During a recent podcast recording, I asked my good friend and colleague Flo LaBrado about her perceptions of me while we worked together years ago. Flo and I shared a very similar career trajectory at the same big company and worked closely together in different capacities through the years. At one point we shared a tight cubicle in our early days in Quality Assurance, then I later followed her to a production support function where urgency was the service and problem solving and communications drove the value. We both earned leadership spots in that organization, being entrusted as role models (and managers) of others. So it was interesting to get her take on how at least one person I worked closely with interpreted my unconscious attempts at masking my ADHD.
We had a great discussion (see episode 2), where she recalled seeing me as surprisingly quick to proactively recognize and solve problems, connecting dots others hadn’t discovered yet, but also a little arrogant. Her word was gentler. Mine is a little more accurate and truthful.
Here’s what I’ve since figured out about that arrogance, though, and it isn’t a defense so much as a correction: it was a projection based on a neurodivergence, not a descriptor of how I felt. What people were reading as “I am smarter than you” was closer to “please look at the work and not at me.” I was certain out loud about the technical thing because certainty is a fence, and behind the fence was a person improvising most of the rest of it. Turns out you can broadcast at roughly 30% louder than you feel, and people will (fairly) grade you on the volume.
Nothing Flo said was really a surprise to me. I had been told before that I needed to tone down the arrogance and be more inclusive and supportive of others. That was always painful feedback, because at the core of who I am and how I see myself is someone rooted in the service of others. I pretended to understand what they meant and did my best to comply without ever actually understanding the root cause of the perception. All I knew was that the image I was putting out had to change.
So the image changed, and the perceptions went away.
That sentence is the whole problem, by the way. It worked and the root of it was not discovered for decades. I constrained my natural self to fit some mould others expected, and the feedback stopped, and everybody including me filed it under “coachable, took the note, moved on.” Scrutiny invited criticism, which invited rejection, which invited doubt. And I couldn’t afford doubt about my ability to influence others if I was going to keep learning new things and securing the next promotion, staying on track to maintain as much autonomy as possible to satisfy my brain’s spiciness.
Only recently have I started connecting some more dots of my own- about myself.
I share all of this not to impress you or embarrass myself. Rather, I’m trying to show what the work life of a twice-exceptional person can look like. Twice exceptional (also known as 2e) people are those with twice the spiciness in their brains, such as gifted, plus some other neurodivergence, like ADHD. (Exceptional here means exception from normal, not amazing. I’d rather not earn the arrogance label all over again in my own writing.) I was a precocious, “gifted” kid always on the cusp of being forced into those special classes with the smart kids, but never quite “mature enough.” At one point they tried to move me up a grade so the older kids could force some maturity into me. I’m still not sure how that was supposed to work. Behavioral science in the 1980’s, eh? But I did do the whole International Baccalaureate thing- until I had my first brush with burnout, got bored with school in general and dropped out altogether. I opted to get a GED at 17 and started working full time. So my rise through the ranks at the big company, coming from that background, was something I was very proud of and not something I walked away from very easily but was something I had to do once the burnout consumed me. My very best year was also my very worst, and it took me a long time to fully realize why.
The difficult thing about being 2e is that the gifted part arms you with enough intelligence, skill, or raw processing to mask the other part. Sharp intelligence lets a kid or an adult compensate for a learning disability or an organizational problem. A high-achieving professional can look completely put together to their peers while trying twice as hard for the same result. What looks planned and controlled from the outside can be bubblegum, duct tape and a whole lot of improvisation. In my case, I always felt like I was drifting through life, as if I was just accidentally falling into success. Some 2e people can be charming and earn trust and authority through their ability to think critically and process information almost like a supercomputer. By being friendly, approachable, and a reliable source of helpful information, they can be disarming and hide the chaos underneath it all. Growing up exceptionally different, they develop a heightened sense of empathy, which can help a 2e steer a situation so the focus lands on their strengths and the neurodivergence stays out of frame. I became very good at taking on other people’s problems and not focusing on my own. I didn’t even realize I had a problem, let alone a storm brewing. And thus, by holding up the world with one hand while fighting off the distractions and executive function issues with the other, the full picture of their 2e reality is not readily apparent.
It hides pretty well, too. Sometimes even from the 2e person. Right up until they run out of ways to keep compensating.
Ambition vs Survival
What some saw as me being ambitious I just felt was me trying to keep my head above water; I needed to keep things interesting and moving along. I averaged a promotion or job change about every 2.5 years. I was able to use my ability to learn quickly to master a role, or at least master the technical and hard skills for the role, and become an authority on the subject matter fairly fast. That quick learning was part of the disguise.
From the outside that pattern looked like a career ladder. From the inside it was closer to a shark thing… keep moving or something bad happens. The 2.5 year cycle wasn’t strategy, it was the interval between mastering a role and the role going quiet on me. Once the novelty burned off and the hard skills were locked in, the job stopped generating its own fuel, and I’d start hunting for the next thing before I could have told you why.
The Need For Autonomy vs Presence
I’ve been called a lot of things in performance reviews, and the one that kept resurfacing in different costumes had almost nothing to do with the quality of the work. It was some version of “needs to be more visible,” or “isn’t always where he’s expected to be,” or my personal favorite, “availability concerns.” Which was true. I just heard it differently than it was meant.
Here’s the part that took me twenty years to see… I wasn’t rebelling against a schedule or hiding from the work. Rebellion implies you’re pushing against something for the pleasure of the push. I was negotiating for the only working conditions where I could actually deliver. Autonomy over my own hours wasn’t a perk I wanted, it was an accommodation I was requesting without knowing it had a name.
The tell was always the asymmetry. I have never once had a good idea in a conference room at 9am. I have had several in a parking lot, one in the shower, and an alarming number at 1am on a Sunday, which is also where a fair amount of my actual output came from. Give me the same problem in a mandatory 8:30 sync with a status template and watch it sit there. Same work, same difficulty, same me. The only variable was whether someone else’s clock was on it. (Interest-based nervous system is the clinical-ish term. “Availability concerns” is how it shows up in your file.)
And presence is such a seductive proxy, because it’s the one thing that’s trivially easy to measure. Butts in seats, calendars that look full, green dots in Teams. I could produce strong results, but I struggled with being the constant presence and ambassador that the job required, and organizations grade on both. A person can be physically present and mentally three states away, and a person can be nowhere near the building and two days ahead of schedule, and only one of those shows up on a badge reader.
Which is why schedule policing, for a lot of us, isn’t merely irritating. It’s disabling. It removes the one lever holding the whole compensating apparatus together, and because the apparatus is invisible, all anyone sees is a high performer who mysteriously went sideways when the new attendance policy landed.
The Need to Influence and Be Seen as an Authority vs. Fitting In
Becoming the expert was never really about the title. It was armor.
If you’re the person who knows the thing, several very expensive social problems solve themselves at once. People come to you, so you don’t have to figure out how to enter a conversation. Your questions read as rigor instead of confusion. Your intensity reads as passion instead of just being “a lot.” You get graded on output rather than presence, which is enormously convenient when presence is the part you’re winging.
Expertise buys you a permission slip to be weird.
And underneath that sits the doubt thing. If I was certain about the technical matter, nobody had a reason to poke at anything else. Being the authority meant scrutiny landed on the work instead of on me, and the work could take it. By being the expert on the facts, I could hide my weirdness a little more.
Some Other Misconceptions and Confusions
An incomplete list of things that got read one way and meant another:
- “You’re so organized.” I’m not. I’ve built an elaborate exoskeleton of lists, reminders, naming conventions, and automations because the alternative is losing things I care about. The systems aren’t evidence of executive function, they’re a prosthetic for the lack of it. Take them away for a week and you’d get a very different review. I was lucky that I grew up in a large corporation with the tools and systems that I could lean in. I learned this the hard way when I left and went to work for a much smaller company without the massive corporate framework. Culture shock was the least of my problems.. I had to adapt to a new way of keeping myself “organized.”
- “You work so well under pressure.” I work only under pressure, which is a different sentence entirely. What looked like grace in a crisis was a nervous system that finally had enough signal to engage. Production support was, in hindsight, an accidental accommodation… urgency was the service, and urgency was what switched my brain on.
- “You’re such a good listener.” Sometimes. I do really care about people and what they are going through. But a lot of what read as attentiveness was hypervigilance, scanning your face for the moment I lost you so I could course-correct, or guide the conversation back to repeat something so that I could turn up the volume on your voice track and turn down the volume on the track wondering what I was going to have for lunch while also wondering what you were really trying to say.
- “If you can do that, why can’t you do this?” This is the 2e question, and it’s the one that does the most damage. I could architect a process across three platforms and then fail to submit an expense report for 2 months. The gap between the ceiling and the floor is basically the whole diagnosis, and to everyone watching it just looks like selective effort. Which reads as character. Which is why so many of us grow up believing the problem is that we’re lazy, or that we’re faking the competent part, or both on alternating days and twice on Tuesdays.
- “You’re too sensitive about feedback.” Also true, and also not the whole story. A correction in a meeting could put me somewhere physically unpleasant for two days while I performed unbothered. Rejection sensitivity rarely shows up on the outside as sensitivity; it shows up as over-preparing, over-explaining, or going quiet in a way people find hard to read. But you can’t read too much into a neurodivergent person going quiet, because there are many reasons that could be at play- some good and some not so good.
- “You always want the next thing.” Boredom after mastery isn’t hunger. It’s withdrawal. Once the original thing is settled it is done.
- “You’re a perfectionist.” I’m a person who learned that scrutiny invites criticism, so the only safe move is handing over work with no seams in it. Not the same motive, even if it produces the same spreadsheet or org structure.
And then the one nobody says out loud, the one you say to yourself at 11pm: how did I get here? They’re all going to find out I’m a fraud!
Paying the Piper
Here’s the mechanism, as best I understand it now.
Compensation is not free and it is not renewable. Every one of those workarounds- the exoskeleton of systems, the volume, the expertise-as-armor, the hypervigilant read of the room- runs on the gifted part of the brain. The gifted part is essentially funding coverage for the ADHD part, and it does this quietly, in the background, all day, forever. What makes it so hard to catch is that the ledger only shows outcomes, and the outcomes are fine. Better than fine. Nobody intervenes on a person whose numbers are good and who seems to have their life together. So the loan keeps growing and the only one who can see the balance is you, if you’re even aware, and you’ve been trained since roughly the third grade not to mention it.
For me the bill arrived in the form of a promotion.
The senior leadership role had two halves, and they were exactly the two halves designed to break a 2e. The first half required steady, reliable, unglamorous results in an area I’d already mastered and was frankly bored with. No novelty, no urgency, nothing to switch the brain on, just sustained executive function applied to a solved problem, which is the single most expensive thing you can ask of a brain like mine. I was a letdown to the internal clients that I served because they knew me as this engaged advocate and I was not serving them that with the same enthusiasm as before. The second half required learning an entirely new domain, which is normally the thing I’m best at in the world, except now I had to do it at a level of visibility where being visibly a beginner was not on the menu.
And that’s the trap, because the two strategies that had carried me for twenty years were both unavailable at once. I couldn’t disappear for three weeks and re-emerge as the authority, because at that level you don’t get to be invisible. I couldn’t lean on autonomy, because seniority means you’re accountable to more people, not fewer. I couldn’t fall back on being the expert in the room, because in half the room I was the newest person there, and several of them reported to me. The armor came off and the fuel ran out in the same quarter, and both halves of the job were drawing on the same battery.
The really cruel part is that 2e burnout doesn’t look like burnout. It doesn’t announce itself. It looks like a formerly sharp person becoming inconsistent. It looks like disengagement, or attitude, or “he’s checked out.” It looks, to the organization and eventually to you, like a character problem. And the diagnosis you’d need in order to understand what’s happening is one you have to go find using the exact faculties that are currently offline.
I sincerely loved my job, and I was very good at it until the burnout hit. I did not have the tools, awareness, or knowledge to handle my situation any better. That’s most of why I’m writing any of this down. Not because I’ve got it solved, but because the version of me at 28 would have read this and recognized something in it, and would have had a decade of information he didn’t have, and perhaps I can change the outcome for the next person.
Which brings me back to Flo, in a tight cubicle, watching me connect dots faster than I could explain how. She was right about what she saw. She just didn’t have the other half of the picture, and neither did I. Twenty years later we finally got to compare notes on a podcast, which is either a very long feedback loop or exactly the right amount of time. Probably both.
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