Sonia Gray and her daughter, Inez, are still learning to navigate their way through the world as a neurodivergent family. Photo / Michael Craig
Having ADHD has meant a lifetime of challenges for Sonia Gray and her daughter Inez. Now, she tells Joanna Wane, they’re celebrating the wins
Sonia Gray was in Wellington to record the new series of her neurodiverenge podcast, No Such Thing as Normal, when a fire alarm started blaring at the hotel where she was staying. For the young woman who’d arrived a few minutes earlier to share her story, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Touch, smells, noise and light are all really hard for her, so it was a disaster,” says Gray, who offered to call off the interview. “But she was determined to persevere.” They ended up talking for an hour and a half.
An “incredibly smart” 22-year-old who’s been recruited for the GovTechTalent graduate programme, Amber-Rose has multiple sensory sensitivities that mean she feels the world with an intensity most of us can’t imagine, Gray explains.
By the time all the evacuated guests were allowed back into the hotel, she was hyperventilating. You can hear her voice shaking in the powerful opening episode of the podcast’s second series, which goes live on Saturday
The fire alarm going off was “horrendous”, Amber-Rose tells Gray, but a reality of her everyday life. “It was definitely more intense than it normally is, but it’s exactly the same sensory processing problems I have daily,” she says. “All day, every day.”
Later, Gray emailed Amber-Rose to apologise if she’d handled the situation badly.
“I talked a lot when I was trying to calm her down because that’s just what I do, and it’s what I need, but when you’re having a meltdown, it’s probably the worst thing for them.
“I asked her if it’s okay when someone does the wrong thing but their intent is good. She said that was an interesting question because she always assumes people have good intentions. And I think that’s why she’s such a good advocate [for the neurodivergent community] because she truly sees all the sides.”
It’s a tribute to Gray’s natural warmth and empathy that she’s able to draw out what are often uncomfortable and sometimes traumatic stories from the people she talks with. But there’s a lot of laughter, too, as she compares quirks with her guests (a discomfort with supermarket shopping; one man’s fascination with industrial chimneys versus her deep obsession with shoes).
If there’s one thing the actor, broadcaster and long-time Lotto presenter has learned since both she and her daughter, Inez, were diagnosed with ADHD, it’s that neurodivergence truly is a spectrum.
An estimated one in five New Zealanders is classed as neurodivergent, a label that covers conditions such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia and giftedness.
Among the more high-profile figures appearing in this series of her NZ Herald podcast are musician Anika Moa, who was diagnosed with ADHD early on in the Covid pandemic, and Olympic rower Eric Murray, whose son Zac has non-verbal autism.
Gray says she saw a lot of similarities in Amber-Rose to how Inez experiences the world. Both are “super-tasters” who feel overwhelmed by the sensations triggered by food. Even at 22, Amber-Rose’s three staples are chicken nuggets, plain pasta and sweetcorn.
When Inez was younger, she ate very little for a long time, too. “You have no idea what’s going on and it’s terrifying,” says Gray, who couldn’t work out why chicken nuggets seem to be the one thing even food-avoidant kids will eat.
Amber-Rose told her nuggets are a “safe” food because they always taste the same. “She said, ‘I like strawberries, but you never know what you’ll get with a strawberry when you bite into it.’ And the anxiety around that is so great. So now she’s helped me understand my own daughter.
“That’s the challenge in what I’m trying to do – finding people who can articulate their experiences and help get society on board so that someone with a child who’s only eating four or five foods can give this resource to a grandparent, for example, and say, ‘This is not a picky eater; their body is feeling a threat.’ That’s the level it’s at.”
Gray’s frank and deeply personal documentary Kids Wired Differently opened the door on families in turmoil when it screened on TVNZ 18 months ago. In the days that followed, thousands of emails poured in from other parents struggling to support their neurodivergent children.
Inez, who’s 15 and has a twin sister Thandie, has been diagnosed with a range of neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). She’s also gifted.
When she was at primary school, Inez found her environment so difficult to process that she often lashed out violently. Later, she developed such extreme OCD that she’d spend hours or even days trying to line things up in her room, not eating or sleeping until she felt they were arranged perfectly.
This year, though, she’s turned a corner. Her school attendance has skyrocketed and she came top in Year 11 maths for her mid-term exam. Capable of mastering high-level concepts, she can struggle with the basics and had been advised to drop maths the previous year after writing nothing more than her name at the top of the paper.
“I was so proud of her because she just finally got a win,” says Gray. “The sun came out that day. Last year, she was so unhappy. And, you know, when you have a really unhappy child, you cannot function as a parent.
“One thing I wish I’d known is how much your anxiety plays into theirs. They can feel it, especially those really sensitive kids. It’s not easy, but thinking about what you can do to emotionally regulate and stay low, even when they go high, was a big turning point for us.”
Gray, who’s had her own battles with anxiety and depression, was diagnosed with ADHD after a psychologist working with Inez suggested she and her husband, Simon, get tested. Her mother told her it explained Gray’s entire childhood.
“My big thing was that I couldn’t trust my brain, so I had to be hypervigilant and would get into absolute panics if things weren’t exactly right,” says Gray, who knew from an early age that there was something different about her.
Medication has helped calm the chaos in her mind – “not completely, but just enough so it’s not 15 voices all speaking at the time and at the same volume”.
She’s now exploring new research into psychedelic microdosing as an alternative treatment for conditions ranging from ADHD to drug-resistant depression, as part of a documentary series slated to screen on Sky early next year.
It’s an incredibly busy time for Gray, who’s the host of a new TVNZ series, My Family Mystery, which premieres on July 21.
In the first episode, she hunts down the provenance of a possibly stolen artwork and uncovers the truth about a young man’s great-grandfather, said to have been a “mercy killer” in the British merchant navy (responsible for dispatching people on board where required) before assuming a false identity and jumping ship in Reefton.
The second series of No Such Thing as Normal will run for 13 weekly episodes. To those who don’t believe ADHD is real or that the explosion in diagnoses suggests it’s simply a fashionable label, Gray likens it to the apparent rise in people who are left-handed.
Lefties have always been around, she says, but remained invisible until a few decades ago because they didn’t fit the societal norm. Adult women with ADHD, who often present without the more stereotypical “hyperactive” symptoms, are still particularly at risk of being underdiagnosed.
There’s no question ADHD has made Gray’s life hard, from her sensitivity to rejection to the psychological overload. But she also thinks it’s the best of her: her drive, her empathy, her strong sense of justice, her ability to operate on instinct with almost a sixth sense about the right thing to do.
“It’s not a disorder, it’s a neurodevelopmental difference that I believe has a really important role to play in the world,” she says. “I love it now. And I wouldn’t take it away because although so many things are really difficult for me, you’d take away the good things, too.
“All neurodivergent people from a really early age have been told explicitly or implicitly that the way we are in the world is wrong and a whole lot of baggage comes through that.
“So it takes a while to unmask and say the way I am might not be okay for everyone, or you might find me too much or whatever, but I’ll be able to offer more and be happier if I can be as much of me as possible.”
No Such Thing As Normal is available iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The new season premieres on Saturday July 6.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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