The ADHD symptom I can’t explain away (Andrea Jones-Rooy’s story)

Andrea Jones-Rooy — data scientist, comedian, and fire-eating acrobat — talks candidly about feeling like a failure even when all evidence points to the contrary. With sharp humor and vulnerability, she describes having “no self-esteem” (not low — none), limited willpower, and a reliance on fear and external pressure to get things done.

Andrea, who hosts the podcast Behind the Data, gives herself very little grace. She remains skeptical of her ADHD diagnosis. But one ADHD challenge feels impossible to dismiss: time blindness. Together, Andrea and Laura explore what it means to be present — and why that presence often comes more easily at work or on stage, where the stakes feel high, than with the people we love most.

For more on this topic

• ADHD and time blindness

• Behind the Data podcast

Episode transcript

Andrea Jones-Rooy: I thought, you know, what an easy out that would be. It felt like cheating to just say, "Oh, I just have ADHD." So I was very resistant to the idea. And it wasn't until I read about time blindness that I thought, "Oh, wow."

But I read the description and it was spot on. And I couldn't talk myself out about it in terms of willpower. Because everything else — oh, you procrastinate, oh, you're disorganized, oh, you — felt like a personal failing. But time blindness to me just felt like a different thing altogether.

Laura Key: Hi everyone and welcome back to "ADHD Aha!," the show where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they have ADHD. How many of us with ADHD doubt our diagnosis and might even say things to ourselves like, "If I just had a little bit more willpower, I could beat this"?

My guest today, Andrea Jones-Rooy, has certainly struggled with that thought pattern. Andrea is a data scientist, a comedian, and the host of the podcast "Behind The Data." Or, as the "New York Post" has described her, a professor who lives a double life as a fire-breathing acrobat. Andrea, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Andrea: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here. And I can't help but notice that might be the most ADHD title ever. A professor and a fire-breathing acrobat. Can you tell us, did you really breathe fire?

Laura: Well, technically I ate fire, didn't breathe fire. Very few people care about that distinction, but your fire-performing audience will want to know that distinction. So I was eating fire, I was not breathing fire.

Andrea: Right, right. It wasn't until you said it in the context of this podcast that I was like, "Wow, that is kind of an ADHD background." Speaking of aha! moments, I was like, "This might be the aha! moment in real time," that I'm like, "Maybe it is, maybe it is ADHD after all."

Laura: I was thinking we should start with the relative time period when you kind of hit your wall, when you were getting your PhD. Because you weren't diagnosed at this point. You were diagnosed later.

Andrea: That's right. So I went straight from undergrad to a PhD, ignoring all the advice of everyone in my life. And I thought, "No, I need to be a ultimate high achiever. I will go straight from school to school to school." So I'm under the impression that some people have fun in their 20s. That was not my experience.

I was at the University of Michigan and it was in political science. And so you'll have a couple of years of coursework, which just sort of feel like undergrad on steroids. Then you have a couple of years where you take what's called the preliminary exams, and then you have to propose your dissertation.

Once you get that proposal approved, it's like, then you do the thing. And as I went through each step, life got worse. I work okay when there are deadlines. In grad school, the deadlines are fewer and further between.

The prospectus almost broke me. Basically they say, "Okay, go by yourself in a room and come back when you have a really great idea that will define your career and prove to us that you're smart enough for a PhD."

So not only is that hard for anyone, it's super hard for me because without a deadline, I just wander around and go to yoga every day and lie on the floor face down and a lot of task paralysis — just awful. But I not only cannot manage my time if there's no deadline, and there was no deadline. I don't know if this is an ADHD thing and here I am doubting myself in real time.

But I have no self-esteem. And so any idea I would have, I would immediately say, "Not good enough. No, it's really bad and I better scrap it." And then I would go in and finally muster something up and take it to my advisor and he'd say, "Oh, okay, interesting, but there's X, Y, and Z problems with it," and maybe that's rejection sensitivity dysphoria. I would take that to mean scrap the entire project and come up with something new.

So I was in prospectus purgatory for four years, for forever. The dissertation itself, once I got past that — and I can belabor how I got past it, it was very difficult — but once I got past that, the dissertation itself was like six months and I had a deadline again because I had gotten a job, and you can't start a job as a postdoc without a doc.

So I again had a deadline and I kind of did a 24-hour marathon in a Thai food diner in Pittsburgh and I got it done. But the prospectus was this really — part of me may never recover from that experience.

Laura: I mean, Andrea, everything you just said, you basically just summed up why I did not go to get my PhD. I got my masters in Spanish literature, which sounds very fancy. And I wasn't diagnosed at that time either, but it was like, "There's no way I'm going to be able to manage my time in chunks and do this surely but steadily," right?

So but you got over the hump because you had kind of a threat hanging over your head, right? What you're saying really reminds me of something that a renowned expert who actually passed away recently, Dr. Tom Brown, it was something that he said that made me more cognizant of the fact that I might have ADHD.

In fact, it might have been like a mini aha! moment for me in my life. And he's like, "You know, if you have ADHD, it might feel like you have to have a gun to your head to get something done," right? So terrible violent analogy, but we get the point.

Andrea: And in full disclosure for this podcast, I have been wanting to set up my office to record with this camera and this microphone for two years. And I literally used this as the gun to your head deadline to set up my office. It's not finished, but —

Laura: I'm so glad that we could be helpful, even if it was like through violent means, right?

Andrea: Yes, and it's not just work stuff, it's personal stuff. Like, I will text back a friend if it's about what we're doing later. A dear friend could write to me and I haven't heard from her a thousand years, "Let's catch up this and that," I will not reply until I have to reply.

Laura: But you got the PhD.

Andrea: I got the PhD.

Laura: And you were not diagnosed. You didn't really have even an inkling at that point.

Andrea: Not even an inkling. So I got my PhD in the dark ages of 2012 and I say that to say that there was no TikTok or like internet that was outside of my own friend circle where someone could have pointed out ADHD. It was hard enough to kind of normalize mental health.

So I went to a therapist for depression and anxiety and all of that, and was totally stunned many, many years later when I read that ADHD in women in particular is often misdiagnosed as depression and anxiety.

So I was seeing a therapist, but I was so isolated and it just wasn't something that my social group was talking about and it wasn't something that was on my radar on the internet. And you know, growing up in the 90s, my younger brother had ADHD — ADD at the time — and I remember thinking, "Wow, that seems tough, glad I don't have it."

And so it really put into my brain, and I'm sure many people you've talked to and many of your audience, it put into my brain a very specific idea of what ADHD looks like. And I didn't look like that. And so it wasn't even like "maybe," it was just like, "What's wrong with me? Why don't I have willpower? Or why can't I get it together?"

So it wasn't on my radar and would not be on my radar for yet another 10 years. It was only very, very recently that I was diagnosed.

Laura: I want to talk about your performing. Was it in that period between getting your PhD and getting diagnosed?

Andrea: Yeah, I think so. I always liked performing growing up. I did dance and musical theater, was a dance minor in college, and then I went to graduate school and thought, "Alright Andrea, now it's time to be serious." And then I very quickly learned that the University of Michigan has an excellent dance and musical theater program.

And so I thought, "Well, what's the harm if I'm already here?" They had a synchronized swimming team. And so I thought, "I'm going to join." And I stayed on the team until I was too old.

It's for undergraduates and I was, you know, swimming with a bunch of 18-year-olds at 24 and finally they were like, "Andrea, you're great to have, but no. You can't. You're too old for that." And so then I took figure skating lessons and then I found hot yoga, and it was the only thing that made me feel better as especially as the classes wound down and the prospectus loomed.

And then during that miserable, miserable time where I was just in my deepest lostness, I found circus. And I found it because I was wandering through the grocery store in the middle of the day, as one does when one is avoiding one's work.

And I was reading like the community bulletin boards, and there was a sign that said, "Come to the Detroit River Festival featuring performances by the Detroit Flyhouse Aerialists." And I just thought, "I don't know what that means, but yes."

And I remember just walking in the first day and being like, "I cannot believe adults are just allowed to do this." It was so playful and fun. And so I went every Sunday. It was the only thing that kept me going in my dissertation.

But it wasn't until I got a faculty job that I moved — this is a long meandering story — but I got a job at NYU. And NYU was opening a campus in Shanghai. And so I went out there to help develop the program.

And part of the reason I moved was because by then I was early 30s, I couldn't stop doing circus and I thought, "I am never going to be a serious professor if I keep ducking out every chance I get to study trapeze some more." And once I got there, a month later a circus-themed nightclub opened that was hiring international performers.

So I got a job as a full-time performer. And they had a great improv scene out there, and the improv scene was really tied closely with the stand-up scene and I'd always secretly wanted to do stand-up but I was too afraid, and because they were so friendly and because I thought, "You know what, if it goes badly I'll just leave the continent," I was like, "Yeah, I'll try it."

And so it was in Shanghai that I really leaned into performing. There was a kind of liberty about being far away from the rest of your life that allowed me to really explore those things. And so I've been doing all of them ever since.

And again, ADHD couldn't have been further from my mind, but I was able to, you know — because it ate up so much of my time, it meant that my academic work really required that hyperfocus. I was much more productive when I had the double life than when I came back to the US and thought, "I'm going to be a serious academic."

Laura: Every three years I think, "I'm going to be a serious academic," and it doesn't work. Andrea, all of that is so cool. I have to say, everything that you just described, this amazing colorful life that you built on your own, that is not the life of someone who lacks willpower.

Andrea: That's a really nice thing to hear. Thank you. Now I'm like, "But you're wrong and here's why."

Laura: And I understand that and it's hard to hear that this thing you've been telling yourself might not be true. But you had all of this academia work to do and you could say that you were just procrastinating, and maybe that was part of it, but you saw something that piqued your interest and then you drove to Detroit to see if you could get involved. That's willpower. So just like I'm going to leave you with that, you know, and you're not allowed to argue with it.

Andrea: I'm glad this is being recorded. I'll just have you saying that every day and until the narrative changes in my brain. So don't feel weird, but I am going to listen to your voice and see your face every day for the rest of my life.

Andrea's "Aha!" moment

Laura: So let's talk about what led you to get diagnosed.

Andrea: I spent 10 years in academia, so I was a professor and I was teaching and I was okay in the classroom and, you know, preparing for a lecture is a nice adrenaline kick as well because you got to have 40 slides to say in front of 200 people by this time so you're just going to get it done.

Performing, which I'm imagine is a thread in your story. Exactly. Exactly. And performing I also never put those pieces together that performing requires a lot of level of focus and there's the deadline at all of the stakes — the gun or the knife or the water balloon is to your head, I'm trying to think of an analogy that would get you going. The slip and slide is ready, I'm not sure.

But when I wasn't teaching, I still couldn't get it together to do research, which is a big part of how you have a career in academia.

The feeling of time blindness

Andrea: Summer break would come and professors would love summer break and I would think I would but then July 3rd would hit and I'd be lying face down on the ground doing nothing. And I was just very miserable and like I said, I loved the field, but I felt like my day-to-day was just torture.

And so I ultimately — this was sort of on the back end of COVID of lockdown in New York City — started working with a career coach. And it was the first time anyone had watched how I work. And finally she brought it up and she just said, "I wonder, has anyone ever mentioned the possibility of neurodivergence to you?"

I said, "Absolutely not. What are we talking about?" And this is what really stood out to me. She said, "It shouldn't be this hard for you." And I like — I'm like getting chills remembering it and I was like, "Oh, like it's not this hard for everyone?"

Like this hard every day to just feel like you're scaling a cliff to do basic things. I thought everyone was just stronger and better and more organized and more disciplined and smarter than I was. And she said, "It really should not be this hard."

And so she encouraged me to — to, you know, read about it a little bit, and I read about it, and I thought, you know, what an easy out that would be. You know, it almost felt — it felt like cheating to just say, "Oh, I just have ADHD."

So I was very resistant to the idea. And it wasn't until I read about time blindness that I thought, "Oh, wow. That is something that I've never noticed in myself," but I read the description and it was spot on — like you're late for everything, you think less time has passed than it has — like everything about that in particular.

Because that was something that I hadn't struggled with because I didn't have a name for it and I couldn't talk a — talk myself out of it in terms of willpower. It was just like a mental inability to feel the passage of time.

And so that was the one that made me kind of sit up and say, "I should go to a doctor and stop taking these online quizzes." Um, and by the way, you know, TikTok and Instagram since the moment I downloaded them in 2020 had been feeding me nothing but ADHD content.

And I thought, "Ugh, everyone has ADHD on the internet, ignore, ignore," but shout out to the algorithms because they nailed it as well.

Laura: Yeah, time blindness, coined by the expert Dr. Russell Barkley. It's not meant to be like negative or demeaning, it's just really it's about time perception and just as Andrea described, like just not having a clear sense of time and you're right, it is something that feels more unique than maybe struggling with focus, getting distracted, the things that everybody struggles with sometimes.

Andrea: Time blindness has that kind of like, "This is a real symptom I can wrap my — my brain around." That's exactly right. Many of the other symptoms of ADHD feel like they're on a continuum that everyone struggles with, like, "Oh, do you have trouble getting started on a task that's boring?"

But if most people are kind of a one or a two, I'm a — and ADHDers are a 90 out of 100. Whereas time blindness, it's not like everyone is a little time blind.

It's like, "Oh, I see my boyfriend and he has never once been surprised to discover what time it is." He just seems to know. It was something that didn't seem like I could willpower my way out of it.

Ahead of this podcast I thought, "Oh, she's going to figure out that I don't really have ADHD and I'm an impostor and I'm using it as a crutch because I really just can't get it together," but time blindness is the one that I anchor to. And I'm just like, "No, I do not experience the passage of time in a way that makes any sense."

Laura: Yeah, I'm either incredibly early to things or incredibly late to things is what I've found.

Andrea: I am a few minutes late to everything and it's on the heels of a mad sprint. The only thing I was ever able to do — I was like, "You cannot be late to the class you are teaching. That is such a problem." And so I did manage to, you know, if my class was at 3:15, to get it in my head that I had to be there at 3:00 or I was late.

Laura: Yeah, there's something about performance, the threat of being found out maybe by a group of people who look up to you, getting in trouble, like if the te — if the students report that you've been late, right? It's like as opposed to just for you, like, "I want to get to yoga on time because I like yoga."

A "mop of self-doubt"

Andrea: The more external the stakes and the more likely I am to be punished or ridiculed or thought less of in some way — like I live in fear of the students not liking me, thinking that I'm wrong or finding out that I'm stupid or that I'm — so I have a particularly paranoid relationship with teaching as compared to even a stand-up comedy show.

And I will be on time for those, but like I said, I'll cut it close because I'll know that like, "Okay, the show's at 8:00, I should be there by 7:45, if I roll in at — I know that if I'm there at 7:50 the only person that's going to be annoyed is the other comedians.

And it's like, 'Ugh, whatever.' The audience doesn't know that I wasn't there on time," right? So it's sort of like not only does the gun have to be at my head, like the town square has to be filled with people watching.

Now we're in a — it's a horrible analogy and I'm sorry for that. It's very vivid, but it's so extreme — like the amount of agony I have to be under to function.

It's interesting the way we place value on things and the way that that dictates how closely we cling to controlling our symptoms. Like, why is it so much more important for me to be extremely present with my coworkers at work as opposed to with my children at home?

Laura: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of fear that comes in with having ADHD, fear of punishment to your point, and fear of failure, right? Where I'm like, "My — if I fail my family they'll forgive me." That might not be fair to them, but it is just kind of the reality.

Andrea: And that's one of the things I've been struggling with, you know, for the past year or so since I left the academy and I'm trying to do my own work. Which is mostly around communicating political science and data science with broader audiences.

But the problem is, is that that means that it's all on my deadline. And so it's the things that I absolutely say that I care about most, like building my own career and sharing research that I genuinely think would help the world — I cannot do it.

But if if some random person from a company says, "Hey, we're going to need you to come and interview the so-and-so for the such-and-such," I'm there. The scale does not map to what I deem important, it maps to what I deem frightening.

Laura: That's really well said. 

ADHD as a "superpower"

Laura: So the time blindness thing comes up and then you seek out an evaluation. True?

Andrea: Yes, yes. I — and and true to form, I went online and made an appointment with a primary care person for that day. And she said, "You know, I saw this appointment just showed up on my calendar," and I said, "Yeah, I decided I have to do it." And she was like, "Hmm," and wrote that down. Like, "Alright."

And she said, "What you're describing sounds like it's worth further exploration." And so I went the following week with my actual primary care provider and went through all the questionnaires and she said, "Well, why don't we try some medication? One clue if you have ADHD is if the medication helps you."

And so I took the medication. It helped me so much that I cried because it was so easy to send emails and reply to things. I remember sitting at my computer and being like, "Who else could I write to?" And I was like, "Is this how it feels for everyone? Like what a waste of a life."

And so it totally helped and that was about a year and a half ago. And yet to this day I still think in the back of my mind, "I wonder if I should get a second opinion even though I did go to two doctors."

"I wonder if this medication would help everybody. And I barely take the medication because it feels like cheating." I literally have it here and I know every day I wake up, I know it would help me, and every day I think, "No, I'm going to muscle through and get it done."

And I don't get it done. Deep down I know I have ADHD, but — but the noise of self-doubt is still very, very loud.

Laura: Yeah. I totally hear that.

Andrea: And I don't know why I feel this way about ADHD as opposed to, say, depression, which is a similar sort of spectrum and I'm not a professional or an expert. But in my — my understanding of it is sure, we all feel down sometimes, but depression is a truly debilitating disease that really ruins people's lives.

And I had no trouble accepting a depression diagnosis. And I have no doubt when it comes to ADHD diagnoses in anybody else. Not even a shred of a doubt.

But something about my own — maybe it's because it took so long to get the diagnosis and I'm just so used to the narrative in my head that I should be better than this. Or because I can get it together when all eyes are on me.

It's when they're not that it falls apart, and so it really — the temptation to conclude that it must just be a personal failing is strong.

Laura: No, I hear you. It is very slippery. It's so slippery. You described depression as a truly debilitating condition. Everything that you've said in this interview about ADHD describes a truly debilitating condition as well.

And we don't — I'm not here to say, like, "Everyone be afraid of an ADHD diagnosis because it's just so awful." That's not the point here. I think the point is you're a successful person, but the ADHD piece of it, that's not really what it's about.

Sometimes it is, but it's for you and for so many of us it's like, "I just don't believe myself." One of the first things you said when you came into the interview was that "I have no self-esteem." That's related to this.

My sense is that the world is very much designed for neurotypical people, and ADHD does seem to show up in ways that for many people willpower could really make a difference.

Andrea: Like, "Oh, just have a to-do list and prioritize it by urgency or importance and then you just do it." Because the signals from the world are so overwhelmingly — and the advice is so overwhelmingly "do a little bit each day."

I wasted a year doing a little bit each day when I was trying to write a book. It just didn't — and I haven't written the book. But a little bit each day is definitely not the way.

And so if you already have low self-esteem or are inclined to think, "I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm going to defer to external advice," and that advice and the incentives and the reward systems, whether it's in the corporate world or academia or any other world that you could be in, they reward neurotypical performance.

My best moments are when I reward myself. So for example, I'm very proud of the fact that I can hyperfocus. And it was only when that same coach said, "You know, I can't do that."

She said, "I can't sit for more than a few hours and get something done or my brain trails off." And it's like, "I could go for 15 hours straight," you know? Have some water and some coffee and I'm good. It's not the healthiest way to live, but it's — I like to think of it as a bit of a superpower.

And so when I allow myself to feel proud of the things that I can do that a neurotypical person maybe can't, that sort of allows me to have like a modicum of self-esteem on occasion. But it's just all the information is telling me that I'm a failure.

And then it requires convincing myself that I've ADHD and that's why I'm a failure. But because it's invisible, I can just gaslight myself into thinking no, I'm just a failure.

Laura: Yeah. And you're not a failure. I'm not trying to be an annoying cheerleader right now, but you're clearly not a failure. In fact, you've done really incredible things.

Andrea: No, it's welcome. I appreciate it, yeah.

Laura: Andrea, it's been really a pleasure to chat with you today. I'm so grateful that you came on the show.

Andrea: Well, thank you for having me and just the fact that you allowed me on the show is another tick in the box that suggests that perhaps indeed I do have ADHD.

Laura: You do. She does everyone, she does.

Andrea: Spoiler alert, I do. And I'm going to hang on to the willpower piece in particular. So thank you.

Laura: Thanks for listening today. As always, if you want to share your own aha! moment, email us at ADHDaha@Understood.org or send a message to our voicemail inbox. You'll find a link in the show notes along with resources and links to anything we mentioned in the episode.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"ADHD Aha!" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli. Say hi, Jessamine. Hi everyone. And edited by Alyssa Shea. Video is produced by Calvin Knie.

Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Richter. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

From Understood.org, our executive producers are Scott Koshiere and Jordan Davidson. And I'm your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.