Meg wolf

How did you get involved in Neurodiverse Connections?

I was the one who dragged Shannon to pottery. Next session, Marcee showed up. Then Shannon strong-armed Robin into coming, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I'd known for 2 years that my oldest daughter is autistic and saw first-hand during pandemic homeschooling how profoundly difficult her PDA profile made school for her. I had also recently received my own ADHD diagnosis (at age 46!). So, I did what I always do to make sense of things– I started learning everything I could about neurodiversity. The more I learned, the more I realized how little I had known about it before. In the last 15 years, scientists have discovered so much about the brain that almost ALL the current information is new to EVERYONE, especially as it applies to girls and women, and other marginalized groups. I was utterly fascinated, but it occurred to me that I was actually LIVING this neurodivergent life and barely knew anything about it– how many other people were as unaware as I?

My teacher in LA taught us that “Acting is the art of communication,” (thanks Diana!) and that storytelling creates community. So though I'm not a doctor, therapist, or special education teacher, my whole life has actually been preparing me to collaborate with these amazing women to create Neurodiverse Connections. This is by far the most important role I've ever played, and I can't wait.

MEG'S STORY

So here's some more background info. It's written in 3rd person for some reason, as if I was pretending someone else was fascinated by me and that I didn't actually write this myself. Interesting. Marcee, you're a therapist. Do we need to talk?

>Meg grew up overseas, and came back to the States in 6th grade. She lived in the Chicago suburbs, was a camp counselor in SC, attended a year of boarding school in Massachusetts, went to college in MN, studied theatre in London, worked and performed in Minneapolis, and then moved to LA to act full time. She married a hilarious brilliant man, and with him by her side she worked on-camera in LA for 12 years, rescued dogs, traveled, and talked about moving up to Bainbridge Island to raise their children… sometime.

Then one day, Meg was making an Olive Garden commercial. It was 12 weeks after delivering her first daughter and Meg had started the day nursing her infant girl. 3 hours later, Meg sat on a soundstage in Hollywood, across the table from a 23-year old actress playing her on-camera daughter. Meg decided her life was too strange and it was time to make some changes.

She and her family settled on Bainbridge in 2016, when Eloise was just barely 2 and Alice was waiting to make her debut at the end of that year. The friends Meg made at her daughter's preschool were instrumental in helping Eloise be identified as having Sensory Processing DIsorder, and a year later at age 5, we learned Eloise is autistic with the PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) profile.

[Oooh, look, back to first-person– I guess because things get real here?]

I shudder to think where our family would be if we had not been encouraged to seek an explanation for Eloise's distress (thanks Shannon, Laurie, Taya, and Amy!). Learning about PDA radically changed everything about parenting Eloise, and I am so thankful for this knowledge. A year and a half later, at the ripe old age of 46, my doctor and I figured out I had ADHD, though Marcee swears she saw it when we first met. This identification has changed my life. I'll write about it soon. I'm also seeing the same ADHD traits in little Alice and we are in the process of helping her understand her brain too. I spent my whole life thinking I wasn't good enough and didn't deserve my accomplishments, desperate to please everyone while terrified someone might see through my facade to the sham beneath it. (That's called imposter syndrome, folks, and is really common in ADHD'rs– more on that later too). The point is, I won't let my girls go through that. So. Yeah. Neurodiverse Connections. Let's do this.