For most of his life, the man the world knows as Questlove filed himself under one label: the oddball. Now, sitting across from Michelle Obama, the Oscar winner revealed he has started looking at that story through a very different lens.
On IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson was asked about his early obsession with music. Before answering, he paused. “This is the first time I’m going to tell this story from the perspective of… quasi-disclosure,” he said. “I decided to get tested for autism, ADHD like a year and a half ago.”
He did not say what the testing found. Instead, he described how it reframed his childhood. For years, Thompson said, he had cast himself “as like the outcast or the black sheep or the weirdo” of his family. His mother, he explained, told him his aunt noticed that as a baby he “was transfixed by things that rotate in a circle,” calmed instantly by a spinning light over his bed. “I guess you could say it’s like a stimmy or that sort of thing,” he said, adding that he would watch records turn on the turntable even before the music started.
Getting tested, he added, is something “I highly recommend to a lot of us.”
The disclosure came during a conversation in which the Roots drummer, Tonight Show musical director and filmmaker called this year “probably the most transformative year of my entire life.” Thompson said he once used curiosity as an excuse for overwork, “not knowing that I’m being avoidant of life.”
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The list was long. Before 2019, he said, he was in the food world and running a publishing imprint, a podcast, a merch line, DJ gigs, The Roots, The Tonight Show, film directing and scoring. “Like I legit had 13 jobs,” he said. He cut back to six after the pandemic, then crept back up after Summer of Soul won the Oscar for best documentary feature.
Now he is practicing a new word. “I’ve been implementing the word no,” Thompson said, adding that he is “getting over the whole, I have to people please” habit.
The hardest part, he admitted, is letting himself enjoy success. Even before his name was called at the Academy Awards, he said, he was mentally tallying who would not be happy for him. Good news still triggers the same reflex. “I’ll be like, oh great, that’s cool. But I will have a panic attack three seconds later,” he added.
His recent documentaries, including Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), have explored the toll fame can take on great artists. On IMO, he turned that lens on himself.
“Just allowing myself in the space to feel is a hard thing to do,” Thompson said. “But I’m gonna get there.”
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