In this anthology, I will delve into two spheres of my personal and professional life: how my gender has inhibited my authority in the workplace, and how my gender has impacted the assumptions others make of my aptitude and worth. In each entry, I explore the intersection of poetry and literary criticism regarding internalized gendered assumptions. My headnote offers questions to consider upon reading each poem, and I have taken techniques and examples from Mary Oliver’s handbook on writing poetry, to then offer my own poem in response. Finally, I then analyze relevant scholarship to the gender-based issue I am referencing, alongside a personal explanation of how this issue materializes in my poems.

A handbook consisting of scholarship and social media included to frame the six experiences around which this handbook is organized: getting in the zone, a thought process in overdrive; impulsivity; a distinct relationship to creativity; difficulties with transitions, especially the transition to and from sleep; and a complex relationship to medication. Following the initial framing, I then describe what each of these experiences feel like to me. To render these experiences for the purpose of a shared inquiry, I followed the critical-incident interview method that Flower describes in Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. I first learned to use this interview technique in ENG 205: Introduction to Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies and practiced it further in ENG 390: Methods of Inquiry. The crux of my project is the insights of research participants as they read and responded to the six critical incidents and respective follow-up questions I designed for this study. The full interview protocol–approved by ASU’s Internal Review Board in December of 2022–is included in the appendix. Following IRB approval, I recruited four participants for a critical-incident interview, the results of which enliven this handbook’s portrait of thriving with ADHD.