SHANNON BOSS

ADHD, “Gifted Underachiever”, M.Ed., Mom (she/her)

Kids?
Yep! One sweet little almost eight year old girl.

Dogs or cats?
It depends. I have both (and a fish and two rats), but I’d say there are pluses and minuses to both dogs and cats. I have always been into animals, but I find that it depends on where I am in life as to whether I prefer dogs or cats.

If you could be any fruit, what kind of fruit would you be?
Definitely a grape. I love being surrounded by my bunch of people.

What superpower do you wish you had?
Mind reader. But only in some instances, like with my child or the children I teach. I’d love to read their minds (most of the time), but I don’t need to read the mind of the random person walking down the street.

Where in this world have you lived?
Seattle, Bainbridge Island, Wa, Portland, OR, Milwaukie, OR, Cuenca, Ecuador, Hamden, CT, Sacramento, CA and Bainbridge Island again!

Where did you go to school?
The University of Portland
Concordia University

First Job: Babysitter

Best Job: Teacher at The Island School

How did you get involved in Neurodiverse Connections?

When you are in the right place and time in your life, the people you need just seem to appear. Who knew it would take 41 years, but when the time was right, those “right people” just also happened to have stories so similar to mine that it was only natural we would come together with this incredible common mission.

SHANNON'S STORY

When I was in high school, school was hard. Well, not math, just anything that required reading (red flag much?!?). I wasn’t a behavior problem and always performed within the normal range on standardized tests, so no school ever thought twice about my needs and through the cracks I fell.

Thanks to my persistent mom, I was flown from Seattle to Orange County, CA for a full evaluation from an Educational Psychologist. The findings? I was officially a “gifted underachiever”. Translation - I have a pretty decent IQ and ADHD. At this time, ADHD was a rare diagnosis in females and even more rare for those of us in what we now call the inattentive subtype.

Now, a mom of one wonderful little girl, I knew by about age 5 that she was gifted a similar brain to me. By age 7, she too, had an official ADHD- inattentive subtype diagnosis. Thanks to family history, her active struggle in school, and another persistent mom, her diagnosis was much faster to come by.

Everything in me is grateful for the brain with which I have been gifted. Does it make things tough at times? Sure. But I know without the brain that I have, I wouldn’t have the same intense ability to connect with other neurodivergent people including my students, my friends and my incredible daughter.

I proudly identify as female, a mom, a teacher of almost 20 years, and neurodivergent.