This week, Jill explores the both/and of loving and hating simultaneously - for the Green Bay Packers and for someone she's never met but fell in love with anyway. She talks about emotion dysregulation, why she can't just 'stop watching' or 'walk away,' and what it means to hold two impossible feelings at once while hoping 'what if they come back?' Love is foundational. Hate is valid. Both are present. That's survival.

This week, Jill shares what happened when she bravely told someone about the podcast - and got crickets. The rejection and isolation brought up a blog post she wrote years ago about being Autistic and neurodivergent in a neurotypical world, feeling misunderstood, and masking through 'cute weird' vs 'scary weird.' She explores the both/and of understanding your brain works differently while social rejection still hurts the same.

In this episode, Jill talks about confidence in failure, her lifelong struggle to write her story, and how a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis helped her understand why.

Now, she's finally making progress with an unlikely assistant: AI. She reflects on what it means to do something imperfectly and keep going anyway - the both/and of survival.

In this pilot episode, Jill introduces herself and the Both/And podcast. She shares her story - living with autism, ADHD, C-PTSD, and chronic emotional pain - and explains why she's creating a survival podcast for people who are tired of toxic positivity and recovery culture.

You'll learn about the both/and framework from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), why choosing both/and over either/or is a daily battle for Jill, and what to expect from future episodes: weekly reflections on surviving when maybe this is as good as it gets.

Topics covered: mental health, neurodivergence, autism, ADHD, complex trauma, chronic pain, survival (not recovery), DBT skills, and accepting life as it is.

This podcast is for anyone who feels like they've tried everything, who's exhausted by being told to just try harder, and who needs to know someone else is still here too.