Podcasts about Chatty Cathy

On this episode of Kirk and Marianne we break the ice with some of our eye-catching fashion choices. Tune in to hear Kirk and Marianne live in the Boom Boom Room discuss the different clothes we wear that starts the conversation. What are you wearing that brings out "Chatty Cathy." One way to find out. Hit play!

Reddit rSlash Storytime r amithejerk? where AITA for refusing to let my sister-in-law bring her dog to my house? AITA for not being a Chatty Cathy with my hospital roommate. AITA for telling a mom that I don't care about her daughter being dumped by my son? AITA for snapping at my mom for telling people I'm gay? AITA For Not Letting A Woman Cut The Line At The Grocery Store? AITA brother in law asked my family to move our Christmas vacation we had planned after they (him and fiance) decided to honeymoon in the same city at same time. AITA for refusing to call me friend by her new name, "Queen"? AITA for telling my MIL if she keeps rearranging my Kitchen she can get a hotel room? AITA for banning my friend from my home after she refused to take videos of my bird down? AITA for asking my cousin not to eat my food? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you feeling stuck in a pattern of thinking and living that you wish you could change?  We all have a “voice” and a “listener” inside our heads.  And oftentimes the “Chatty Cathy“ is running the show, talking constantly, and keeping us feeling stuck and powerless to change.  In this episode, we take a closer look at that “voice” inside our heads.   Bob Proctor has said, “The quality of one's life is in direct proportion to their level of awareness.”  So in today's episode, we are shining a light on “that VOICE” that has been lying to you, discouraging you from taking on that new project, new job, new adventure, and we aim to help you become an objective listener to that chatter.  Why is this helpful?  Because when we become AWARE of our thoughts and feelings, as an objective, 3rd-party observer/listener, we can then make some non-judgemental observations and ask ourselves some questions like: 1.Is this thought/feeling true? 2. Is this thought/feeling serving me? 3. Is this thought/feeling in alignment with the person I aspire to be? 4. What thought/feeling would I like to have instead? 5. What is stopping me from believing this new thought/feeling?   It is as if you start playing the objective counselor/advisor to that “voice” in your head!   Who is going to start trying this?  Let us know how it is working for you!  We hope this episode inspired you to take action!  We would love to hear how this episode encouraged or challenged you! Be sure to reach out to us!  Give us a “shout out” on your social media platforms!  Thank you!  Drop us a message, LIKE, SHARE, and leave us a review!  Follow us on Instagram @wakeupanddreampodcast.  You can also connect with each of us here:    Sara Carlisi: @saracarlisi1    Kelly Armstrong:  @kellyarmstrongofficial  kelly@fullyembraceyourlife.com   Lisa Taylor:  @lisa.kay.taylor www.linktree.com/lisa.kay.taylor

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1097, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Nebraska, New York Or North Dakota 1: The least populous. North Dakota. 2: Its name does not have a Native American origin. New York. 3: The Oregon Trail crossed it. Nebraska. 4: The largest in area. Nebraska. 5: Its cities include Minot, Jamestown and Grand Forks. North Dakota. Round 2. Category: Mattel-Ica 1: Can you identify this classic Mattel fortune-telling toy with an internal die that answers queries? Signs point to yes!. the Magic 8-Ball. 2: The Splittin' Image and the Peeping Bomb were among the models in this "fiery" Mattel toy car line introduced in 1968. Hot Wheels. 3: Mattel now makes this classic boxing game in which the Red Rocker and Blue Bomber try to knock each other's blocks off. Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. 4: "Let's play house" and "Please change my dress" were 2 of the 11 phrases said by this talkative doll introduced in 1959. Chatty Cathy. 5: Back in the '60s, you needed a Thingmaker to cook up the insect toys with this alliterative 2-word name. Creepy Crawlers. Round 3. Category: Emperors And Empresses 1: He was a rear admiral in the Austrian navy before he became emperor of Mexico. Maximilian. 2: Carolus Magnus is the Latin name of this king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne. 3: This "fiery" Roman emperor reportedly said, "I have only to...sing to have peace once more in Gaul". Nero. 4: This Ethiopian emperor's wife, Wayzaro Menen, was a great- granddaughter of Menelik II. Haile Selassie. 5: In 963 Nicephorus II was crowned Byzantine emperor in this most famous Byzantine church. Santa Sophia. Round 4. Category: Y. With Y in quotes 1: Part of an egg, or a natural grease exuded from sheep skin; now it's on you. yolk. 2: "Seinfeld" popularized this repeating term meaning "and so on". yada yada yada. 3: This "Y" word is in the title of Robert Crawford's 1939 Air Corps (now Air Force) song. yonder. 4: You could say it's the desire to acquire this Japanese currency. a yen. 5: A plant of the agave family, or a Nevada mountain that may or may not end up full of nuclear waste. Yucca. Round 5. Category: 6-Letter SYnonyms. With S in quotation marks 1: A child's teeter-totter. a seesaw. 2: Slang for a black eye. a shiner. 3: Candle bracket. a sconce. 4: An ape, or apelike. simian. 5: To envelop or to bandage. swathe. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

If you want to get healthier, stronger, and more resilient, one of the best things you can do is build muscle. Regular strength training can contribute to your longevity, improve your brain health, optimize your metabolism, and so much more. But unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there about what it takes to put on muscle. My friend Jay Ferrugia is an elite fitness and mindset coach. His client base spans from professional athletes to everyday folks. Jay is so successful because he makes training simple and realistic. He's back on The Model Health Show to share the five biggest mistakes people make when they're trying to build muscle. You'll learn about selecting the right exercises, the right weights, and other habits and behaviors that can help you get better results. We're diving into topics like progressive overload, recovery, and nutrition. Jay is a seasoned expert in the realm of fitness, and I know his insights are going to empower you to build muscle as effectively as possible. Enjoy! In this episode you'll discover: The connection between resistance training and cognitive function. Why building muscle requires simplicity. How many reps you should do of an exercise, depending on your skill level. Why form is critical for building muscle. What mechanical tension is. Why soreness is a poor indicator of a good workout. How to know if you're lifting heavy enough. The importance of selecting the right exercises for you. Why learning the fundamentals of movement can help you build strength. Simple ways to avoid injuries. The best way to create results in the gym. Two definitions of intensity. What the effective reps theory is. The truth about progressive overload. Why your mindset plays a powerful role in your fitness outcomes. Nutritional considerations for building muscle. Why you have a duty to be your best self. The number one thing you can do outside the gym to maximize your results. Items mentioned in this episode include: DrinkLMNT.com/model -- Get a FREE sample pack with any order! Onnit.com/model -- Save an exclusive 10% on performance supplements & tools! Connect with Jay Ferruggia Website / Podcast / Instagram Join TMHS Facebook community - Model Nation  Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes:  Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify Soundcloud   Thanks to our Sponsors! This episode is brought to you by LMNT. we're looking at what is the key to maintaining longevity, functional longevity with our body, with our muscles and also with our brain and cognitive performance as well? Well, the latest data is confirming that it is through resistance training that we're seeing a gigantic leap in functional longevity, in not just our lifespan, but our health span. And so it's not just muscle strength. And this is the key. The latest data is affirming it's also building and maintaining muscle mass. Now, this does not mean that we need to walk around with Hawking amounts of muscle on our frame. If you're into that, that's cool. But for all of us, for every walk of life, for every demographic, for every sex, we need to build and maintain muscle mass. It is one of the greatest gifts that we have as human beings, to choose to put more muscle on our frame, but to create and build muscle that feels good on us, that also, dare I say, looks good on us as well, but most importantly allows us to live a long healthy life. And so here's the key and what this episode is all about, is practical, real world science on building and maintaining your muscle. And we're gonna look at this through the lens of the biggest mistakes that people make when working to build muscle. In fact, we're gonna go through the five biggest mistakes that people make when working to build and maintain their muscle, and we're gonna learn from somebody who is, I'm talking about, elite when it comes to understanding how to build muscle. And I think that this is going to be one of those episodes that impacts your life for many, many years to come. Now, it's really important to understand that it isn't just about the stressors or the environmental inputs. The strength training that enables us to build muscle, there are key elements that are driving our muscle contractions, and also the recovery and healing of our muscles as well to build back stronger. And so protein is obviously of critical importance because these are truly the building blocks, these amino acids are the building blocks that are making up these tissues. But also, there are key minerals that are critical in order for our muscles to function in the first place, the most important minerals being electrolytes. These are minerals that carry an electric charge that enable muscle contraction in the first place. And so if we're deficient in these things, we simply cannot fire or recruit muscles in the same way. And also, this can lead to unnecessary fatigue, this can lead to muscle cramping and also lack or slowing, degrading in the ability to have our muscles to be repaired. And so electrolytes are truly important. And actually, it was at my special guest house, I was just over there doing a show years ago, and he gave me these electrolytes, and honestly, I took them and then they just sat in my cabinet for like three months. And then my wife went to do yoga, she went to a hot yoga class and she came back and she was just kind of feeling depleted and just kind of low energy. And I was like, "You probably need some electrolytes, so let me grab you some." I'm like, "I've got some in here," and I grabbed them, added them to water, gave them to her, and then I went to my office. I came back like 20 minutes later and she's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and working. I'm just like, "What the... What happened to you?" And I realized like, okay, I gave her some electrolytes, but this kind of change in her energy was very notable and very strange, and I was like, "This is interesting." And so I utilized them the next day. And usually, sometimes if I got a long day and if I'm recording a lot and doing multiple shows and doing interviews and media and all this stuff, around 4 or 5 o'clock, I might not really wanna be Chatty Cathy at that point. I might just wanna be a little bit more reserved. But it was like 4 or 5 o'clock and I was walking around in my backyard, and I'm just thinking about, "I haven't called such and such back yet," or like I've got... "I need to leave this voice text for such and such. I said I'd get back to him," whatever. I was just like thinking up people for me to get in contact with, which is not my personality, especially at the end of the day. And I was just like, "What is going on?" Maybe it's just I'm having a great day, but I had those electrolytes that day as well. It's just like I'm putting two and two together, I'm like, this might be something special here. And so I start to look into the science and contacting the creator as well, and one of the creators is actually somebody who's, for me, been such an inspiration and mentor. And I was shocked that I hadn't utilized or looked into these electrolytes sooner because of my level of respect for him. And I'm talking about New York Times best-selling author, Robb Wolf who's become a really good friend. And so having the science and having this connection and understanding the integrity, that's why I decided to really get on board with the incredible electrolytes from LMNT. Go to drinklmnt.com/model. And not only are you going to get the best electrolyte formulation based on hundreds of thousands of data points from different people, we're talking about high-level athletes to everyday folks on the optimal ratio and the most important electrolytes for performance, cognitive performance and physical activity as well, and no unnecessary sugars, no artificial colors, none of the nefarious stuff that we typically find in these "electrolyte drinks" that have become popularized in recent history, in particular through the lens of sport. Again, go to drinklmnt.com/model, get yourself hooked up with their incredible electrolytes. And when you go to that link, you're going to get a free gift, a free sample pack of electrolytes with multiple flavors with every purchase. Alright? So they're giving you a free gift right now, when you go to drinklmnt.com/model. Get hooked up with the best electrolytes in the world.   This episode is brought to you by Onnit. No list, no gifts. Here are just a few benefits of building muscles seen in peer-reviewed studies. Building some muscle mass can significantly improve your insulin sensitivity, improve your overall hormone health, improve your cognitive performance, improve your immune system, protect you against injuries and speed recovery, and defend your body against age-related degradation. This is just a small slice of what a little bit more muscle can do. Now the barrier of entry to building more healthy muscle and reaching a state of physical fitness is easier than ever. Having a few key pieces of equipment at your house can absolutely change the game for you. Kettlebells, steel clubs, maces, battle ropes, all of these phenomenal, multifaceted pieces of equipment are readily available to ship directly to your door. Go to onnit.com/model, and you're going to receive 10% off some of the most premier training equipment in the world. Simple piece of equipment that you can do dozens, if not hundreds of different exercises with. Plus, they've got incredible programs as well to teach you different techniques for unconventional training to truly create more functionality in your health and fitness. On top of all that, Onnit is also one of the world leaders in human performance nutrition. They've got the most remarkable pre-workout supplements and post-workout protein that you're going to find, all sourced from Earth-grown ingredients, nothing synthetic. They also have put their own products into real world clinical trials to affirm their efficacy. Again, go to onnit.com/model. That's onnit.com/model for 10% off everything they carry.

One of our biggest challenges with timeliness is the 'Chatty Cathy.'  These are some of our best patients.  They're super sociable and often fun to work with.  But they make finishing a session on time a challenge.We've gotten this question/comment from many of you, and this 'sode is inspired by a post from one of our mentees in the Business Accelerator program (www.pelvicptrising.com/accelerator).Really, there are three reasons this might be a problem for you in your practice.Politeness.  You aren't comfortable interrupting or find it rude to stop a patient as they go on.You're a 'down-low Chatty Cathy yourself.'  As one of our mentees said, she struggles with this because she also enjoys the conversation!You're frustrated with going over but don't have the skills or ability to stop it.We make sure you're taking control of your 'Last 5' with your patient, ending the session authoritatively, and giving them specific directions as they finish.We'll also discuss the challenges of people who are having trouble 'taking the hint' that the session is now over.Getting good at these techniques will prevent a lot of the problems you're experiencing, keep you running on time and decrease your frustration/anxiety with running over.Business Accelerator ProgramFor those looking to level up their business in 2024, make sure you're on the wait list for the Business Accelerator Program (www.pelvicptrising.com/accelerator).  This six-month coaching intensive will help fill your schedule, streamline your business and improve clinical excellence.  We've helped 400+ pelvic health businesses as they grow - you don't have to do this alone!About UsNicole and Jesse Cozean founded Pelvic PT Rising to provide clinical and business resources to physical therapists to change the way we treat pelvic health.   PelvicSanity Physical Therapy together in 2016.  It grew quickly into one of the largest cash-based physical therapy practices in the country.Through Pelvic PT Rising, Nicole has created clinical courses (www.pelvicptrising.com/clinical) to help pelvic health providers gain confidence in their skills and provide frameworks to get better patient outcomes.  Together, Jesse and Nicole have helped 400+ pelvic practices start and grow through the Pelvic PT Rising Business Programs (www.pelvicptrising.com/business) to build a practice that works for them!Get in Touch!Learn more at www.pelvicptrising.com, follow Nicole @nicolecozeandpt (www.instagram.com/nicolecozeandpt) or reach out via email (nicole@pelvicsanity.com).Check out our Clinical Courses, Business Resources and learn more about us at Pelvic PT Rising...Let's Continue to Rise!

  Jessica Hare - Hare Hollow Farm - Altus, OKHarehollowfarm.comMorph Market - https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/hare_hollow_farm/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Hare-Hollow-Farm-113861266980541Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hare_hollow_farm/Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@unmeinohiJana King - ASM Royal Tails - Port Orchard, WAMorph Market -https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/asmroyaltails/Facebook -https://facebook.com/RoyalReptails/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/asmroyaltails/Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@asmroyaltails6846Show Sponsors: RAL - Vetdna.comUse code #sh!thappens to get $5 off a crypto panel.Shane Kelley - Small Town Xotics - Knoxville, TNMorph Market - https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/smalltownxotics/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SmallTownXotics/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/smalltownxotics/Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/SmallTownXoticsRumble - https://rumble.com/search/video?q=smalltownxotics Roger and Lori Gray - Gray Family Snakes - Huntsville, Alabama Morph Market - https://www.morphmarket.com/us/c/all?store=gray_family_snakesFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/GrayFamilySnakesInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/gray_family_snakes/  Andrew Boring - Powerhouse Pythons - Tacoma, Wa Husbandry Pro - https://husbandry.pro/stores/powerhouse-pythonsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/powerhouse.pythonsInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/powerhouse.pythons/  Eileen Jarp - Bravo Zulu - Daleville, IN Morph Market -https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/bravozulu/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/bravozuluBPInstagram -https://www.instagram.com/bravozuluballpythons/Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@bravozuluballpythons Christopher Shelly - B&S Reptilia - Sellersville, PA Morph Market - https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/bandsreptilia/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/B-and-S-Reptilia-1415759941972085Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bandsreptilia/  Justin Brill - Stoneage Ball pythons - Gresham, OR Morph Market -https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/stoneageballpythons/?cat=bpsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/StoneAgeBallsInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/stoneageballpythons/Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/stoneageballpythons        

This episode is brought to you by Strip Makeup - use SLATE20 for 20% off on all my favorite makeup remover products. Follow  us on IG @slateitpod

Neenscale is on the tail end of her recovery journey from eye surgery and breaks down the struggle of working in the food and beverage industry when dealing with sick leave. As a tipped employee working in a non-traditional setting, it can be extremely stressful to be out of work due to a health emergency. But luckily, your fairy cocktail mother and SWHFTM podcast host is here to give advice on the matter and help you plan for these unforeseeable moments!Nina also shares some recent restaurant recommendations that offer outstanding service and exciting dining vibes. 

Better than being a Karen, be a Chatty Cathy. Here's why. It's CRNA-related. I swear. BRAND SPANKIN' NEW

Ah, the chatty coworker. It's fun to catch up on the office gossip, but how do you get them to just. shut. up. so you can actually work?It's a solid Q, and the Work Wives' answer might surprise you. Welcome to Ask Your Work Wife, a new podcast where Vanessa & Holland answer your real questions about real work in corporate America. Covering topics from quitting to interviewing to negotiating to resumes and meetings. It's about knowing the rules of the game so you can get what you want.Email us your questions at help@askyourworkwife.com and listen for a new episode every Wednesday. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at @askyourworkwife!

It's hard to imagine childhood without the classic cartoon characters June Foray gave voice to: Little Cindy Lou Who from The Grinch, Granny from the Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi's villainous cobra. June Foray even provided the voice of the Chatty Cathy doll. Mo talks with Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson) and Bob Bergen (Porky Pig) about the woman they call 'the Meryl Streep of voice actors.'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Let's take a trip back to 1963 where we talk about Mouse Trap, Chatty Cathy, Where The Wild Things Are and the best (and worst) of the movies and music of that year.

Laura and Lindsey are back with another Moms episode, this time with Lindsey's mom! They talk about Karen's childhood in Brooklyn playing with her Chatty Cathy, Thumbelina doll, and most of all Barbies! They also chat about Lindsey's bitty baby as the intro to big sisterhood followed by Felicity. Plus, Karen tells the gals which AG doll she would have today. Send us your American Girl stories to americangirlwomen@gmail.comFollow us on instagram @americangirlwomen“Love Mode” song courtesy of ItsFrida

In this episode, we discuss the next steps in creating a purpose statement, focusing on one thing at a time, and more small things to enhance daily life.

Hare Hollow FarmJessica HareHarehollowfarm.comFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/Hare-Hollow-Farm-113861266980541Morph Market - https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/hare_hollow_farm/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hare_hollow_farm/ ASM Royal TailsJana KingFacebook -https://facebook.com/RoyalReptails/Morph Market -https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/asmroyaltails/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/asmroyaltails/Intro Music - EEKmusic on audio jungle

Chatty Cathy's today!!!! Li's birthday, Memorial Day weekend, sissy visits, Allisa's new website & reading advice emails! Get Early Episodes Here: https://anchor.fm/agahmil/subscribe Send questions, topics you'd like to hear, advice you may want, or really anything you wanna tell us to agahmilpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Instagram @agahmil to stay updated! SHOP OUR MERCH: https://teespring.com/stores/agahmil Please show support for the Black community here: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co

Here's the next installment of the series on the three-person Committee of duplicitous scheming bastards in our head: Barry (Embarrassment), Gil (Guilt) and Seamus (Shame).  After the entry-level bullshit from Barry, who as Secretary of the Committee diligently records all the embarrassing individual things we've ever done, Gil takes it to the next level by compiling them all in a neural treasury of guilt and throwing the book at us with the very-convincing lies that it'll all just go away if we just have one more drink.  Lather, rinse, repeat the vicious cycle. Dana flew solo on this episode because Austen was under the weather, but we wanted to get this guilty mess started with an initial monologue from our resident Chatty Cathy.  p.s. Dana spent several minutes on this episode discussing the darkest places where Guilt can take us -- so if you are in suicidal crisis, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.  p.p.s. If you want to buy the t-shirt Dana was rocking on this episode, message Rodolfo on IG @hairlesslion1 -- and if you want another great podcast to binge in honor of Pride Month, search for "The Sober Gay Podcast" or Mark Schulz's (Ep.15) new show called "Gangly Flamingo." They're both available on your favorite streaming platform and YouTube...and they're both absolutely fabulous! Thanks so much for listening to IKAGB — if you have feedback, please contact Dana & Owl @ikissedalcoholgoodbye (Instagram) or ikissedalcoholgoodbye@gmail.com. Much love and peace! --Dana & Owl Become a Premium Member of IKAGB Podcast and get 6 perks for just $6/month -- it only takes two clicks at https://ikissedalcoholgoodbye.supercast.com/ Join now!

Wines: Spring & Seed Wine Co. Scarlett Runner Shiraz, 2017 & Elderton Shiraz, 2016After two and a half years of podcasting about wine, we've finally made it to the Land Down Under! We can't believe it's taken us so long to feature Australian wine on our pod!With summer bbq season getting under way, we both agreed that one of our summer go to's for years has been Shiraz. Simply the Syrah grape with that little bit of Aussie pizzaz, Shiraz has long been a favorite of both of us - the only excuse we have for not featuring sooner is so many wines, so little time!We have also included a fun "take you along" to the wine store feature in which we throw it all the way back to EP4, bringing out our inner Chatty Cathy talking with one of our favorite wine sellers as we select this wine. Listen to learn about Shiraz from Australia, what pairings we encourage and more!About UsBuy us a Mimosa!Wines To Find Podcast,  Finalist in the 12th Annual TASTE AWARDS  in  four categories. -Best Drink or Beverage Program-Best New Series-Best Single Topic Series-Best Food or Drink PodcastWe have been listed in the Top 50 wine podcasts! https://blog.feedspot.com/wine_podcasts/==============Music from https://filmmusic.io "Night In Venice" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) 

In this episode, co-hosts Sami (type 1) and Dobie (type 2) welcome Sami's mom, ‘Sherry Parker' as the special podcast guest in honor of Mother's Day. Dealing with diabetes is one thing, but watching your child or loved one deal with diabetes is a whole other ball game when you can't cure it for them. Sherry Parker provides some great insight on how to support, encourage, and motivate your child to tackle this disease with acceptance and confidence. Plus you will learn where Sami gets her ‘Chatty Cathy' side from... Tune in NOW to hear all about life as a mom caring for a child with diabetes.C'est la vie, baby!Question of the pod: Who is your biggest diabetes supporter? Share it with us at:Instagram: @justmytypepod_Twitter: @justmytypepod_Tik Tok: @justmytypepod_Facebook: @justmytypepodHashtag: #justmytypepodThis episode of Just My Type is sponsored by The Diabetes App: a community platform for individuals living with all types of diabetes.For more information and to listen to more episodes check out our website:www.justmytypepodcast.comDisclaimerNothing expressed on the Just My Type podcast or on the Just My Type website is intended or should be interpreted or used as medical advice.  You should always consult with a competent physician with respect to all aspects of your health and wellness.Ad Song: Just Smile by LiQWYD Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 — CC BY 3.0

What's on tap for Roche and its closely followed cancer immunotherapy? Are we all headed for another jab with a Covid-19 vaccine? And what explains the recent success of Vertex Pharmaceuticals' R&D pipeline? This week, reporter Andrew Joseph joins us to discuss the FDA and its meeting with outside advisers that considered questions about Covid-19 boosters and the potential for updated vaccines that better match the circulating strains of SARS-CoV-2. We'll also dive into a look at Vertex and hear from its top executives about two experimental, but potentially groundbreaking, treatments for pain and type 1 diabetes. And as we often do, we'll kick off the podcast with a Chatty Cathy round of hot takes on this week's news.

01:09 - Jenna's Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech * The User is Everything 04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User * Building For Themself * Bother(!!) Users * Walking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-zYKo8f7nM) 09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing) * Preparation * Identifying Bias * Getting Things Wrong * Gamifying/Winning (Developer Dogs & Testing Cats) * Overtesting 23:15 - Working With ADHD * Alerts & Alarms * Medication * Underdiagnosis / Misdiagnosis * Presentation * Medical Misogyny and Socialization * Masking * Finding a Good Clinician Reflections: John: Being a super human. Jacob: Forgetting how to mask. Jamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code. Jenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I'm one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton. Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr. Welcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles] JENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J's. [laughter] JAMEY: We're so excited to have you. JOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!” [laughter] JAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs] JENNA: I wish I could take credit for that. [laughter] Bob is definitely the one responsible. JAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it. JENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde. [laughter] I also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling. JAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes. [laughter] JENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything. I'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them. JAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career? JENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life. So I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me. But I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change. JAMEY: That's amazing. JENNA: Thank you. [laughs] JACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails. [laughter] As work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus? JENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference. I feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example. She's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up. But I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today. I always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them. So I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it. JAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually. [laughter] It's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users' Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs] JENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses. JAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs] JENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs] JAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something. [laughter] So I'm so happy. [chuckles] JENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles] JOHN: Aw. JAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs] JENNA: Oh, thank you. [laughter] Big warm hugs. [laughs] JOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else. So do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for them? JENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I've answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over. Now, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is. There have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation. JAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening. JENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold? JAMEY: Mm. JENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea. I know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red. JOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you've got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever. JENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them. JOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview? JENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs] So I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation. JOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on? JENNA: Oh, absolutely. When I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders' need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors' needs. And when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs] JAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it. JENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats? JAMEY: Elaborate. JACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about. JAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job. Cats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation. So what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse. So testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I've got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again. Dogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things. JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that's really insightful. JOHN: Yeah. [laughter] JAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person. [laughter] JACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree. JENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste. [laughter] JOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.” JENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she'll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles] JACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake. [laughter] JENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter. For some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs] JAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you. JACOB: Yeah. JENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs] JAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people. [laughter] JOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that? JENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it. [laughter] Most of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again. So I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those. The most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing. Also, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs] So all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We've got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs] JOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way. JENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.” So it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth. JOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it's the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy. JENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still. So there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different. I guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs] So let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don't know. [laughter] It didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age. Most people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term. JACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life. So when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense. JENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs] JACOB: Yeah, me too. JENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs] JAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel. JENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face. [laughter] For those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4' 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable. [laughter] But I can't reach them any better than they can! [laughter] Sometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning. [laughter] JAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be. That got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs] JENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great. [laughter] Especially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.” [laughter] But I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay. I've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way. JAMEY: Definitely. JOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be. JENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces. JAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back. [laughter] I did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults. I think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently. So I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it? JENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits. So finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate. I know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge. It is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different. Like I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.” I have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard. So I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt. JAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right? JACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly. JENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child. JACOB: Yeah, I know. JENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now. JAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think. JOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that? They said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that. JENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don't know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking. But my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked. One of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition. I said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong. JAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.” [laughter] JENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor. JAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do. [chuckles] So I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare. JENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations. I think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I'm 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there. No offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die. JAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles] JENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right? JAMEY: Yeah. Totally. JENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles] JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff. JENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty. [laughter] That whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs] JAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think? JOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term. JACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that. JAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show. [chuckles] JENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss. All of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me. If you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full. JAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug? JENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That's my big plug. Support your testers! [laughter] JAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people. [laughter] JENNA: Yes! [laughter] JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great! JOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful. JENNA: Aw, thank you. Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.

This will be a live demonstration of what using a potent compound can do to your motormouth. I medicated before this interview and apparently I thought I was on HER show being interviewed! Friends, Deborah McDonald was courageous in her valiant effort to get past my tongue and tell you about the famous cannabis company she works with and their new product line… But I started talkin and hardly came up for air! Please take a look at this amazing leader in the industry of cannabis products at the link provided below. We also talk about a serious cannabis conference coming up and those links are there too, as well as to some of the doctors we mentioned. Wish I could tell ya which compounds in that cannabis turned me into Chatty Cathy but the COA on it wasn't that descriptive, dangem! Enjoy the professional patience of the wonderful Ms.Deborah McDonald, Kannaway Ambassador. kannaway.com (Find conference info there, as well as more about Dr. Verdegem, et al… --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cannabaverum/support

'We all have that one friend who loves talking to the cab/Uber driver.' 'It's never a light hearted conversation either... It's always the most serious topic imaginable. They try and solve world hunger during this 9 minute trip.' #CruzMornings #yxe

Welcome to a super mega episode of the TJU show today. Hopefully your ears are ready for everything we talked about

Join the Chatty Cathy's Jamie, Karen and AJ as they digest another night of TV. Tonight's line-up... Wheel of Time, The Expanse, Discovery and whatever else sounds good

Christmas time has always been the time when kids anxiously awaited Santa's arrival and the delivery of their cool holiday goodies, and it was no different when GamerDude was a kid.  This week, he talks about the toys and games he received that were not the traditional board games.  He talks about how, when he was growing up, there were defininte "boy toys" and "girl toys," and how those toys maintained the mindset that girls needed dolls and kitchen appliances to play with, while boys, well, boys got to be boys. He remembers Suzy Homemaker, Chatty Cathy, and the E-Z Bake ovens were typical "girl toys." GamerDude also talks about the cool toys he received, or at least got to play with, and explains how they worked.  He remembers Hot Wheels and the track set you could get to go with your Hot Wheels cars.  He talks about the U-Fly-It and how he turned the dining room into an airfield. He remembers when he got Skittle Bowl, and talks about the many shoot-outs he had with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  He talks about Battling Tops and how certain tops always seemed to perform better than others.  He also remembers the SSP racers, and the Smash-Up Derby set, and how much fun it was to send car parts sliding through the kitchen after a crash.

Episode mother freaking 65 coming your way on the holy day, #ThankGodItsTuesday. This week, the Buttonista is EXCITED to officially launch some limited edition Buttonista merchandise for you to rep your favorite weekly podcast in the 518 and beyond. We're talking about the one product she can't live without, who in her family is putting her early bird reputation to shame, and of course taking some time to answer some (key word: some) of the questions from Instagram this week. THIS PART IS IMPORTANT - stay tuned for a MINI(ish) episode coming later this week to get to the rest. See you BEFORE next Tuesday!EPISODE NOTES:Nobody Asked Me, But... (0:52)Buttonista merchandise on sale now (3:05)The Dyson Dilemma and why you need a cordless vacuum in your life (9:00)Senior Buttonista - The Ultimate Early Bird (10:12)When will "lefty shaming" end?! (16:33)A very nervous dog mom moment (19:02)Your questions answered, brought to you by the Times Union  (24:30)Question 1: Update on the Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian situation (25:25)Question 2: Is there an appropriate age to have kids? "LOL" (33:10)Question 3: What's in (and out) for home decor for 2022? (48:14)I DIDN'T GET TO THE REST OF THE QUESTIONS!!!! HOLIDAY EDITION MINI EPISODE COMING LATER THIS WEEK (59:15)Best enjoyed with a Miller Lite.

In this episode we look at Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, a Christmas favorite!  We also hear about a unique project--charity vending machines. In addition, we'll look at the top selling toys of 1968.  Who remembers Chatty Cathy, Hot Wheels, EZ Bake oven, and G.I. Joe? Those are only a few of the ones we'll talk about! As always, thank you for listening!  If you'd like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee at www. buymeacoffee.com/rickgarrett and you can also share the podcast on your social media and let folks know what you're listening to!

First of all Gazza was drinking while recording… maybe too much. The next thing we know he is Chatty Cathy an still claiming he isn't drunk. Crazy if you ask me!!!We got a letter in from a young lady who's been lying about her name. It's pretty crazy too!!!Season 3 launches 10/26Follow Us on IG: @themermaidandthelion_Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/TheMermaidandTheLion)

Heelloooo my lovesss!! I have MISSED you all so much!! Today's episode is a Chatty Cathy one where we're catching up. In today's episode I share a bit about the self-sabotage and negative self-speak that can arise when you start a new chapter of your life. I also chat about the loneliness you may experience when you're in the midst of a new chapter.    In the next episodes we'll be back on schedule + with a new intro. I'm also making the next episode the start of season 7 of Manifest Daily – get excited, my loves!!   If you're into skincare and wish to follow my new brand's IG, here it is: Huile Haus Instagram Or, if the hyperlink isn't working for you, visit this link instead: https://www.instagram.com/huilehaus/   And, as always, find me on Instagram here. Or, with this link: https://www.instagram.com/themanifestdaily/  

Gossip, like to talk about? Here we go! Gossip is defined as casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true. Now society usually denounces gossip as a negative behavior in which only the classless and ill-mannered participate. But, is there ever a situation where gossip is good? Can gossiping be a corporate climbers superpower? Today we’re tackling just that. Let’s talk about how office gossip can be used to facilitate your corporate climb aka the Chatty Cathy Come Up.Check out our YouTube channel and remember to subscribe!!Catch up on some of our many articles on our Blog !!  Like and follow our page on Facebook, “Full-Time Black Woman” Follow us on Instagram @fulltimeblackwomanFollow us on Twitter @FTblackwoman***********************************************************************************************************BUZZSPROUT LINK:fulltimeblackwoman.com/buzzsprout/***********************************************************************************************************INSTACART LINK:fulltimeblackwoman.com/instacart/

Raise your hand if you had a Barbie Doll, or Hot Wheels, when you were a kid. Or how about a Chatty Cathy, or a See-and-Say? Bu perhaps no toy of the 20th century in America was more iconic, more popular, and more widely known than the ubiquitous Barbie doll. Ruth Handler was the key figure in bringing all of those to market, as the co-founder of Mattel Toys.

SUMMARY If you're wearing a mask to hide mental health challenges, why not swap it for a superhero cape and brainpowers so strong they're sure to save the day! Sharon Blady, PhD (comic book geek, former Manitoba Minister of Health, founder of Speak Up: Mental Health Advocates) and Dr. Simon Trepel (a psychiatrist and member of Sharon's treatment team) openly talk about Sharon's multiple diagnoses, what's helping her heal, and how you, too, can embrace neurodiversity and load your mental health toolkit with superpower solutions. They also touch on the impacts of stigma and childhood trauma on mental health, the effects of COVID-19, the need for resilience, and the importance of strong doctor/patient relationships. TAKEAWAYS This podcast will help you understand: Personal experiences from a person with multiple mental illness diagnoses, and those same experiences from the vantage point of her psychiatrist An individual's experiences with post-partum depression, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar 2, and suicidal ideation Challenges and opportunities associated with multiple diagnoses Mental health “superpowers” and how they can help promote personal healing and support others Superhero Toolkit Benefits of neurodiversity (seeing that brain differences such as ADHD and autism are not deficits) Impacts of stigma (structural, public, and private) and reducing its negative effects “Resilience” from personal, professional, and community perspectives Impacts of COVID-19 on mental health Doctor/patient relationships and what makes them work   SPONSOR The Social Planning & Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) is a leader in applied social research, social policy analysis, and community development approaches to social justice. The SPARC team supports the council's 16,000 members, and works with communities to build a just and healthy society for all. THANK YOU for supporting the HEADS UP! Community Mental Health Summit and the HEADS UP! Community Mental Health Podcast.   RESOURCES Speak Up: Mental Health Advocates Inc. Embrace Your Superpowers program Managing Multiple Diagnoses of Mental Illnesses The Importance of a Complete Diagnosis: Managing Multiple Mental Illnesses Neurodiversity in the Modern Workplace   GUESTS  Sharon Blady, PhD Sharon Blady is former Minister of Health and Minister of Healthy Living for the Province of Manitoba, an academic, and a comic book geek turned mental health superhero who empowers others with her fandom-based Embrace Your Superpowers program. Using her lived experience of multiple mental health and neurodiversity diagnoses, she helps others better understand and achieve improved mental health and well-being. Her diagnoses became a source of strength – Superpowers – which she harnessed and directed for personal, organizational, and community growth. Sharon's life experiences range from being a single mom on social assistance, to being responsible for a $6-billion health department budget. She is a survivor of domestic violence, cancer, and suicide, along with being a published author, entrepreneur, and public speaker. Email: sharon@speak-up.co Phone: 204-899-4731 Website: www.speak-up.co Facebook: @SpeakUpMHA Twitter: @SpeakUp_MHA & @sharonblady Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-blady/ & https://www.linkedin.com/company/speak-up-mha Simon Trepel, MD, FRCPC Simon Trepel is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with more than a decade of experience assessing and treating kids and teens. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches medical students, residents, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and family doctors. Simon is also a clinical psychiatrist with the Intensive Community Reintegration Service at the Manitoba Adolescent Treatment Center. Simon is co-founder and consulting psychiatrist for the Gender Dysphoria Assessment and Action for Youth clinic, and consulting psychiatrist for the Pediatric Adolescent Satellite Clinic, where he primarily works with children and adolescents in Child and Family Services care.​ Simon has worked with Vital Statistics as well as Manitoba school divisions providing his expertise in child and adolescent gender dysphoria. He has spoken to audiences on a range of topics, including gender dysphoria, video game addiction, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and neuroplasticity.​ Websites: https://matc.ca/ (Manitoba Adolescent Treatment Center) Email: sptrepel@gmail.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/simontrepel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-trepel-md-619a76b8/   HOST Jo de Vries is a community education and engagement specialist with 30 years of experience helping local governments in British Columbia connect with their citizens about important sustainability issues. In 2006, she established the Fresh Outlook Foundation (FOF) to “inspire community conversations for sustainable change.” FOF's highly acclaimed events include Building SustainABLE Communities conferences, Reel Change SustainAbility Film Fest, Eco-Blast Kids' Camps, CommUnity Innovation Lab, Breakfast of Champions, and Women 4 SustainAbility. FOF's newest ventures are the HEADS UP! Community Mental Health Summit and HEADS UP! Community Mental Health Podcast. Website: Fresh Outlook Foundation Phone: 250-300-8797   PLAY IT FORWARD The move from mental health challenge to optimal restoration becomes possible as more people learn about various healing challenges, successes, and opportunities. To that end, please share this podcast with anyone who has an interest or stake in the future of mental health for individuals, families, workplaces, or communities. FOLLOW US For more information about the Fresh Outlook Foundation (FOF) and our programs and events, visit our website, sign up for our newsletter, and like us on Facebook and Twitter.   HELP US As a charity, FOF relies on support from grants, sponsors, and donors to continue its valuable work. If you benefited from the podcast, please help fund future episodes by making a one-time or monthly donation. Sharon Blady, Dr. Simon Trepel Interview Transcript You can download a pdf of the transcript here. The entire transcript is also found below: RICK  0:10 Welcome to the HEADS UP! Community Mental Health Podcast. Join our host Jo de Vries with the Fresh Outlook Foundation, as she combines science with storytelling to explore a variety of mental health issues with people from all walks of life. Stay tuned! JO  0:32 Hey, Jo here. Thanks for joining me and my two guests as we conduct a brain tour that will take you on a journey of discovery, from mental illness all the way to mental health superpowers and superheroes. This great conversation is brought to you by the Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia. My first guest is Sharon Blady, founder of SPEAK UP: Mental Health Advocates Inc., and former Minister of Health and Minister of Healthy Living for the province of Manitoba. She knows firsthand how getting mental health or neurodiversity diagnoses means living with stereotypes and stigma associated with those labels. She also knows there's a way to reframe those stereotypes and define assets that empower us instead. Sharon's lived experience, combined with a lifelong love of comic book superheroes, successful treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy, and robust peer support, gave her the perspective and tools she needed to see her mental health challenges as assets or superpowers that she now harnesses and manages for better mental health and success. Helping us navigate Sharon's brain tour is Dr. Simon Trepel, a psychiatrist with more than a decade of experience assessing and treating kids and teens. He's an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches medical students, residents, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and family doctors. He's also a clinical psychiatrist with the Intensive Community Reintegration Service at the Manitoba Adolescent Treatment Centre, and co-founder and consulting psychiatrist for the Gender Dysphoria Assessment and Action for Youth Clinic. Welcome to both of you, and thank you for embarking on this journey of disclosure and discovery with me. SHARON  2:39 Thank you. It's great to be here, Jo. SIMON  2:41 Hey, Jo... yeah... thanks for having me as well. JO  2:43 I know the relationship between doctor and patient is sacred, so your willingness to help us better understand that connection is brave, and so very much appreciated. First, we're going to dive into Sharon's story, peppered with Simon's clinical perspective. I think this is going to give you a whole host of insights. Sharon, let's start with you. When we spoke to prepare for this episode, you talked about being born with quote, "different brain things," unquote. Can you tell us that story, starting with you being an energizer bunny and chronic overachiever right from the get-go? SHARON  3:27 Yes, that was my very articulate way of self-identifying, but that's how I felt as a kid... that there was just something different about me. And it wasn't just that I felt that way. I kept getting told that I was different, and not always in a good way. Sometimes I did receive positive encouragement in school and always did well. The first time my parents had to ever deal with the principal, and my being in the office, was because in grade three I had decided I wanted to drop out because I felt there was nothing more that they had to teach me because I was spending more of my time helping other students. And it all just seemed so boring. That's what would eventually get me into advanced programs and stuff like that. So, it was just that thing where I was always doing things and not intending to be one step ahead of things, but finding myself there and then kind of getting simultaneously rewarded and punished for it. So, it'd be like, yeah, there's a great grade, but then you get the side-eye from your classmates. And then I get my father. His tendency was to say that, on one hand, yes, you're my child, you're so smart. But don't think you're that smart... don't get too confident or cocky. So, there was never 100 percent security in it. It's the way I lived in terms of the university and how I was managing things. I remember a girlfriend and I… the joke was that no one would have thought of giving us mental health or neurodiversity diagnoses. More that the joke was made to zap us both in the butt with tranquilizer darts to slow us down so that everybody else could keep up. That was my childhood. JO  4:57 What were your teenage years like? SHARON  5:00 Oh, a roller coaster. I was always good in school, but I got into the IB (International Baccalaureate) program, and it was the first year that they had the IB program in school. So, I think in some respects, they weren't ready for us. We were that first class... 50 of us kids that were used to being chronic overachievers… outsiders… were all suddenly in one small school that only had a total of 350 students. I was, again, still doing well in school, but I found my own people and then went off in directions that had me going to The Rocky Horror Show and doing all of this wonderful world of exploration and finding like-minded people. That was when my second round of visits with the principals started to happen. But again, that weird place where it's like, how do you discipline the kid that's in the advanced program for doing a thing, because they're supposed to be there as a role model. And also, that thing, like the seven colors in her hair, might not actually be a disciplinary issue. It's just you've never encountered it before as a principal. So, I was all over the place. I was doing really well in school and was the very untraditional captain of the cheerleading squad where we cheered to punk rock songs like Youth Brigade. And then I was also in Junior Achievement and, in fact, was the president of the Company of the Year for all of Canada in my final year. Yeah, so again, chronic overachiever... energizer bunny. JO  6:25 What happened that triggered your first experience with mental illness? How was it treated? And how well did you respond? SHARON  6:34 It was actually a while after my first son was born. I was 25, I was a grad student, I was doing my master's degree. I had been going out with somebody that had been a classmate, but when he found out that I was pregnant, ran the heck away. Of course, he also ran the heck away, because the day I found out I was pregnant, I also found out he was cheating on me, and basically said, "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out." So, I moved back to Manitoba from BC. I had my son, and didn't feel very well, and I couldn't figure out what it was. Because it was, "I've got this kid, I'm doing my master's degree, I've got support from my family," and then one day, I had... after feeling all of this up and down and trying to juggle everything... the overwhelming desire to drive my car off the side of a bridge. And was really the red flag, and something stopped me in the same moment that my wrist almost turned to do that. Another part of my brain went, "That's not the rational thought that you think it is, that's not going to save you or your child the way you think it is." And that's when I sought out help, and would end up with a postpartum diagnosis. And then that would go on to being diagnosed as chronically depressed, and then I spent some time on Luvox. The GP that was looking after me… I wasn't receiving any therapeutic care… I wasn't receiving any kind of counseling or supports that way… it was just medication. I was eventually on the maximum dosage, and it was making me physically ill, so I did a very unsafe thing and I went cold turkey. I was lucky to then connect with a psychotherapist that helped me and introduced me to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And that's where my really first positive journey happened. But I have to admit, I probably lived the first three, four years, five years of my eldest son's life in a real, foggy, ugly place. That's where the journey started. And it's led to other things and seeking out care has been intermittent and based on things like addressing being assaulted by my ex-husband. Other basic traumatic events have triggered seeking out care. And it's now working with Simon that I've really had that opportunity to go back and dig through a lot of stuff and learn more about myself. And she's like a superhero geek kind-of-way retcons my narrative in the sense that I've realized my understanding of things has changed, especially as we've dug deeper and I've learned more about my brain and what my diagnoses are, as opposed to what I thought they were, and what others had told me they were in those shorter forms of treatment and care. SIMON  9:12 That might be a nice place for me to maybe step in a little bit if you guys don't mind. Sharon's covered a lot of things simultaneously… I'm going to try to have a foot in Sharon's side and to be preferential and biased in Sharon's behalf. But, I also want to take a bit of a meta sense, as well and take a look at what Sharon has said through the lens of maybe how people with mental health challenges or superpowers are sometimes treated by the system or by their families or even by themselves. So, we backed up a little bit to the beginning when you asked Sharon about her childhood. She talked about having lots of energy and being an overachiever. And she was told that she was different, which is an ambiguous message. “Difference” doesn't let a child necessarily understand that that's good or bad. And the child is left to struggle with, "Am I special? Yes. But do I fit in? No." That is the mixed message that a "different" label gives us as children, and we struggle as well to make sense of that. And we are, simultaneously, as Sharon mentioned, rewarded for our special features, our cognitive abilities, but at the same time it isolates or sometimes distances us from other connections that we can have in social circles and with peers and things like that. So, Sharon felt ahead of others, which then makes her feel separated from others, which then makes her aware of pure jealousy. And then she mentioned this mixed message from her father to be, “Hey, you're good, but don't become arrogant.” And I think that's a big understanding of Sharon's struggle to really understand, "Am I a good person or not?" And this is ultimately what leads us to struggling with our sense of self-esteem and sense of identity. You then went on to talk about the teen years and, again, Sharon is propelled to this academic special status of IB program. But you hear her own worries about the school's ability to contain and nurture that in a good way by her own misgivings about it being, quote, "the first year the IB program is in effect." And so again, the theme is, "I'm not sure the adults can handle us... I'm not sure the adults and the systems and the parents can handle us special kids." And you hear the same thing when she talks about getting in trouble, and the rebel phase of, I think it was, pink hair, and getting into trouble despite good marks. And she remarks, "Yeah, it was really tough for the principal because he'd never encountered it before." But he had, Sharon, many times. The principal had encountered many rebellious yet academically talented kids who weren't getting clear messages at home about who they were, and letting them shape a  foundation and identity that gets stable over time, then becomes something for them to fall back on in later years. When they struggle, or even fail at things, they're able to tell themselves, "Hey, that's okay, I'm good at stuff." But when you get a mixed message for so much of your life, and so many systems, you end up falling back on yourself, and you're not sure if you're going to catch yourself. So, you start to wonder if you're able to get helped by the adult authority or systems that are supposed to be catching us. And then we move on to university degree, and we hear Sharon talk about these awful experiences with a partner, and yet she glosses over it very quickly. And you hear the avoidance in her about talking about that very traumatic rejection and separation that happened abruptly at a time when she needed help the most. And see here, there's no ability to process that trauma. And so, when she gets home, all of a sudden, she wants to drive into traffic, and she doesn't understand why. But yet it's the lack of processing that trauma that sits in the basement of our mind and the sub-cortex and waits like a monster until we are at our lowest, and then it shows and rears its ugly head and attempts to take everything from us because we don't feel like we have anything there. JO  12:47 Sharon, I know that you have had multiple diagnoses with different mental health challenges. Can you explain to us how that unfolded? SIMON  12:59 How about, “Sharon, how you doing?” Because we talked about a lot of things just now. And I think an important part of doing these type of interviews where we are laying bare our souls and our histories is that we can go too far. And we can open up too much. And I took Sharon's lead from how far she went in hers. But I think at this point, I'd like to sort of check in with all of us because we've really unloaded some very heavy things. And we don't have to act like it wasn't heavy, Sharon? Well, it's not just for sharing. It's also for our host. JO  13:29 I love this back and forth. I think it's brilliant in that we combine lived experience with a clinical perspective of that lived experience. And I think that's very, very positive. And as you mentioned, Simon, it must be positive for Sharon as well. SIMON  13:48 Exactly. And when we unload things like this, we feel exposed. When we feel exposed, really, again, the sub-cortex of our brains, our basement where our amygdala (which is our fear and emotion center) sleeps beside our hippocampus (which is our library), and that retrieves our memories. And when those two get intertwined in the dance of trauma, they end up opening up these boxes again, when we're not always ready. And so, I always make sure whenever we're talking about traumatic events that I take the lead of the patient, but then when I do the step that seems like I'm being asked to do, we stop and we take a breath, and we reregulate our nervous systems, to make sure that we're still on the same page, and it still feels safe, because therapy doesn't always feel safe, but it should always feel caring and kind and make sure that you are checking back with people. So, you're walking together. And I hope I've given you some time now, Sharon to sort of articulate what it is that you want to maybe say at this point. SHARON  14:47 Thank you for the processing time. I want to thank Simon for how he picked up on how I had said things. And so that in that time to process what I recognized was, for example, that tendency to gloss over things or to say things quickly and sort of dismiss the traumatic aspect of it. And that I've kind of conditioned myself to just telling that story, and that sometimes it has left me raw and open and vulnerable. And that I would just keep moving on not recognizing that it was effectively taking a psychological or a mental scab, and leaving it open to possibly getting infected. And so that's one of the really interesting processes. SIMON  15:31 Oh, I like that. I like that metaphor. SHARON  15:33 Well, that's what I've loved about this process, and about being able to share this today here in this manner, because I've come to realize that so many things that I had taken as normal... they were my normal, they were my habits, they were my whatever. But they weren't. And they maybe got me through the thing at the time, but that they weren't the way things had to be... they weren't a mandatory default setting… that they could be changed. And that even some of the language that I use is, again, a process or part of that, again, what I had internalized. And so that's what I always love about feedback. And the support that I get from Simon is that recognition of, oh my god, am I still using that language? Oh, really? Okay. I thought I'd made some growth here. Yes, I have made some growth, but I'm still carrying around some baggage that I didn't realize I had. I thought I dropped that emotional Samsonite back two weeks ago, but somewhere along the line, I decided to pick up the carry-on version of it after all. And, so what can I do to process that... SIMON  16:35 I hate to interrupt you, Sharon at this point, but we often talk about again, in trauma, this idea of a win-lose or black-white, or yes-no. But when we get into this idea you are doing it again, you're selling yourself short when you say, "I thought I made some growth, but if I made a single mistake, I obviously haven't." SHARON  16:47 Again, and that's what I appreciate, because it's a black and white thinking that I've normalized. So, I'm enjoying the growth. I appreciate the reminders. Jo had the question about the different diagnoses, and I have to say that, because I've been given a variety of things over time, I didn't view them necessarily as negative. Some people will look at mental health labels and neurodiversity labels as negative and other, and I found ways of reframing that, but I still found them as identifying mechanisms or filters that I would run things through. And what I've come to realize in the time that we've worked together is that while those were, I guess you'd say, things that I could use to ground and navigate with. I think it's Maya Angelou that said, "You do the best you can, and then when you learn more, you do better. Some of the diagnoses that we've talked about that I ascribed to at one point, and then realizing that they were mislabelings. I'm glad that I had them for the time that I was there to get me through the thing. It's nice to go back, and that's where I use that term about retcon and go, "Oh, that wasn't really the thing that I thought it was. And now I can adapt to it differently having a better sense." And I would have to say that the one thing that I was most surprised to sort of learn about myself, was just how much of my own mental health has been shaped by trauma of all the different things that I've been dealing with. That is not one of the ones that I would have put near the top of the list or is having had the most influence. SIMON  18:26 That's powerful, and it's because we as a society demonstrate one of the symptoms of trauma, which is avoidance. In my clinical work, and in my everyday life, we are all desperately trying to avoid talking about traumatic things. And that's the reality. JO  18:41 Simon... a question for you. A few of the diagnoses that Sharon had were ADHD, OCD, bipolar two, PTSD. Do you often have patients with multiple diagnoses like that? And if so, isn't it incredibly difficult to diagnose if a person has more than one problem? SIMON  19:05 Well, yeah, but we're not textbooks. We are complicated things. And so, there's many, many reasons why somebody may or may not have a diagnosis at a certain time, and maybe why someone might look like something at one point, but they'll change over time. So, for instance, children, children to teenagers, teenagers to adults, our brains are qualitatively changing over that time, not just in size, but in how they work. A child is not a mini adult... a child is a qualitatively different animal, so to speak. I think that's first of all. So, really, what we're learning is that the brain undergoes incredible amounts of development over our lifetime. And we know that, for instance, in ADHD, while 7% of children are born with the psychological diagnosis of ADHD, according to our latest studies, by the time you reach 18 years old, we know that only 50% of people are going to have ADHD, which is about 4% of adults. And the reasoning for that is because we know as the brain develops and matures naturally over time, if given the right supports and the right conditions, and you will naturally develop the ability to regulate yourself in unique ways as you develop more skills, have good experiences, and accomplish things, and believe in your ability to manage yourself. And we see those things. You can be diagnosed as ADHD as a child, never having been treated or medicated and end up not having ADHD as an adult just by the power of development of the human brain and neuroplasticity. But there's also other things that happen. For instance, you might learn skills that allow you to be more organized, and so you no longer meet criteria for ADHD because you've learned skills that compensate for it, the same way maybe somebody with diabetes might learn how to regulate their diets. They don't have to rely on as much insulin. So, I think we're all regulating our chemistry in different ways all the time. And lastly, we're not in Star Trek or the Jetsons yet, so we don't have the ability to scan a human brain and say, "Okay, well, now we know exactly what this is." So, if somebody comes in talking about hearing a voice or feeling delusional, or being disorganized, and it looks like something called psychosis, well, psychosis is a really a general term that can be many, many things… anything from a bonk on the head, to paranoid schizophrenia, to somebody using math for the first time, to somebody having an autoimmune disorder that's causing an inflammation of the cerebral arteries in the brain. So, there's many reasons why we present the way we do, and sometimes it's not clear in the beginning. Lastly, PTSD and trauma is a great imitator, it can look like almost anything in medicine. We talk about lupus sometimes looking like many, many, many different types of disorders from many different areas. And I feel that in psychiatry, in particular, child, adolescent and young adult psychiatry, I see that trauma looks like many things before it finally gets figured out to be what it is. JO  21:52 Sharon, how did your understanding of the diagnoses and yourself change as your treatment with Simon unfolded? SHARON  22:01 I would have to say the greatest thing was that recognition of what he just explained about PTSD. And I love his comment about the societal avoidance of trauma. Because when I think about my childhood, or the way I used to think about it in terms of or even how well I was in it, it was that… well, you know, my folks are together, I live in a nice house, I've got my brother, I've got my cousins, I've got this, I'm doing well in school. I never would have thought of things necessarily as trauma... trauma was for somebody else that lived far away, that didn't have a stable roof over their head, that lived in a warzone, that kind of thing. So, it was again, not that eight-year-olds necessarily have the clinical or academic understanding of adverse childhood experiences, so the notion of trauma didn't really enter my life until I got to things like dealing with an abusive ex, dealing as an adult recognizing what I had experienced with my father, and what he considered discipline, was, in fact, abuse, and that it was both physical and emotional, psychological, that kind of thing. But that was like, again, in retrospect. So, I understand now exactly how the labels... I go, okay, that's the thing. If that's what I've got, at least I know what I'm up against, at least I know how to deal with it. And so, the understanding that there was something actual masquerading, and that my trauma responses, I think that's the other part, was things that I thought were other things were now like, "Oh, that's a trauma response. Okay, I didn't realize that. Well, that shines a whole new light on it." So, I have to say that's the one thing is that it's given me a lot more, or an ongoing sense of self-reflection. Not that I ever figured out, I never thought that I had it all figured out, but it's encouraged me to keep a growth mindset about my own mental health and neurodiversity. And that there are things that I can always learn about myself so that I can really learn better, healthier ways of coping and adjusting and just moving through life. JO  24:08 Simon, what are you learning about Sharon's unique brain during all this? And is her response to her trauma similar to other people's responses who have experienced similar trauma? SIMON  24:23 I'll take the second part first, if that's okay. What's really fascinating to me about trauma is that every single human being that's ever existed, has experienced something traumatic, but not all of it becomes something that we call PTSD, or a fundamental change in how your brain works after that event. And that's what separates it. We can be scared, and we can struggle by something for a few days, and then our brain essentially gets back to factory settings. Or we can have a really horrific event happen and our brain can then change. And they can do two different ways. And so often people think of trauma, like somebody has been to war or has been raped, really something we think about something truly savage has happened. And that is one type of trauma. And that is the classic type of PTSD you think about. But we are now becoming very aware, our eyes have been opened to another type of trauma called complex PTSD, where it doesn't have to be savage, at least not savage through the eyes of an adult, but is savage through the eyes of a child. So, for instance, if you are a harsh parent to a child, you are a big, much larger individual. And if you scare, intimidate, or otherwise terrorize a child in the act of trying to be a parent to teach something, you are actually in some ways putting that child through a savage event, and that can be scary. And when the person that lives with you scares you, that can easily become something we call complex PTSD, and it fundamentally changes how our brain works. And so that's something that has to be recognized. And it doesn't recognize that, as Sharon said, "I didn't realize how much trauma affects me," but it's like putting a lens over your reality from childhood. And so, you start to recognize that when we see this happen in other ways, for instance, in religion, or even in more severe things like cults, for instance, where children are very young or sort of shaped in a certain way, it becomes very difficult for them to disentangle themselves from those perhaps bias messages from their childhood, or perhaps healthy messages. I'm not going to moralize on these things right now, but my point is, what we learn early affects us, and sometimes it can affect us for a very long time. So, savage or harsh, either one can create trauma. And so that's the first message. The second one is Sharon's brain is unique, but I don't know where to start, actually, like we've already mentioned lots of things. And so, I honestly think that the most unique part of her brain is simultaneously the ability to experience everything she's been through, and then be able to look at it and really allow her to renegotiate who she is, again, looking back, which is the power we all have. And so, I really am honored about and privileged to work with somebody who is so strong and doesn't know it all the time, but is so strong, they're willing to walk back and say, "Let me look at my childhood, again, with my kinder eyes, with my more neutral, healthier eyes, with eyes that aren't afraid, in the same way anymore... and let me see what was truly there. And let me look in the shadows, then find out they're not as scary. Let me look into my eyes and see that I matter all the time, not just when my Dad's in a good mood." And these kinds of things become extremely powerful moments for anybody, but in particular, people willing to risk the discomfort of therapy with somebody who's willing to go there with them, but also take care of them along the way. And that's what Sharon and I have been able to create. JO  27:56 Sharon, what have been your biggest challenges along the way?  SHARON  28:01 Wow. I'd have to say that it's been breaking belief cycles and habitual cycles that reinforce the trauma behaviors. So, whether, like I said before, it's the use of language or the comparative competitive thinking, or even recognizing, as I'm recognizing my own strength, because I have to say that there's a lot of things where I would describe the situation or thing that I'd accomplished and kind of felt that it's like, well, anybody would do that under those circumstances, and not allowing myself to recognize the specialness, of maybe something that I had done or accomplished the uniqueness of it. And whether that was academically, politically, it was just oh, this is what I had to do at the time. Or, gee, anybody in my shoes could have done it. And so, I think the biggest challenge will be in that assignment. Okay Simon... I'm curious what you have to say, cuz you're always good at reminding me when... SIMON  29:02 Well, again, when you are putting yourself in the crucible of your own personal accomplishments, you have to remember that earlier on it was compounded into you that you can't get cocky. Yes. And so, what you end up keeping with you is that what seeming like an innocuous message from your father when you brought home 105% on that math test, and he said, "You know, don't get too full of yourself because no one likes an arrogant person," and you didn't know what to do with your accomplishment. And you see how long you carry that. And so, what I challenge you to do is to put that down and say, you don't have to worry about the backhand when you do a perfect forehand. Yeah, I just made that up. But that sounds great. SHARON  29:41 Yes, it does, I agree, and that's probably the biggest challenge right there is living in those things.  SIMON  29:48 Or maybe you should not have to worry, because that's not reasonable for me to suggest that you shouldn't worry when the person there perhaps is a vulnerable narcissist and needs to extract his self-esteem from you in some way. And as a child, we are unequipped to even imagine that as possible from the gods that we sort of worship. Right? Yeah, sorry to be so powerful. I'm just in that kind of mood today... loving it! JO  30:15 Sharon, you touched on your challenges. What have been your key moments of personal growth and resilience? SHARON  30:23 Well, it has been the aha moments like those and recognizing that I'm allowed to celebrate these things. And in fact, I should be encouraged to celebrate them. And that it's okay, and that I'm not being cocky and celebrating. Yes, I was the Health Minister dammit, and I was responsible for the $6 billion budget, and I think I did it well. People are allowed to have another opinion. That's their opinion and their business, but I don't have to diminish myself anymore around those things. Earlier on in my own experience, like I said, I've learnt to get through things by reframing them. And that came from experiences with my son and finding the assets. So, I have been able to go, "Yeah, you know what, you might say I have this thing, and that makes me difficult to manage or whatever. But I've also got this other positive aspect of it." So, it was that process of the reframing, which would turn into that superpower language that I use, because being the Energizer Bunny can be very useful and productive. And being somebody that gets told that they can't sit still, and they can't focus, also means that, you know, I pulled together pretty damn good master's theses, and I connected some really interesting dots in some other places, both in my academic and political life that other people hadn't got to. And that in some respects, I was surprised that, "Why is it taking me to do this? How come nobody else thought of this, because once I got here, this seemed really obvious.?” So that reframing is health. SIMON  31:55 Or, how about one ever talks about Steve Jobs and Elan Musk never sitting still. JO  31:59 Yeah, exactly. SHARON  32:03 Yeah, well, and that's the other part of it, too, is that some of it's even been gendered, in a way.  SIMON  32:08 In a way... some of it? All of it! SHARON  32:10 Yes. Yes, I was the Chatty Cathy doll that was a know-it-all and this and that... but I'm sure boys... SIMON  32:16 No, you weren't, you were a woman with an opinion. SHARON  32:18 Yes, but that's how I was... SIMON  32:20 ... like a human being. Yeah, exactly. SHARON  32:22 But that's how I was labeled when I was growing up was that it was... SIMON  32:25 ... no, that's the microaggression. SHARON  32:27 And that's the thing that has to be unlearned, because I'm watching my granddaughter right now, who's also recently been diagnosed with ADHD. And one of the messages that came home was that we need to get her to learn to be quiet, and to behave herself in class. And I was just like, "Oh, you do not tell a young girl who has got a voice and an opinion and is able to articulate thing well... you don't put baby in a corner.” SIMON  32:55 Particularly in 2021. SHARON  32:57 Yes, exactly. SIMON  33:00 I thought we just learned these lessons.  SHARON  33:03 This was it. So, it was like, we work with her on how to focus, manage, empower, but do not make her quiet, because that would be doing to her in 2021 what was done to me in 1971. SIMON  33:17 Well, yeah, talk about a replay. JO  33:20 So, what you might be saying, Sharon, is that your granddaughter... her ADHD may be a superpower for her. SHARON  33:27 Oh, it honestly is. Like this kid, it blows my mind, honestly, sometimes the things that we'll watch her do, and then process and be able to articulate back. When they went to Drumheller, guess who came back like the little dinosaur expert, and that she was, again, connecting dots and doing things. She's now a big sister, and I think one of the things that she's also got is a sense of compassion there, where she understands her little brother in a way that while he's not even two weeks old, I mean, she wanted to sit down and read all of these books so that she could be a good big sister, and she read some bedtime stories. And I think that there's a compassion that she's acquired because she knows what it's like to be treated particular ways, to make sure that she's going to be her little brother's defender. She's going to be a good big sister. SIMON  34:21 Let's not do that to her.  SHARON  34:22 Okay, that's a good point. Let her be her. SIMON  34:25 Let's not sign her up for a job without discussing it with her first, because we've got all sorts of great plans, but John Lennon had some song about that or something. I'd like to challenge us, as well, to circle back the last two minutes and let's reframe something. What is the school telling her by saying she needs to learn to be quiet… what are we actually missing in that message? Because, if we see it as a pure criticism, we might be missing some wisdom in there that is helpful for us to think about. Because superpowers... when you discover heat vision as a child, you don't make microwave popcorn for your parents, you burn a hole in their curtains is what you do. And so, we're not talking about that... we're acting like the superpowers are easy to handle, and the person who has them knows how to wield them. But I think what we're hearing the school say is that she has something cool that makes her unique, but it also interferes at times, and we don't want that to hurt her. JO  35:25 Before digging in deeper was Sharon and Simon. I'd like to acknowledge a major HEADS UP! sponsor... the Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia. SPARC BC is a leader in applied social research, social policy analysis, and community development approaches to social justice. The council's great team supports 16,000 members, and works with communities of all sizes to build a just and healthy society for all. Thanks yet again, to all of you great folks for your ongoing support. So, Sharon, let's circle back... we've been talking about superheroes and superpowers. And I'd like to hear the story of how that all got kicked off for you. SHARON  36:17 Well, I'm a comic book nerd. I fell in love with superheroes at about a year-and-a-half when the Spider-Man animated show came on TV, and I found myself fixed on the screen. And I just never broke away from that, and it's gone down into other different fandoms over time. So, I've got a whole bunch, I'll spare you the list, but what happened was in raising my kids, especially having two boys, we were surrounded by comic books and action figures and Marvel movies. So, it was just familiar. We had favorite characters, and this and that. And, so what happened was when my second son was born in 2003, I noticed some things about him very early on, especially once he started school, it became really obvious. He was not interested in learning to practice his writing, he would just scribble, he had a very strong auditory sense, like, go to a movie with his kid, do not ever try to debate script with him, because he will have picked it up. And he can come back, like literally with the phrasing, the cadence, the tone, that kind of thing. And that was his gift. But he was struggling in school, and he always had problems. He was told that he was daydreaming. He was having problems with reading and math. So, they would just send him home with more stuff, and he just was super frustrated. And as much as I'd asked for psychological assessments, I was told that he was too young and will get by. And they kept passing him from one grade to the next, where things just kept getting progressively harder and harder, because he didn't have the skills. And he was eight years old, and he just melted down one day and said, "Mommy, if you love me, you wouldn't send me to school anymore. Because I'm a failure, I'm broken. And I'm not going to do well there. And it's just it's not worth it." And I found myself saying to him, as he rattled off each of these different things that were wrong with him. I found the flip side. "Oh, so what you're telling me is that you think you're oversensitive to this and that, well, I see empathy there, I see caring, I see strategic thinking." And we flipped all the things and found assets. And I said, "Sweetheart, you're not broken... you're like an X-Man... you have mutant superpowers. And it's just a matter of figuring them out and figuring out how to harness them. So, we're going to do for you what Professor X does for the X-Men," and I use the example of Cyclops with laser vision. I said, "Think about Cyclops... you can blow up buildings and save his friends to do all these things and take down the bad guys, whatever. But if he doesn't put his visor down in the morning, guess who's gonna set his underwear on fire while he gets ready for school?" So, we use the example of Cyclops, and what I found myself doing at first I was like, "Oh my gosh, did I just blow smoke at my kid?" And then I realized how I had been coping and managing since that diagnosis of postpartum, and the different tools that I had been given intermittently, and what I had learned on my own... taking those tools and then researching and doing things further on my own,... was that I had been reframing, and I had been finding assets, and that actually previous to that diagnosis the thing is like the kind of thinking that I had with ADHD... well, that had been an asset. As long as I was checking off the right boxes and I was getting rewarded, that was an asset that was a spidey sense that I was hiding. And that why is it as soon as things helped out on me at a diagnosis of postpartum, that suddenly there was like, “Whoo, I've got a thing wrong with me… it's a diagnosis...  bad, broken.” And I saw that it's stigma, that kind of thing. That's what I started doing, and that's where we started really trying to Identify within our own family, what were the assets that we had. And it was things like hyperfocus, it was creativity, and that's just the language that we started using, because we also found that it was neutral. The superpower is inherently neutral... it's what's done with it. It goes to Simon's comment about burning the hole in the drapes or making the popcorn, right. It is what it is... now, am I going to be stigmatized and end up someone like Magneto, who becomes the antihero and become reactive and defensive? Or am I going to become someone that's more like a Professor X and the X-Men and use my powers for my own benefit, but also for the benefit of others. And that's where I realized that a lot of the things that I had been doing were about using those powers to help others. So that's where it came from. It was basically me trying to parent my little boy who was broken, and to help him build a toolkit until he could get proper clinical diagnosis and support. It was our way of getting through things. JO  41:06 How have you evolved that program? I know now that you're offering the toolkit, for example, to other people. Tell us about that. SHARON  41:15 I guess it's been about a decade now or so since that originally happened. I was using that language with my kids, which crept into my language at work. So, you want to see political staff, which have the minister in a meeting, use the word “superpowers.” That was on the list of words that the minister wasn't allowed to use. And also, not allowed to talk about neuroplasticity, or anything else that will get the opposition a front-page headline where they can call me quirky or a flake or something. And they tried, but it was a case of going through that and deciding that after coming out of office, and after working at another organization, that I wanted to share that, because as I encountered different people that went, "Oh my gosh, that's an interesting way of looking at it." And so, I realized, and also watching my son and other people I'd  shared it with, that it had a destigmatizing approach. I'm not a clinician, and I'm not someone that's trained as well as Simon is... I'm someone with lived experience who has trained in things like peer support, and, that for me, it's a language that I find helpful in taking these big complex ideas and making them relatable, and making them a conversation that we can have, without it being again, scary or distancing. So, I can talk about anxiety and talk about Spider-Man. And we can have conversations around Peter Parker, and Spider-Gwen, and Miles Morales, and find out that people have empathy for those characters in a way that they might not have for themselves, or someone they know what that diagnosis is. So, it creates that little bit of a safe space. I guess how I put it is I take mental health seriously, but I don't always take myself seriously. And if I can share stories and do things and introduce people to tools and perspectives, or especially introduce kids to ways of handling their emotions, because a lot of times it manifests more emotionally, where they see it as positive. I've seen the results with my son, who specifically has got some powerful reframing tools. That's what it is. And so now it's a program called Embrace Your Superpowers. And I've since encountered another fandom that I've been dived way too deep into, and I have another program based on the music of Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS), and just published an article in a peer-reviewed journal out of Korea on the mental health messaging within their music and how they model things like CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy), peer support, and some other therapies. JO  43:43 Wow, that's amazing. Simon, can you put all this into clinical/neuroscience/neurological context? SIMON  43:54 You mean, as assistant Professor S? JO  43:56 Yes. SIMON  43:59 Like that one... Sharon... Professor S? SHARON  44:00 Yes, yeah. SIMON  44:01 Pretty close... yeah... not bad. And as a psychiatrist, I didn't want to say sex because then I have to say something about my mother... it's embarrassing. So no, I really can't summarize it in some perfect way. But I can talk about Sharon's use of superheroes as a way for her to lovingly and empathically discover herself. And I think that when you think about how difficult Sharon's life is… especially early on was, maybe not so much now, which is awesome… but as a child, she didn't have a hero that was safe to look up to. And when kids don't have a hero that's safe to look up to they find them. They find them in teachers, or they find them in pop culture, or they find them in rock and roll, or they find them in fandoms. And Sharon was really lucky to be able to find such an awesome fandom that gave her such positive messages, that allowed her to start to say, "Wait a minute, different is unique." It gave her the idea that adults could be nice, that they could do things that were selfless that did not have to hurt other people. That adults could do big things and handle things. That they could be role models. That adults could be strong, and that people could look up to them and still be safe in doing so. And these are all contrary to the messages that Sharon had been experiencing in her own life. And so, this was a very much a place for her... a cocoon for her... to be able to develop safely in her own mind and her own psyche to survive how harsh childhood was with all the adults in her life that were not sending her comfortable messages. In fact, they were quite mixed, and they were quite barbed. So, I think that I would start off by just saying it's awesome to think about this way, and in Sharon, teaching other people how to have more empathy for themselves. We always work on the idea that what we do for others we're actually doing for ourselves. And so, it brings us back to the idea that Sharon is doing this, in fact, for herself, which then makes me wonder if I'm doing this for myself, and it makes me feel good to help other people. So perhaps, I'm selfishly also baked into the system here and doing some of the same things. But that's okay, because you can reach a point in your life where you can give to others without taking anything away from you. And that's the other idea about how things are not a zero-sum game, things are not black and white. In fact, we can generate kindness and love on the spot as humans, and we have this beautiful ability to do so. And that's, as well, what superheroes do... they love the human regardless of the situation, because they know the person's always trying their best. And that's one thing that I always make sure I work on with everybody... I will truly believe that everybody is trying to be as successful as possible at every moment, including when we don't want to get out of bed, we just calculate that. That's all we have that day, and that's the best we can do. And I just want to make sure Sharon continues to embrace those parts of her because they are easily the most powerful parts that really do have the ability to generate almost infinite abilities to believe in yourself. JO  47:02 Sharon, you mentioned earlier… neurodiversity, and I'm really interested to know, first of all, from you Simon, what that means, and what that means to people like myself and like Sharon, who have mental health challenges. She may not be considered, quote, "normal" unquote, from a mental health perspective, but look at who she is. Look at what she's accomplished. Look at how she's helping people. So, can you just respond to that? SIMON  47:37 Absolutely. I'll back you up a little bit. Sharon's as normal as anyone else... there's no such thing as normal. This is the lie that we've all been sold very early on in our lives, that there is something called "normal." And, by the way, that normal is also perfect. And that's also the thing we all wanted to aspire to be. But it's really a story of conformity... the language of normal or perfection is actually language of conformity. And so, the reality of it is, we are all so different. If you go into a field and look at 100 cows, but then you put 100 people in the field beside them, you look at the people, humans are really unique. I'm not suggesting cows aren't unique...  cows are pretty neat, too, but humans are exponentially more unique. And because of the freedom that we enjoy, because of our prefrontal cortex to imagine ourselves in almost any scenario we like, we're walking around with a holodeck in the front of our skull. So, we all have that. But what neurodiversity truly speaks about, it's recognizing that in the great, great ghetto blaster of Homo sapiens, the equalizer is spread uniquely throughout all of us, all of Homo sapiens is a spectrum. And so, we do cluster sometimes around some tendencies such as gender, but we're learning that not everybody experiences a “normal” quote/unquote, as we've been sold, gender. In fact, there is intersex conditions, there is agender, there is gender fluid, there is genderqueer, there is non-binary. So, there is no such thing as normal. There is just this incredible adventure called being a human being. And the only limitations we're going to put on that are the ones we put on ourselves. JO  49:16 So, Sharon, how did your understanding of neurodiversity help you to see yourself in a different light? SHARON  49:23 Well, it goes definitely to what Simon said... one of my favorites expressions around this is "normal is just a setting on a dryer." That's the only place it's a useful term. SIMON  49:34 And it doesn't always work for the clothes in the dryer either. SHARON  49:37 Exactly, exactly. It might not be the setting you need. Again, when my youngest one was finally tested and given diagnoses that said that he had discalculate dysgraphia and dyslexia, these are things that are called learning disabilities. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, he just learns differently, and that he learns in ways, that again, it's this idea of along a spectrum, and so it's a case of wanting to take the stigma away from it. There is all of this diversity. And that somewhere along the line, somebody came up with some sort of liberal, conformity-based normal in the supposed center, and that the rest of us were put out on the margins. And we have a disability or like with ADHD, the idea that it's a deficiency, and I'm like, “Okay, no, no, I don't have a deficiency disorder. I can hyper focus. My ability to focus is divergent, and it can be hyper focused, it's not deficient.” The term, variable attention stimulus trait is one that I've come across as an alternative. And I appreciate that one, because it's the idea that I just have greater variety in my stimulation range. It's not better or worse, that idea of positive or negative. So that's why I tend to use the term neurodiversity, where other folks would tend to use terms like a learning disability or some kind of a challenge or something, again, something that implies other or negative. It's like, no, there's this wonderful spectrum that exists. And that's what we need to understand and appreciate. And then the other thing that I've come to realize, especially, I guess you'd say, in real time with my son's experience… and then I'd say, in retrospect, with my own on this journey with Simon… has been that those of us that have that kind of a diagnosis or a label, will inevitably have some kind of traumatic or mental health issue. Because you're going to experience anxiety, you're going to be stressed out, you are going to overthink and self-judge and do all of these things. When you are being treated as other in the classroom, because you're not reading the same way, you're not writing the same way, you're not allowed to hand in a video presentation instead of an essay. And so instead, you're beating yourself up for two nights trying to get two paragraphs on a piece of paper. Whereas if you had been left to give an oral presentation, or maybe my son had a geography assignment that by God, if you'd been able to do it in Minecraft, to build this world that he created for this class, he would have knocked their socks off. But instead, it was knowing we need five paragraphs on a piece of Bristol board and a picture. And that just wasn't his thing. So that's for me, neurodiversity is about we need to challenge how we see each other, how we teach, how we work, because we're missing out. There's a lot of us that I call sort of shiny sparkling stars that, you know, you're trying to take those shiny, pointy stars, and that's what you're trying to shove into the round hole, not just a square peg. But you're trying to shave off all of my shiny pointy stars to stick me in a boring round hole. And we all lose. SIMON  52:44 And I think really the other thing we have to mention is that we need to treat education like fine dining, but instead we treat it like the drive thru. Yes. And so, if we don't talk about that, we're going to blame the teachers for everything. And it's not their fault. Schools, education has been undervalued, underfunded, and quite frankly, is not sexy or cool. Even though I think it's the best thing ever. SHARON  53:07 Yes. SIMON  53:09 We don't look at teachers as heroes, yet, they are probably one of the highest skilled and the most patient and most saint-like versions of humans that have probably existed in our society. And I'm not joking, the ratios are too high and unmanageable for teachers to spend the qualitative time to actually help kids learn in the best ways they learn. So, what they do is they bundle kids… and I know sounds like a [Bell] MTS package…but they bundle kids into packages of classrooms where the median learning style will get served the best. But what we have to start doing is recognizing there might be seven or eight unique learning styles, and then streaming our children into those enriched learning environments. So, they simultaneously get to enjoy their easy way, while working on the other seven types of learning that they're not good at. So that everybody starts understanding that there's no deficit for those people. We all have deficits, because we don't have everyone else's skills, but that's a qualitative aspect about being human. We're all capable of learning to greater or lesser degrees, but we're all capable of learning, period. And we're gonna find some ways that we do it easier across the board, which is going to work in many environments, but it's not going to work in all environments. So, the challenge for all humans is to enjoy what you got and flaunt it, and be celebrated. But at the same time, celebrate learning the other things you don't do well, and we're not going to blame the student because the school doesn't know how to approach their unique learning challenges. We're going to help fund the school, we're going to elect people that take education seriously, and we're going to start to really give our kids a fighting chance to develop self-esteem and identity and an actual career that they feel fulfilled by. JO  54:53 Simon you mentioned that we can all learn. How does neuroplasticity play into that? SIMON  55:00 Our brains have changed dramatically since the beginning of this podcast. That's how our brains are a dynamic ocean of neurons and waves that are sending electrical signals to each other all the time. Every single thought you have is like playing a single note or several chords on a keyboard at the same time. That's why people say we only use 10% of our brain, because if we used all of it at once would be like playing every key on the piano at the same time, and you would not make sense of what that was. Neurodiversity and neuroplasticity, in particular, talks about the idea that our brains are shaped by our genes that sent templates for them, but then having great amounts of potential to be shaped in dramatically unique and different ways. By our experiences, in particular, if those experiences are harsh, they can hardwire in some ways and rigidly keep that template baked into the system for sometimes decades at a time. And on the other side of the spectrum. If our young brains are nurtured… like an orchid in a garden that understands the conditions under which they will thrive the best… then the human brain doesn't seem like it has limits, and we see that in our neurodiverse populations that are allowed, because they're so separated in so many other aspects. If you have severe autism, for instance, we see human abilities that are beyond anything we could ever imagine. And that's all within the human brain. JO  56:29 You can't discuss mental health without talking about stigma. Sharon, what kinds of stigma have you experienced? Be it structural, public, personal? And if you have experienced that, how have you reduced the impacts of that in your life? SHARON  56:46 I might not have identified it as stigma as a child. But there was definitely that sense of being othered. I wouldn't have had that word. I remember when I was first given the postpartum diagnosis, and I remember the doctor asking about if there was any history of mental health issues. And then going back to my folks and being given this adamant, "NO," that there was nothing. Okay, they're very defensive. And yet, at the same time that I was given this adamant "NO," it was then followed up with my mother's explanation about how she and her two sisters all spent some time on Valium in the 70s, while six of us peasants were all young and growing up together. There's been a lot of self-medication on both sides of the family, and how those that had nothing to do with those behaviors, nothing to do with that. And there was this real sense of denial, and, How dare I ask these questions? And I still have some family members, from whom I am estranged because, How dare I talk about mental health? How dare I be the crazy person? And as I said, I had been given a diagnosis of bipolar which again, through work with Simon, realize that behaviors that were seen in there, it seemed like the thing at the time, but we're realizing those because trauma hadn't been addressed appropriately. So, my son, his father to this day still asks, and because my son lives with me predominantly, has had the gall to say... my son would come back, and this is pre-COVID, would come back from a visit. And you know, so how did your visit go? Oh, well, Dad asked, "What's it like to be raised by a bipolar mom?" And, "Am I okay?" And, "Am I safe?" And then, when I went public with my mental health, as the Minister of Health, part of the reason why I did that was because I wanted people to know that I was somebody with lived experience, I wasn't just a talking head. And it had to do with a particular situation, where we had just lost someone to suicide, and that the system failed this person, and hadn't been able to meet his needs. And as a result, we lost this wonderful artist. And that broke my heart, because I always looked at that job as if the system can't look after me and my family, then it's not good enough. And if we lost this person, I saw the situation, I guess, from both sides. I saw myself as the potential parent in that situation, and also the potential adult child who was lost. And I remember my staff, people were flipping out about how the minister cannot discuss this, because we're gonna have to deal with peop

by David Trinidad

In this weeks episode, Zach, Steven, and Chum talk about the CARS Tour race at Hickory Motor Speedway (NC) and have a special guest in studio. Driver of the Triple R Racing 81, Sam Butler joins them to give the drivers perspective from the track in practice, qualifying, and the race. Take a listen as the recap the good, the bad, and the details everyone talked about after the checkered flag had flown. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/triple-r-racing/message

Subscribe to the Tipsy Ghost on iHeartRadio - http://ihr.fm/3932N5WSubscribe on Stitcher - http://bit.ly/2QjoYy6Subscribe everywhere else - http://bit.ly/3lFZGWOThe episode where we share our experience with our sleepover at McInteer Villa, in Atchison, KS. This place is super haunted, and you can find plenty of evidence on their IG and FB page as well! We spent the night with several creepy presences including Chatty Cathy, George, Goldie, a dirty old man in the basement, and more. Lindsey also finally got her 90s prom makeover, thanks to Sarah. We have some evidence to tune into, so make sure you listen up - and keep an eye on our social media accounts for the evidence from the night vision camera!http://www.thetipsyghost.comFind us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok @thetipsyghostEmail us your stories at thetipsyghost@gmail.comShow your support when you subscribe, leave a great review & give us a 5 star rating—it really helps!~~~~~~~~~~~Indie Drop-InAll content legally licensed from the original creator. Thank you to The Typsy Ghost for the great episode. You can find Indie Drop-In at https://indiedropin.comHelp Indie Drop-In support indie creators by buying us a coffee!https://buymeacoffee.com/indiedropinBrands can advertise on Indie Drop-In using Patreonhttps://patreon.com/indiedropinTwitter: https://twitter.com/indiedropinInstagram: https://instagram.com/indiedropinFacebook: https://facebook.com/indiedropinAny advertising found in this episode is inserted by Indie Drop-In and not endorsed by the Creator.If you would like to have your show featured go to http://indiedropin.com/creators~~~~~~~~~~~

Subscribe to the Tipsy Ghost on iHeartRadio - http://ihr.fm/3932N5WSubscribe on Stitcher - http://bit.ly/2QjoYy6Subscribe everywhere else - http://bit.ly/3lFZGWOThe episode where we share our experience with our sleepover at McInteer Villa, in Atchison, KS. This place is super haunted, and you can find plenty of evidence on their IG and FB page as well! We spent the night with several creepy presences including Chatty Cathy, George, Goldie, a dirty old man in the basement, and more. Lindsey also finally got her 90s prom makeover, thanks to Sarah. We have some evidence to tune into, so make sure you listen up - and keep an eye on our social media accounts for the evidence from the night vision camera!http://www.thetipsyghost.comFind us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok @thetipsyghostEmail us your stories at thetipsyghost@gmail.comShow your support when you subscribe, leave a great review & give us a 5 star rating—it really helps!~~~~~~~~~~~Indie Drop-InAll content legally licensed from the original creator. Thank you to The Typsy Ghost for the great episode. You can find Indie Drop-In at https://indiedropin.comHelp Indie Drop-In support indie creators by buying us a coffee!https://buymeacoffee.com/indiedropinBrands can advertise on Indie Drop-In using Patreonhttps://patreon.com/indiedropinTwitter: https://twitter.com/indiedropinInstagram: https://instagram.com/indiedropinFacebook: https://facebook.com/indiedropinAny advertising found in this episode is inserted by Indie Drop-In and not endorsed by the Creator.If you would like to have your show featured go to http://indiedropin.com/creators~~~~~~~~~~~

Subscribe to the Tipsy Ghost on iHeartRadio - http://ihr.fm/3932N5WSubscribe on Stitcher - http://bit.ly/2QjoYy6Subscribe everywhere else - http://bit.ly/3lFZGWOThe episode where we share our experience with our sleepover at McInteer Villa, in Atchison, KS. This place is super haunted, and you can find plenty of evidence on their IG and FB page as well! We spent the night with several creepy presences including Chatty Cathy, George, Goldie, a dirty old man in the basement, and more. Lindsey also finally got her 90s prom makeover, thanks to Sarah. We have some evidence to tune into, so make sure you listen up - and keep an eye on our social media accounts for the evidence from the night vision camera!http://www.thetipsyghost.comFind us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok @thetipsyghostEmail us your stories at thetipsyghost@gmail.comShow your support when you subscribe, leave a great review & give us a 5 star rating—it really helps!~~~~~~~~~~~Indie Drop-InAll content legally licensed from the original creator. Thank you to The Typsy Ghost for the great episode. You can find Indie Drop-In at https://indiedropin.comHelp Indie Drop-In support indie creators by buying us a coffee!https://buymeacoffee.com/indiedropinBrands can advertise on Indie Drop-In using Patreonhttps://patreon.com/indiedropinTwitter: https://twitter.com/indiedropinInstagram: https://instagram.com/indiedropinFacebook: https://facebook.com/indiedropinAny advertising found in this episode is inserted by Indie Drop-In and not endorsed by the Creator.If you would like to have your show featured go to http://indiedropin.com/creators~~~~~~~~~~~

Join the Chatty Cathy's Jamie, Karen and AJ as they dig into another night of TV. Tonight's Line-Up... Big Sky, Resident Alien, Snowpiercer and whatever else sounds good

This week the guys get together to talk Lao, Chatty Cathy, and Mary Browns.   MERCH LINK - https://teespring.com/stores/order-of-the-straight-arrow SPOTIFY PLAYLIST LINK - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lb0NGz0GWFbhLPcwe1rfq

GreetingsThis is a very special podcast interview as I introduce you to Carmen a 39 year old mom of two who is the living breathing testimony of phenomenal and gracious woman who chose not to survive but thriveAt the young age of 4-6 years old she was raped repeatedly by an older cousin.  She described herself at that young age as a Chatty Cathy, instinctively she  knew what he did to her was wrong, but she remained silent.   In the 9th and 10th grade she was engulfed in a crippling depression, which left her  unable to function at school. Unaware what was wrong her parents took her to a doctor who misdiagnosed her as bi-polar.  Throughout her teens and 20's she battled depression and manic episodes of anger and rage.In 2012, in a manic episode she finally told her parents what happened and was institutionalized.She battled back and today she is thriving and raising two successful children, and willing to share her journey of struggle, healing, and thriving in the hopes of helping others.She never saw herself as a victim didn't want to be defined as a survivor, she wanted more, and she achieved it 

THE WAT-ZEE PARTY HORROR SHOW 016: Late Phases (2014) SHOW NOTES Misters Wat & Zee are back AF, and they would like to cordially invite you to join them for their 16th episode! The guys are kicking off this 3-Act show with a comprehensive look at the horror movie releases you might have missed in November 2020 in their infamous PARTY FAVORS segment. Next… in the HORROR DEEP DIVE segment… Wat & Zee pull back the curtain for an intimate behind the scenes look at the podcast itself as they ponder what the future hold for the Party after Horrorphilia. Lastly… it's SHOWTIME! In this portion of the Party, Dave & Dustin deliver a spoiler-free review of the modern werewolf classic, LATE PHASES (2014). Be sure to stay for the surprise AFTER PARTY… after the outro music has played… where spoilers abound and all bets are off! It's such a surprise that Dave Zee himself didn't even know it happened! Join the Party & celebrate the genre with us here on episode 016 of The Wat-Zee Party Horror Show! TIMESTAMPS INTRO  = 00:00:00 The Party is back! Coffee turns Dave into a “Chatty Cathy.” Watson, his son, and son's friend shot a minute long short film. Dave's basement video store. Thanksgiving talk. 2020 horror watches. Watson almost pukes watching Yummy (2020). What happened to the Happy Hour episodes? Episode Itinerary = 00:30:48 ACT 1: PARTY FAVORS  = 00:32:13 November 2020 Horror Movie Releases Let's Scare Julie They Reach The Dark and the Wicked Kindred Sleepless Beauty Lingering (AKA Hotel Lake) Freaky Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist Run Deathcember Peninsula ACT 2: HORROR DEEP DIVE   = 01:24:18 Mister Watson & Dave Zee read an email from an anonymous listener and pull back the curtain of the podcast to show what's behind the scenes. They discuss the following: The future of the podcast after Horrorphilia. Networks vs. Self-hosting. Their autumn hiatus. Do Watson & Dave's Exploding Heads co-hosts hate one another? ACT 3: SHOWTIME  = 02:41:09 Spoiler-free review of Late Phases (2014) Dave Zee's Rating = 7.5/10 Mister Watson's Rating = 9/10 OUTRO = 03:15:54 Sub-Genre Roulette Result = Satanic/Demonic/Cult/Witches Movie Coin Toss Result = Watson wins and chooses Terrified (2018) Plugs… Dave Zee's Other Shows… Exploding Heads Horror Movie Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/ExplodingHeads/posts The ABCs of Hidden Horror Podcast: https://www.

We try the vending machine challenge and we eat one item from each slot from the machine. That's 19 items people. The anticipation is high, the expectation for completing the challenge is low, and I really hope no one gets a Darwin award out of this. This crazy idea was cooked up by our one and only special correspondent Brian Miller.—————————————————Reese’s - 210Swedish Fish - 320Baby Ruth - 260Heath - 210Kit Kat - 210Milk Duds - 585Tootsie Roll - 23Mr. Goodbar - 260——(Miller and Teeg Tap Out, Ryan Moves On)——Butterfinger - 250York - 1503 Musketeers - 240Payday - 240—————————————————Snacks we didn’t get too……Chatty Cathy’s took over the “Challenge” show.Snickers - 250Ferrero Rocher (3 pack)- 219 Toblerone - 540Twix - 250Hershey’s - 220m&ms - 230MilkyWay - 240—————————————————Total items consumed by Teeg and Miller - 8Total Calories for Teeg and Miller - 2078Total items consumed by Ryan - 12Total Calories for Ryan - 2958Total Items - 19 ItemsTotal Calories - 4907

In an episode on SIN CITY these two movie podcasters feel free to commit all the sins at their disposal: Disparaging the director by choosing THE ONE scene directed by someone else as the best (love you, QT) Choosing Josh Hartnett as their favorite character because he's the least Chatty Cathy of all these monologue loving dudes. And debating if it's worth the end of theatrical exhibition as we know it just to stick it to ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL fans. Can you handle all this testosterone saturated decadence? If not go back to our episode on AMERICAN SPLENDOR you nerd. Because we need the download. Any downloads! Support what we do with bonus content and early episodes on Patreon Twitter/Instagram/Facebook: @trilogyintheory Tweet at your hosts: @projectingfilm & @webistrying Letterboxd: @projectingfilm & @webistrying Artwork by: @nasketchs

Do you have conversations in your head, too? So you've just spent the last fifteen minutes playing out every possible scenario in your mind trying to anticipate an interview or replaying an argument you just had - thinking of way better and more colorful rebuttals. Maybe you're about to pitch a new client and you're inner dialogue goes south... What if they don't like your ideas, your shoes, your hair, or you remind them of an old, sweaty, nervous ex-girlfriend?! Or... a new phenomenon that's getting a whole lotta attention - CRICKETS. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Are you the rare breed who doesn't have an inner dialogue at all? The thought of this blows your favorite Womanpreneur duo's minds! Yes, there are people in the world who aren't having conversations in their heads. And Amanda and Melissa are finding it difficult to wrap their own brains around it!  In this episode, we take a closer look at all that internal chatter. Is your inner cheerleader who you hear the loudest? Or is your inner critique wreaking havoc with too much negative noise? Or... NADA? Tune in for an episode that'll get your inner Chatty-Cathy talking up a storm! Keep the conversation going by joining our Facebook Group! To watch the video version of this episode, please visit thewomanpreneurpodcast.com or our YouTube channel. Please leave us a review and subscribe so you never miss an episode! Questions and comments can also be emailed to womanpreneurpodcast@gmail.com Follow Amanda: @aardvarkgirl Follow Melissa: @melissamoatsvo

This episode of Armstrong & Getty begins with news about the devastating wildfires that are burning throughout California. Plus, Joe offers up a new "Chatty Cathy Check-out Theater" and Mailbag!

Lynette opens the show comparing Sonny to Al Bundy. Then the ladies talk about when they were still in school and how much trouble they got into for being Chatty Cathys. After that they get into talk radio and the rise of podcasts slowly taking over terrestrial radio. Before they wrap, Stefanie signs Elby up for basketball and they have a quick discussion on childhood beliefs in fictional characters like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.