we're still friends with almost all of these kids. And, you know, we're all grown-ups now. And looking back, I can see that like, the way that having ADHD affected me in school was that I really didn't know how to do any of this executive functioning stuff that you guys all seem to kind of understand.

Katherine: Yeah, I was just thinking about how I mean, the fact my mom is really organized.

Rae: Your mom is very organized.

Katherine: A very meticulous, organized person, and I think she did explicitly teach me a lot of that stuff without even realizing it, you know? I mean, I can remember sitting down with her to work on ways to write like little autobiographies or something in third grade and like sitting with her and like she helped me, like, write it out. And then we would, like, cut it into pieces and reorganize. You know, like, learn how to edit and like. So, I think I did get that explicit instruction without even knowing it.

Rae: That's so interesting.

Katherine: Yeah.

Rae: It makes sense too. Your mom is very organized and she is a teacher, she probably understood what you needed to learn to do well in that context.

Katherine: Yeah. I mean, she just passed on what worked for her. And now, like, there are so many times where I'm like, "I am so messy and disorganized. How did I, how do you do it? How do you get the dishes away every night and the laundry folded and put away right away? I don't understand. But I came from you."

(11:39) Hyperfocusing and other early signs

Something I really didn't realize until adulthood and recently was the extent to which "Hyperfocus" can be a facet of ADHD, and that is something like I never would have thought that I had ADHD because I can focus for so long on something, way too long, past when I should stop, you know, I should be doing other things, but I can't prioritize them because I am so deeply focused on whatever it is that I'm doing.

So that didn't occur to me that, you know, all of the black holes of research that I always go down. You know, I was a history major and I loved it because I could just research and research and research and like it would lead to all these other things. But then, you know, it would come time to like, write the paper and I'd have enough for like a book and be like, "Oh God, what do I do with all," you know?

And then cutting it down has always been my hardest, biggest struggle. And just things like just taking a really long time and like I still have a really hard time retaining what I read. Like working memory is definitely at play. So, I need to like write things down and, you know, like...

Rae: Yeah, keeping things in front of you so that you don't get lost.

Katherine: Yes. And realizing, too, like the ways in which I had compensated and built in these structures for myself in order to succeed. But like the minute you take away any part of that, like, I crumble and fall or like, you know, like times like I've missed planes because I mixed up the day or the date or the, you know, or I because I just, like, kept it in my head and didn't look at the actual... You know.

And just that all, like the constant feeling of, I mean if I showed you my room right now you would see that it's a mess. So, there's that. And just the constant feeling that like "Oh if I just found the right organizational system, then everything would be OK." Like, it's just a matter of I just haven't found the thing. And so, I just need to get in the right, you know, And like, I would like, always adopt all these systems and they would work for a little bit. But like, the minute I stop, I like, cannot get back. It's just like, well, that's it forever. Like...

Rae: You know, I mean, that all jibes with like, things. It feels so familiar. But it's when I think about all those things, like, I do remember you working really hard. I do remember you being but like, I remember the end of that work to be success...

Katherine: Right.

Rae: In a way that was like very baffling to me at the time and kind of exciting cause I was like, "Look at Katherine go. It's amazing." You know? You're so happy for the people that you love in that way, but also be like, "How did that work? How did she do that?" And I think a lot of like when I think about what you're saying with the examples of like missing a plane because you didn't write it down or trying to find the right system, like all of those things feel so like, of course, like everybody has to find the system that works for them, right?

Like, of course, you're going to figure it out. It'll be fine. It'll be, we'll just get there because we'll find the right calendar.

Katherine: Yeah.

Rae: Or the, you know, why didn't you just set your alarm?

Katherine: Right.

Rae: And I feel like so much of the underpinning of ADHD stuff is that the thinking that would lead you to set the alarm or to find the right calendar or to do the thing that would make it easy...

Katherine: Right.

Rae: It's just not there. Like, it's like, the step in the middle is blank. Like have problem, unclear, solve. But what do you do to get from A to B? So, watching like you perform over the years, to me, you have that step, always. I always saw you as somebody who was like had something that was like invisible to me, like that work in the middle where you could just do it. And so, hearing that you were diagnosed with ADHD was so like, wow, like kind of eye-opening for me because I think it's very easy get stuck in your own experience.

(15:39) "Am I an ADHD imposter?"

And it's also very easy to say, like, "If this doesn't follow the path that I went down, it then it's something that's unfamiliar and probably something else." And I think what you were talking about with the doctor when she was like, "You're just an overwhelmed mom," or "You're just anxious" or whatever. Like the excuses that we use to make women feel like their experiences are invalid, especially if it's like "Maybe you could just handle your life a little better and then we'd all be fine and you would just, you know, maybe you just buck up."

Katherine: Right.

Rae: Like knowing that you went through that as a mom, as a person with two children, where you had like had all of these like, you know, careers established like you were a teacher, you're a writer, you're a photographer, you've done all these things already, seemed amazing to me that you could get to where you got and then get this really revealing piece of information about yourself and that you had to seek it out.

You fought for that, like you said. And how did you feel when they said "This is what it is" like when it was confirmed for you that it was something that you'd been sort of seeking and that made sense to you, it sounds like?

Katherine: Yeah. I mean a little bit validating, a little bit still second guessing myself and being like, "Am I an ADHD imposter? Like maybe I am just an overwhelmed mom," you know, like. So, both, I guess. But it has, you know, just it definitely causes a lot of reflection and looking back and like realizing that there were puzzle pieces missing that you didn't know should even be there or, you know, just like being like, "Oh OK."

Rae: That's why.

Katherine: You know, like when I was starting out as a freelancer like I would work all day, I would work like 12-hour days, but like get nothing done. And I'd be like, "I don't have time for anything else. I'm working so hard," but like, I had nothing to show, like, it was like so... And this was before kids, you know, like I had no excuse. I had, I could only focus on that, and like, I don't understand.

Like, I've been doing this all day and I have, like, nothing to show for it, but, you know, like it being like, OK, yeah. Got it. It's because you have 9 million tabs open because you keep jumping from one thing to the next "Oh look at this, look at this, look at this." And just jumping to the next thing and getting distracted and ending up 12 million miles from where you started. And there are all interesting places, right? Like they're all places you want to go.

Rae: Places you want to go. They're not where you need to go.

Katherine: Yeah. I mean, I have like, I often max out. Did you know you can have 500 tabs open in your internet browser on your iPhone? I do, because I often see that and it makes me close.

Rae: No, but I feel like I'm probably coming up on it. I didn't now you're supposed to close those. I just never did.

Katherine: At one time, if there's that many, sometimes it'll be like, "Do you want me to just close all the ones, like older than six months or something?" you know. And one time one of my kids did that, I was like, "No. What if I needed those? I was going to go back to them." But I never go back to them.

Rae: Mine would be like, oh it's the history of Swiss engineering. Like, what was I looking at that?

Katherine: Yeah. exactly.

Rae: What was I supposed to be doing when I was looking at that? So, I wonder, like, what is the thing? Like you and I have totally different brains, but we have a lot in common.

Katherine: Yes.

Rae: And like when you find that you are now like, "OK, I have this information. I'm Figuring it out. I'm trying to get to the end of like, find that thing." Have you found it? It's like...and if so, what is it and is it available online?

Katherine: Yes, I have. I have the secret to life. But you're going have to buy my book to find it.

Rae: I'll buy 30 copies.

Katherine: Just kidding.

Rae: Pre-sold.

Katherine: No, I'm still always looking. I'm still, you know, you know, listening to audiobooks about how to get your life together and how to clean and how to like, you know, I read that book about how to, you know...

Rae: "Keep House While Drowning."

Katherine: I read that one. And the one about starting habits.

Rae: Any luck there?

Katherine: Zero.

Rae: Oh yeah.

Katherine: Zero habits from that.

Rae: Thanks for listening to this episode of "Hyperfocus." If you have any questions or ideas for future topics, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org.

"Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson. Our video producer is Calvin Knie. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions and Justin D. Wright mixes the show. Ash Beecher is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director and Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott, Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, you can donate at understood.org/give.