About Misty
Hi, I’m Misty.
ADHD coach. Licensed clinical social worker. Late-diagnosed adult with ADHD. First in my family to go to college. Mom of two.
And someone who knows firsthand what it costs to spend a lifetime trying to be someone you were never meant to be.
My story
The real version. Not the polished one.
I grew up in low-income neighborhoods of Rhode Island, the first in my family to go to college. Hope was my superpower from the very beginning, even when my circumstances gave me every reason to abandon it. I could always imagine something better. Something more possible. Something beyond what I could see with my eyes.
That imaginative power, and the support of people who saw something in me along the way, carried me into community work as a teenager. Into co-founding youth organizations. Into racial justice organizing. Into fighting for families facing displacement and building something better alongside my community. And eventually, after a long, nonlinear, beautiful and brutal journey, into becoming a therapist.
But here’s the part that took me the longest to understand: I was pouring into everything around me while quietly leaving myself out.
I didn’t have language for my ADHD yet. I didn’t understand why I could show up so powerfully for the world and still feel like I was failing myself. Why I could hold so much and still feel so depleted, so scattered, so far from the life I actually wanted.
It took fourteen years to finish my undergraduate degree at Brown University. Two academic dismissals. Becoming a single mother. Years of struggling without knowing why everything felt so much harder than it seemed to for everyone else.
And then, a late ADHD diagnosis. And finally… language for what I had been living my whole life.
Not broken. Just different. Just undiagnosed.
The shift
What changed everything.
The diagnosis gave me clarity. But the real shift came later, slowly, and then all at once.
It came when I finished graduate school — the first time I finished anything on time — as a single mother of two young children, and realized something had fundamentally changed in how I was approaching my life and my brain.
It came when I opened my therapy practice and built it around my values, my authentic gifts, and my actual way of working, and watched how much more effective and alive I became when I stopped trying to fit a mold.
It came when I took my first solo trip through Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Cape Verde — five weeks of moving at my own pace, unfolding parts of myself that usually live in the background, standing on Cape Verdean soil knowing my grandfather was born there, coming face to face with history that is part of my story.
And sitting on a train to Madrid on my last day, packing up to come home, I felt something unexpected: grief. Because I had finally felt what it was like to be more fully myself. And I didn’t want to go back to the version of life where I wasn’t.
I made a decision on that train: I never want to go back to living a life where I am not important to myself.
That decision is why Misty Wilson LLC exists.
Why this work
This work is personal. And professional. And those two things are inseparable.
As a therapist I spent years watching brilliant, creative, deeply feeling people with ADHD struggle. Not because something was wrong with them, but because they had internalized messages about themselves that caused them to dim their light, to shrink, to bend themselves into shapes that didn’t fit — trying to belong in systems and structures that were never designed to hold all of who they are.
I watched them work twice as hard as everyone around them and still feel like they were failing. I watched them mask, apologize, and perform competence while quietly falling apart. I watched them carry shame about their brains that had no business being there.
And I knew that individual therapy, as powerful as it is, could only go so far.
They needed community. They needed a framework rooted in liberation rather than deficit. They needed someone who understood the specific intersection of ADHD, neurodiversity, race, class, gender, and identity. Someone who understood the impact of systemic oppression on the lives and self-perception of people who have been told, in a hundred different ways, that who they are is not quite right.
Someone who had lived it. Not just studied it.
That’s what I’m building here. Not a space that tells you how to be more productive. A space where people with ADHD are seen fully, supported deeply, and empowered to stop dimming their light and start living as the whole, extraordinary human beings they have always been.
Who I serve
I built this for folks like us.
My work is specifically rooted in serving adults and young adults with ADHD, especially those from marginalized and underrepresented communities. Black, brown, queer, first-generation, working class — people whose ADHD went undetected longest, whose struggles were most often misattributed to character rather than neurology, and who deserve support spaces that understand their full experience.
I also serve college students with ADHD who are navigating one of the most demanding transitions of their lives, often without the tools, the community, or the self-knowledge they need to thrive.
And I serve late-diagnosed adults who got the diagnosis and then asked the harder question: “So now what?” The rebuilding. The unlearning. The coming home to yourself with new eyes. That’s the work I love most.
Credentials
The professional picture.
Misty Wilson, LCSW-C — Licensed Clinical Social Worker, State of Maryland
- B.A., Africana StudiesBrown University
- Master of Social WorkClinical Behavioral Health, University of Maryland Baltimore
- ADHD Certified Clinical Services Provider (ADHD-CCSP)
- Trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing)
- Trained in Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT)
- Experienced in Psychodynamic Therapy & CBT
- 8+ years supporting adults and young adults with ADHD in clinical and coaching settings
- 20+ years of community and social justice work
- Founder, Umoja Healing Therapy Services — a virtual therapy practice serving adults in Maryland and Virginia
Please note: Misty Wilson LLC is a coaching, education, and wellness company, separate from Umoja Healing Therapy Services. Coaching is not therapy and is not a substitute for mental health treatment.
One more thing
Something I want you to know.
I am not a researcher. I am not an ADHD scholar. I don’t position myself as an expert who has all the answers from a distance.
What I am is a cisgender Black woman who has lived this — the late diagnosis, the shame, the exhaustion, the grief, and the profound relief and possibility that comes when you finally stop fighting your brain and start working with it.
I bring eight years of clinical experience, a liberation-centered framework rooted in my Africana Studies background and 20 years of community and social justice work, and a genuine, deep care for the people I have the privilege of working alongside.
I show up as myself. I expect nothing less from the people I work with. And I believe with everything in me that when people with ADHD — especially those who have been most marginalized — stop abandoning themselves and start becoming who they truly are, the world becomes a better, more just, more beautiful place.
That is the heart of the work I am building within this business. And I am so glad you found your way here.
You get to be you.
With love, Misty
Ready to take the next step?