I am a thirty-nine-year-old ADHD coach and writer who did not know I had ADHD until I was thirty-six. I live in Portland, Oregon, with my husband and two children, and a deeply held conviction that getting diagnosed late changes everything, and does not change a thing.
I spent the first decade of my career in elementary and middle-school classrooms, where I earned a reputation as the teacher who got the kids no one else could reach. It was not until my own daughter was diagnosed with ADHD that I started reading the research and recognizing myself on every page. The diagnosis at thirty-six came with a cascade of feelings I had not expected. Relief. Grief. Anger at the years I had spent calling myself lazy and scattered. A quiet rage at how invisible women's ADHD had been to every doctor, school counselor, and friend who had ever known me.
After my diagnosis, I left teaching to train as an ADHD coach with the ADD Coach Academy. Five years later, I founded Late Bloom Coaching, a private practice working exclusively with women diagnosed in their thirties, forties, and fifties. I have personally coached more than four hundred women through the first two years post-diagnosis, the most disorienting and quietly transformational period of their lives.
I write because most ADHD books still treat ADHD as a deficit to manage rather than an identity to integrate. I write for the woman who finally heard the word ADHD from her therapist and is now reading a 300-page reference book that does not acknowledge the grief, the relief, or the question she is actually asking. Now what.
My books are not workbooks, and they are not lectures. They are letters from one late-diagnosed woman to another, with practical tools tucked into the chapters where they fit. The voice is shame-removing, evidence-based, and gently insistent that you are not late. The diagnosis was.
I am currently writing the Late Bloom Series, a five-book arc covering habits, focus, relationships, career, and motherhood for women with ADHD diagnosed late. The standalone permafree anchor, Was It Always This?, is the introduction to the series. You're Not Lazy is book 1.
When I am not coaching or writing, I run slowly through Forest Park, garden badly, and re-read Mary Oliver every spring.
Maren