Welcome to Extra Focus, introduce yourself!
Welcome to Extra Focus, a community of over 65,000 people with ADHD (or those supporting loved ones with ADHD).
I’ve never actually done a proper welcome or introduction page, so here it is just a few years later.
Thank you so much for being here. 💙
This year, I’m wanting to make this place even more community-oriented, and with that in mind, I want to know who you are!
Share your location and maybe a few sentences about your ADHD story and why you’re here.
I’ll go first.
👋 Hi, I’m Jesse J. Anderson!
I live in Washington State (US) in a city named Puyallup (pronounced PEW like 🔫 “pew pew” and ALLOP like 🐎 “gallop”). It’s about an hour south of Seattle.
I got diagnosed with ADHD in 2017 and tried to learn everything I could about it and why my weird brain worked the way it did. A few years later (2021) I started this newsletter to talk about my experience with ADHD and share everything I’d learned and what was working for me.
I wrote a book about ADHD (that’s sold over 22k copies 😱). I’m married with 3 kids (my wife doesn’t have ADHD but all of our kids do 🤪). I work as a designer and developer and I’m a total nerd that still loves video games and board games.
What about you? What brought you here? What’s your story? What are you interested in? What are you most hoping to achieve this year?
Hi Jesse and everyone! I write about fitness and martial arts, and other things. I met Jesse in a writer‘s group and read his book there. I think it was the very first line that caught my attention – something about not living up to your potential. The story of my life. As I continue reading, everything resonated.
Leaving out a whole lot of details, at 61 I got myself diagnosed, started on meds, and adopted lots of tools and strategies. It’s been absolutely life-changing. Like having a tailwind instead of a headwind. I ended up taking a year’s pause in my work to recover from a lifetime of lack of executive function. It was hard work.
Starting just this past Monday I’m back to focusing on my writing as my primary gig. I’ve recently picked up an entirely new hobby – model railroading, and am having an absolute blast with that. I do Aikido (a Japanese martial art), play around with guitar and fiddle, and keep telling myself I’m into fitness. ;-) I live in the foothills of San Diego County with my husband (together 45 years), our cats, and about an acre of trees and wildlife.
Thank you, Jesse, for your transformational book, and for this awesome community. <3
I'm Emmy from London, UK. I first suspected I had ADHD in the mid-1990's as a teenager, but I was only formally diagnosed last year. I'm a voice and communication coach by profession, and I'm now (hyper!)focusing on learning and sharing everything I can about how ADHD influences verbal communication.