Becoming DBA Kevlar: Roadblocks, Perfectionism, and Technical Orienteering with Kellyn Gorman (1/3)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

What if your strategy at work was to take on the problems no one else will? For Kellyn Gorman, this is a strategy that suits the way she works and learns best. Kellyn is a multi-platform database professional with 25 years of experience in our industry, and she’s also known as DBAKevlar.
This week in episode 320 you’ll hear what it was like to grow up in a perfectionist home as a child with autism and ADHD, the health challenge that forced Kellyn to start over professionally after losing 9 years of memories, and how she went from working at a shoe store to becoming a database administrator. We talk through ways to mitigate perfectionist tendencies by accepting work quality that’s good enough, being kind to yourself, and time calibration.
Original Recording Date: 02-21-2025
Topics – Meet Kellyn Gorman, A Perfectionist Environment, Hitting a Roadblock, Pursuing Unexplored Areas to Remove Barriers, Reaching Good Enough by Tuning for Time, Strengths and Weaknesses in Neurodiversity, No Fear in Asking for Help or Giving Help to Others
2:17 – Meet Kellyn Gorman
* Kellyn Gorman is a database professional who has worked in the technology space for 25 years. Kellyn’s focus has been heavily on Oracle, but she also has experience with SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and much more. To sum it up, Kellyn excels in multi-platform database administration.
* Should we have written our questions for this episode as database queries?
3:25 – A Perfectionist Environment
* Kellyn is the oldest of 3 children and has perfectionist parents.
* Kellyn is autistic and has ADHD. This is often called AuDHD. See Kellyn’s blog post on the strengths of ADHD/AuDHD.
* Listen to some of the challenges from Kellyn’s childhood.
* “So, this perfectionism was always placed upon me to do so much more because I was an intelligent child. But you would get me into most school environments that have a lot of structure…and my brain was like 25 McDonald’s drive-throughs all taking orders at the same time…. And that can perpetuate this idea that you are really failure instead of innovative and kind of doing things very differently than what is that structured expectation of what is fitting inside the box. I did not fit inside the box.” – Kellyn Gorman
* Kellyn started to get the feeling of not living up to expectations.
* Kellyn speaks to having an extreme awareness and being able to recognize patterns. She saw the need to structure her own box, which made a huge difference in what being a perfectionist meant.
* At around age 15, Kellyn told her parents she planned to move far away (and she eventually did to escape what was expected of her).
* Kellyn’s mother had specific plans and ideas for what success looked like for Kellyn as well as her younger sister.
* “You comprehend that idea of what your parents may have and their ideas for you and what they think is successful is very different than what you might have decided. By the time I hit about 21 / 22, I was on my own idea and learning how to be good to myself, learning how to do things differently.” – Kellyn Gorman, on the mismatch between her parents’ definition of success and her own definition of it
7:32 – Hitting a Roadblock
* “I ended up coming to I guess you’d say a complete roadblock in life because that perfectionism was constantly weighing on me even though I was very aware that it wasn’t the right thing for me. I ended up having a medical crisis where I ended up having 5 strokes between 21 and 26. I had to re-learn how to do everything…. I lost nine years of memories. I lost 50% of my visual field. I had to re-learn how to balance a checkbook, how to drive…it was huge.