Loving Your Queer ADHD Brain: A Strengths-Based Approach to Neurodivergent Pride with Andréa Noel

Knowing you arrived late is one thing. Deciding what to do with that arrival is another.

This session picks up where recognition leaves off. Drawing on her journey as a queer, AuDHD, Afro-Caribbean American woman — including three graduate degrees, two late diagnoses, and a lifetime of high-functioning masking — speaker and Licensed Master Social Worker Andréa A. Noel offers a testimony of hope rooted in clinical expertise and lived experience.

The session argues that queer adults with ADHD have already done some of the most sophisticated identity-reclamation work and that this work has a transferable structure. Moving from shame to pride follows four movements: interior work, language, safe community, and embodied living. Most people navigate the first three, but the fourth rarely gets named.

Embodied living is the shift from saying “I told people” to saying “I now orient my life around this truth.” It is what comes after the disclosure and where real freedom lives.

Someone who already knows what it feels like to let queer identity reshape their daily life understands what this work demands. They just need permission to do it again with their ADHD brain in tow.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify how queer identity and ADHD-related shame compound across multiple marginalized identities and why this compounding requires a specific, active response, not just recognition
• Apply the four movements of identity reclamation — interior work, language, safe community, and embodied living — as a transferable framework for neurodivergent self-acceptance
• Leave with four concrete practices for beginning or deepening the work of loving your ADHD brain as a queer adult — including the often-unnamed fourth movement, letting neurodivergent identity inform how you live