Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to another ADHD women's well being Wisdom on your Sunday afternoon.

Hopefully you're listening to this relaxing or gardening or walking or doing something you enjoy.

And I'm sharing today an amazing guest.

I was so profoundly honored to be able to interview at the time a 102-year-old doctor.

Her name was Dr.

Gladys McCary and she wrote an amazing book which I loved, called the well Lived Life.

And I thought, I have to have this person on the podcast.

And I saw that there was definite neurodivergence there.

She talks about her dyslexia.

She talks about her difficulty in school, her need for being outside in nature, for adopting things in a different way, seeing things differently.

And she did.

She pioneered holistic medicine.

She was open minded when western medicine was shutting things down.

And her wisdom is just incredible.

And I wanted to share today a really fantastic episode so you can really tap into her wisdom and how she sees the world.

And I think after over 100 years of being on this planet, this is wisdom that we can all take.

So here is my conversation with Dr.

Gladys McGarry.

102 years.

What does that mean?

It just means to me that there has been one day after another after another after another all these years when I've been learning stuff and growing and understanding and beginning to really appreciate the fact that I'm alive and that it's that I'm the only one that can do what I'm doing.

It's my job to do the job that I came here to do and to share that with others.

And you tell the story that you were obviously held back in class and you felt, you know, stupid at the time that you, you were told that you couldn't move on and you had to stay in the same class and redo it again.

And you were diagnosed with dyslexia.

I mean, first of all, I didn't even know that at those, you know, those points for a girl to have that diagnosis.

How old were you when you actually did figure out it was dyslexia?

Oh, my.

I may have been in medical school, I don't know, because the way it was was that I was just stupid.

You know, the understanding was that I was a stupid girl in the class.

And all the other kids, you know, they thought I was stupid too.

And the teacher really did.

So I had to repeat first grade twice because I couldn't read the letters, wouldn't stay any place, the numbers were jump all over the place, and I didn't understand what was going on.

The blessed part of this whole thing is that that was my schooling.

But I had a home where it was completely different.

And the place where we lived, this was in the Himalayas, and the school was a thousand feet down from where we lived and a mile.

So every day I went up and down that walk.

But in the process of walking up to the place where we lived, I was able to somehow let the rest of this foolishness go, but climb up to where I was accepted.

People understood me.

My Aya, who is the, like, the nanny, total bundle of love.

She couldn't read, she couldn't write.

She had few teeth, this Indian woman.

Amazingly, to me, she was the epitome of love.

And she'd see me coming up the hill and she'd reach out her arm and she'd say.

She'd yell down to me as I'm coming in, Idaho.

Come here.

And so I would go over and tuck in under her shawl and stay there until I could let all that stuff go and become who I really was, feeling who I was.

So it was that juxtaposition of who are you and what are you?

And this kind of thing.

But that kind of scarring from being told you're that kind of stupid person is the kind of bruising to the psyche of people that is hidden and we don't really know.

Like gaslighting, right?

It's, it's.

It's there.

It colors your life from there on.

And I didn't accept that or understand that that was real in my life until much later.

So the actual diagnosing what I had came much, much later than what I really had.

In fact, when we started the American Holistic Medical association, there were 10 of us sitting around the table who had been really reaching for what it was that we thought was the heart of medicine.

And of the 10 of us, six of us were dyslexic.

I've come up with what I call the five L's.

I had to have some kind of structure in which to form, which I could, you know, extend the thinking that I was doing.

And so I came up with these five Ls.

The first is life.

If we don't have life, we don't have anything.

You know, it's like a seed in the pyramid.

It's there for 5,000 years, and it doesn't do anything until water and sunlight and caring from some place else is accepted by that seed.

The shell cracks and life starts.

It's had all the energy of the universe stuck within that shell until love activates it.

When love activates it, then it moves and grows and does what it can.

So love and life are integral to each other.

If we're going to live without love, we've got a real problem.

But if we live with life, life is.

Oh, it's a.

Wow.

The third, the second.

So those two go together.

Life and love are integral to each other.

The third one is laughter.

Laughter without love is.

You know, it's mean, it's cruel, it's really not nice.

But laughter with love is joy and happiness.

And the fourth is drudgery.

I mean, the fourth.

L is labor.

Labor without love is drudgery.

It's too many diapers.

I have to.

I gotta go to work.

This is too.

You know, it's dragging this load.

It's just too hard.

But labor with love is bliss.

It's why you do what you're doing.

It's why I do it.

It's why singers sing, why painters paint.

It's that inner life that is there that needs to be expressed.

It's reaching out.

It is bliss.

And the fifth one is listening.

Listening without love is empty sound.

You just don't get it, you know, it's just empty sound.

But listening with love is understanding.

But what is it for you?

Do you believe that has been your life force?

That has been that continual element to you that has kept you going for this long?

Well, I think you mentioned it earlier.

Gratitude.

Because I am so grateful.

I have no idea how come I've lived this long, but I'm grateful for it.

When my daughter and I were doing a lecture together one time, after the lecture, people did this a lot.

They came up and they were asking me what my secret was or something.

And I was trying to come up with something cute or funny or something, and I couldn't come up with anything.

But I got my daughter's elbow as she punched me.

And she says, oh, mom, you do so.

And you dwell in gratitude.

And I said, yes, that's right.

Because she was able to put it into words, which I had been kind of shuffling off.

It's the matter of understanding that we, each one of us have a voice that needs to be heard.

And if all the time I was deflecting my voice and saying, you know, well, Bill, it wasn't Dr.

Bill and Dr.

Gladys.

It was Bill and Gladys.

I was the end on.

And I accepted that.

Everybody accepted that.

Nobody questioned it.

But it was only after I found my own voice and began to claim what it was that I was saying that I began to really honor the fact that my voice was real.

And of course, this is what my book is about.

It's the reality of what I finally, after years of talking about it and working with it and claiming it and so on, finally being able to put it down so that I think it makes sense for other people too.

And because that was the intention, the title isn't A well Lived Life, which is My Life.

It's A well Lived life of the person who's reading it.

Yeah.

And how they're going to take this and use it.

So I hope you enjoyed listening to this shorter episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.

I've called it to the ADHD Women's well Being Wisdom because I believe there's so much wisdom in the guests that I have on and their insights.

So sometimes we just need that little bit of a reminder.

And I hope that has helped you today and look forward to seeing you back on the brand new episode on Thursday.

Have a good rest of your week.