Hi, I’m Andrea. Wife, mom of four, business owner, Jesus follower, and right now, a Health Science and Psychology student on top of all that. Yeah, I keep busy.
I was born in Brazil and moved to the U.S. as a preteen, which meant growing up straddling two cultures without fully realizing it. I didn’t understand just how different those cultural norms were until I moved out of my parents’ house at 20 and suddenly had to figure out on my own which parts of how I was raised were “just my family” and which parts were “just Brazilian,” and how much of it didn’t match the world around me.
The following year, everything came to a head. I was hospitalized for clinical depression, and it was there that I was also diagnosed with ADHD, at 21. But honestly, I was scared of that diagnosis. As a Christian, I’d heard the whispers, that ADHD is just an excuse, a label people hide behind instead of taking responsibility for their sin. So I buried it and spent over 20 years treating the depression and anxiety instead, trying to manage symptoms that never fully made sense on their own.
Turns out I had it backward. The ADHD wasn’t some side detail, and it definitely wasn’t an excuse. It was the root of everything else, tangled up with culture, faith, and identity in ways I’m still untangling.
Now I’m 44, and I’m finally doing the work of understanding what it actually looks like to live with ADHD as a woman of faith, a Brazilian immigrant, and someone who’s spent a lifetime adjusting to environments that weren’t built with her in mind. Faith, marriage, kids, running a business, going back to school, all of it. This is where I’m bringing together what I’m researching with what I’m actually living. If you’ve ever felt like the anxiety or the sadness didn’t quite add up on its own, or you’ve straddled two cultures, or worried your faith community would dismiss what you’re going through, I have a feeling you’re going to see yourself in a lot of this.
