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October 20, 2025
Kiersten Lyons spent most of her life being told she was too much. Too loud, too dramatic, too many feelings all at once. She was also told she wasn't enough. Not pretty enough, not the right fit, not what Hollywood was looking for. The dichotomy nearly broke her. But it also became the foundation of her story.
As a working actress in LA for over a decade, with recurring roles on Grey's Anatomy and Mad Men, Kiersten kept hearing the same feedback: "You're great, we just don't know what to do with you." So she created her own work, writing and starring in her award-winning one-woman show Crushed. It was supposed to become a TV series. Then the producer ghosted her.
At 42, while advocating for her son's ADHD evaluation, she finally got her own diagnosis and suddenly all those years of rejection, of being "too much" and "not enough," made sense. She understood why she could memorize all 50 states in under 20 seconds to impress boys (it didn't work), why she felt everything so intensely, and why masking had left her exhausted for decades.
Her debut memoir Crushed: The Boys That Never Liked Me Back opens with her fiancé confessing he didn't love her and had cheated at The Magic Castle while she was addressing their wedding invitations. Six months later, he won $100,000 on reality TV. Her life unraveled publicly, but the book isn't about revenge. It's about reclaiming yourself when everything falls apart.
In this conversation, Kiersten and Tracy explore pattern recognition, rejection sensitivity, and why so many creative women with ADHD end up in industries that require constant validation. They talk about the loneliness of being the eldest daughter who takes care of everyone, the grief of late diagnosis, and why acceptance, not positivity, is what allows us to heal.
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“My brain wasn’t running in circles on the outside. It was running in circles on the inside, with all the feelings running in circles too.”
- Kiersten Lyons
“Rejection sensitivity is real, and I chose a career that throws rejection at you every day.”
- Kiersten Lyons
“If we don’t figure out who we are, we end up living lives that aren’t ours.”
-- Kiersten Lyons
"I feel so seen. That's what the diagnosis gave me—I don't feel crazy anymore."
-- Kiersten Lyons
"I spent years letting people who didn’t even know who they were tell me who I was. That was a defining moment, realizing you don’t get a vote anymore."
- Kiersten Lyons
"You were worthy before you ever achieved anything, before a name, a song, a shoelace. Our value isn’t beauty or output. You are worthy right now."
-- Kiersten Lyons
"We have to sit in our grief to heal. ‘Good vibes only’ is BS. If we don’t move through it, our bodies store it."
-- Kiersten Lyons
- Kiersten grew up in a family where ADHD was "a running joke" but never formally diagnosed, with her mom having bipolar disorder and OCD, making it easy to overlook her own neurodivergence despite being high-achieving and eldest daughter.
- Her diagnosis came while advocating for her adopted son's ADHD evaluation, when the pediatric psychiatrist told her "you have raging ADHD" after watching her describe her struggles, leading her to pursue formal diagnosis at age 42.
- The doctor noted she had built so many workarounds and masked so effectively that she didn't score typically on assessments, saying "you're fascinating because you don't score in a lot of these ways, but the more we uncover and peel back those layers, you're very ADHD."
- Kiersten was quintessentially eldest daughter and parentified, taking care of everyone else while receiving constant feedback she talked too much—every report card said the same thing—and was simultaneously told she was "too much" and "not enough."
- She excelled at memorizing and performing (reciting all 50 states alphabetically in under 20 seconds by fifth grade) but struggled socially, with pattern recognition making her seem annoying when she'd predict outcomes others couldn't see yet.
- Her rejection sensitivity went unrecognized for decades, making her choice to become an actress particularly ironic as her first therapist noted, though she believed fame would finally make her "enough" and safe from the bullying she experienced.
[00:50:00 - 01:03:33] From Heartbreak to Memoir: Writing Crushed
- After her fiancé admitted he didn't love her while she tied wedding invitation bows—revealing he'd cheated the night after proposing—Kiersten's life unraveled publicly, especially when he won $100,000 on reality TV while she worked three jobs.
- She signed her book deal exactly 15 years to the day he broke her heart, after a viral TikTok about teenage girls' persistent sadness led her to realize she needed to write the book to tell others "you're not alone and you're going to be okay."
- Working with Regalo Press on the memoir became the most collaborative creative experience she'd ever had, with her 18-year-old babysitter creating the MASH game illustration for the cover, representing how life never turns out like the "perfect life" we plan as kids.
ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem.
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