Invisible Labor: Neurodivergence and the Unseen Effort to Belong
The invitation arrived about a month before my termination. PPG's employee resource network wanted me to speak at their mental health awareness series. They'd selected me based on my "openness about personal challenges" and "willingness to discuss mental health." The same organization that would later claim decision-makers were unaware of my disability had simultaneously identified me as someone whose struggles were visible enough to feature in their wellness programming.
I never gave that talk. By the time the event was scheduled, I was unemployed, and trying to understand how disclosure had preceded termination by exactly eight weeks. But the invitation itself told a story about how organizations approach neurodivergence: visible enough for awareness campaigns, invisible enough to deny when convenient.
This is the mathematics of corporate neurodiversity. You're celebrated in theory—featured in speaker series, highlighted in recruiting materials, counted in diversity metrics. But the structures that govern daily work remain unchanged. Meeting-heavy schedules. Real-time decision-making. Unwritten social codes that determine who gets heard. The expectation isn't that work adapts to different minds. It's that different minds learn to perform neurotypicality well enough to go unnoticed.
In Part I of this series, I examined the structural contradictions between corporate stated values and lived reality—how culture fit becomes conformity, how values become marketing, how efficiency becomes moral misalignment. Those essays looked at systems. This essay, the first in Part II, turns inward. Because the systems I described don't operate in abstraction. They operate on people. And for neurodivergent people, they operate with a particular kind of precision that's invisible to everyone except the person absorbing the impact.
The Double Workload
What neurotypical people do automatically, I do deliberately. That's the simplest way to describe living with ADHD in a corporate environment. The tasks that form the invisible infrastructure of professional life—tracking conversation threads across a two-hour meeting, switching contexts cleanly between projects, sitting still on camera during a video call, remembering which social cues to deploy and when—all of this requires conscious effort that depletes a finite cognitive budget before the actual work even begins.
Psychologists call this "masking" or "camouflaging." It's the continuous work of monitoring your behavior, suppressing natural responses, and mimicking social patterns that don't come naturally. For people with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or other neurodivergent conditions, it's not optional. It's the price of employment. The price of being taken seriously. The price of not being labeled difficult, distracted, or disengaged.
For me, masking meant carefully managing my attention in meetings—not just trying to follow the conversation, but performing the appearance of following the conversation. Making eye contact at appropriate intervals. Nodding at the right moments. Suppressing the urge to move, fidget, look away. Every video call was a split-screen experience: half my brain processing content, the other half monitoring my own face in the corner of the screen, checking whether I looked sufficiently engaged.
It meant forcing focus through real-time communication when I process information better asynchronously. My brain works in layers—I need to read, sit with information, connect patterns, then respond. But corporate culture rewards the people who think out loud in meetings, who fire back on Slack within minutes, who seem to have immediate answers. Processing time reads as hesitation. Needing things in writing reads as not being a team player.
The cognitive load of managing attention and presentation simultaneously reduces bandwidth for the actual work. This isn't abstract. Research on ADHD masking shows that the energy spent maintaining neurotypical performance accumulates across days and weeks, creating a deficit that eventually manifests as burnout, anxiety, or what looks to employers like declining performance. The irony is brutal: the harder you mask, the more energy you burn, the worse you actually perform—but stopping the mask makes you visible in ways that trigger entirely different consequences.
The apologizing was perhaps the most corrosive part. Constant apologizing for a different processing style. "Sorry, can you repeat that?" "Sorry, I need a minute to think about this." "Sorry, I missed that part—can you send it in writing?" Every apology reinforced the framing that my cognitive style was the problem rather than the environment's inflexibility. Over time, you internalize it. You stop seeing accommodation as a reasonable need and start seeing yourself as a reasonable burden.
Years of performing an acceptable version of yourself erode the boundaries between the authentic person and the mask. You start to lose track of which reactions are genuine and which are performed. The vigilance becomes automatic, but the energy cost doesn't decrease—it just becomes harder to identify because you've forgotten what functioning without it feels like. It's like carrying a weighted vest for so long that you forget you're wearing one, but your knees still hurt and you can't figure out why you're so tired.
By late 2023, the accumulation had become unsustainable. I was managing ADHD masking, escalating personal stressors at home, and increasing pressure to be physically present despite being primarily remote. The collapse wasn't dramatic. It was the quiet kind—physical exhaustion, cognitive fog, the growing inability to maintain the performance that had kept me employed. When I described this to a supervisor, the response was to "eat more vegetables." No workload adjustment. No follow-up. No accommodation. Just advice about produce.
The "eat more vegetables" response wasn't malicious. That's what makes it revealing. It reflected a genuine inability—or unwillingness—to recognize that the problem wasn't nutritional. It was structural. The workplace was designed to extract a specific kind of cognitive labor, and when that extraction exceeded my capacity, the institution's diagnostic framework had nothing to offer beyond lifestyle advice. The system couldn't see what was happening because it wasn't built to look.
Employee Resource Networks as Theater
Companies build employee resource networks the way they build lobbies—as displays of what the organization wants visitors to see. The Abilities First network at PPG was real in the sense that it existed, had meetings, and occasionally organized events. It was theater in the sense that it demonstrated diversity without distributing power.
I experienced this dynamic most clearly through the Young Professionals Network's Commerce Committee. My manager "pulled strings" to get me onto the committee, framing it as career development. The reality was more complicated. I was invited to present at meetings but excluded from strategy discussions. I was given talking points by others rather than asked for my analysis. The committee wanted my presence—tall, articulate, projecting what they called "executive presence"—but not my thinking.
This is a specific kind of tokenization that neurodivergent people encounter frequently: you're valued for the performance, not the person. The physical confidence I could project in a room—the stature, the voice, the eye contact I'd spent years training myself to maintain—that was the asset. The strategic thinking, the pattern recognition, the ability to see systemic problems that others missed? That was the liability. "Stand up straight, speak clearly, don't complicate things by overthinking it." The message was consistent: we want what you look like, not what you think.
The mushroom treatment, as a colleague once described it: kept in the dark, fed shit, expected to grow.
This pattern extended beyond formal committees. The Abilities First network functioned as compliance theater—it demonstrated diversity without distributing power. It existed to score points on the Disability Equality Index (where PPG achieved a perfect 100), not to fundamentally change how the organization treated disabled employees. The people running the awareness campaigns and the people making termination decisions existed in different organizational universes, connected only by the same logo on the letterhead.
The mental health speaker series invitation was the purest expression of this disconnect. About a month before eliminating my position, the organization invited me to share my story. Not because they intended to accommodate the conditions I would have discussed—but because they wanted the narrative. Packaged for an awareness event, counted toward an ERN activity metric, filed as evidence of institutional caring. The invitation proves something the organization would later try to deny: they knew. People within PPG identified my mental health challenges as visible and relevant enough to build programming around. The claim that decision-makers were "unaware" of my disability doesn't survive contact with a speaker series invitation that someone had to approve.
This distinction between narrative and accommodation reveals something important about how corporations process neurodivergence. They're comfortable with stories—vulnerability packaged into thirty-minute presentations, followed by Q&A, followed by everyone returning to a work environment that hasn't changed. Stories are containable. They have beginnings and endings. They can be scheduled, moderated, and controlled. Accommodation, by contrast, is structural. It requires changing how meetings work, how feedback is delivered, how performance is evaluated, how space is organized. It requires the organization to adapt rather than asking the individual to perform.
The distinction between resource groups that demonstrate inclusion and resource groups that practice it mirrors the broader "decoupling" pattern I explored in Essay 2. PPG achieved a perfect 100 on the Disability Equality Index—measuring whether policies existed, whether training was offered, whether networks were active. None of those metrics captured whether a neurodivergent employee could disclose a diagnosis without it appearing in a termination timeline eight weeks later. The score measured infrastructure. It didn't measure whether anyone was actually living in the building.
The Extroversion Advantage
Susan Cain's research in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking documents what many neurodivergent professionals experience intuitively: modern corporate environments are designed around extroverted norms that treat a specific cognitive style as the universal standard for competence.
Cain traces this to what she calls the "Extrovert Ideal"—the cultural preference for gregarious, alpha personalities that became institutionalized in American business culture over the twentieth century. The open office, the brainstorming session, the team-building retreat, the networking happy hour: these aren't neutral formats. They're environments optimized for a particular neurotype, and they systematically disadvantage people whose cognitive processing works differently. The research is clear that introverts and neurodivergent people often produce their best work in conditions of solitude, focus, and autonomy—exactly the conditions that modern corporate culture treats as disengagement.
Meeting-heavy cultures, which most corporations default to, create particular challenges. Not just the meetings themselves—though those are exhausting when you're managing ADHD—but the implicit hierarchy they create. The people who thrive in meetings, who think out loud effectively, who can track multiple threads of conversation while managing social cues, are seen as engaged and competent. The people who need time to process, who contribute better in writing, who do their best thinking in quiet—we're seen as disengaged, uncertain, not leadership material.
It's not about capability. It's about whose cognitive style gets to set the standard.
Remote work was the closest thing to genuine accommodation I experienced at PPG—not because anyone designed it that way, but because working from home allowed me to control my environment. Movement breaks without being watched. Written communication as default. The ability to process information at my own pace before responding. Muting myself on calls to take notes without the performance of constant visible engagement.
Then came the return-to-office push in early 2024. As the company started pressuring employees back into physical spaces, I sought confirmation that my remote work arrangements wouldn't be impacted. It was a reasonable question—remote work wasn't just a preference for me, it was the environment where I functioned best. But asking the question made me visible in a way that quiet compliance wouldn't have. Shortly after I started seeking those assurances, I was let go.
When the expectations shifted toward in-person attendance—team gatherings, all-hands meetings, networking functions—the accommodation quietly disappeared. Large gatherings require sustained social navigation without the ability to step away. The sensory load of crowded rooms, multiple simultaneous conversations, the expected mingling that treats introversion as a deficiency. I attended when expected. I rarely felt connection. The events were designed for people who are energized by those environments, not drained by them.
There's a particular loneliness in being physically present at an event full of colleagues and feeling less connected than you do sitting alone at your desk doing focused work. The networking conversations follow scripts that neurotypical people navigate intuitively—the small talk, the appropriate duration of eye contact, the moment when you're supposed to laugh, the graceful exit from one conversation to join another. For me, each of those micro-interactions required conscious processing. By the end of an event, I'd spent more cognitive energy navigating the social architecture than I would have spent on a full day of actual work.
And the cruelest part: these events were where informal decisions got made. Where relationships were built that determined who got opportunities, who got mentorship, who got considered for projects. The very environment that was most cognitively expensive for me was also the one where the career-critical networking happened. Opting out preserved my energy but cost me access. Opting in preserved my access but depleted the energy I needed for the work that justified the access in the first place.
The in-person events served as a reminder of what the organizational hierarchy actually valued. Not the quality of my automation work—the bots I'd built, the processes I'd improved, the error rates I'd reduced. Those contributions happened quietly, in focused work at my desk. What the organization valued was visible participation in its social rituals. And for someone whose brain processes social interaction as labor rather than leisure, those rituals were another form of unpaid work.
Why Disclosure Remains Dangerous
In February 2024, I disclosed my ADHD diagnosis as part of an internal job application. It seemed like the right thing to do. PPG's stated commitment to neurodiversity inclusion, reinforced by that perfect Disability Equality Index score, suggested that disclosure would be met with support—or at minimum, neutrality.
By April 30, 2024, I was terminated.
I'm careful here. I'm not claiming direct causation. Organizations are complex, and termination decisions involve multiple factors. But the timeline is what it is. Eight weeks between disclosure and termination. And the timing raises questions that PPG's stated values should have prevented from ever needing to be asked.
This is the fundamental risk calculation that every neurodivergent employee faces: disclosure is necessary for accommodation, but accommodation requests make you visible in ways that can be used against you. If you mask successfully, your accommodation needs look like special treatment—why does this person need different meeting formats when everyone else manages fine? If you mask unsuccessfully, your struggles look like poor performance—why can't this person keep up?
Devon Price, in their work on neurodivergent masking, describes this as the "disclosure paradox." The better you are at masking, the less people understand the effort required. The less they understand the effort, the less they believe accommodation is needed. And the less they believe it's needed, the more suspicious they become when you ask for it. Successful masking creates the conditions for its own dismissal.
I lived this paradox in real time. For years, I'd masked well enough that my ADHD was invisible to most colleagues. I'd built automation systems, contributed to process improvements, participated in committees. The masking was working—which meant that when I finally disclosed, the disclosure looked unnecessary. If you were functioning fine before, why do you suddenly need accommodation now? The answer—that I wasn't functioning fine, I was burning cognitive fuel at an unsustainable rate to maintain the appearance of functioning fine—wasn't legible within the organization's framework. They could see the output. They couldn't see the cost.
What makes this structurally devastating—rather than just individually painful—is how it interacts with the organizational protections that are supposed to prevent exactly this outcome. PPG's perfect DEI score measured whether disability accommodation policies existed, not whether they were honored during budget constraints. The Abilities First network could demonstrate neurodiversity awareness through speaker series while the organization terminated the same people it wanted to feature. The gap between the policy manual and the lived experience was wide enough to terminate an employee through.
And the organization's own metrics would eventually confirm what I experienced individually. PPG's Computerworld "Best Places to Work in IT" ranking dropped from #18 in 2025 to #38 in 2026—a 20-position decline that suggests my experience wasn't an outlier. The same year the company maintained perfect disability inclusion scores, its own IT employees were telling an industry survey that something was fundamentally wrong. Individual complaints get dismissed as disgruntled. Aggregate metrics are harder to explain away.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria—a common feature of ADHD—makes this entire dynamic exponentially harder. RSD means that social rejection and criticism trigger a disproportionate emotional response. In a healthy workplace, this can be managed. In an environment where feedback is weaponized, where public correction serves as spectacle, where your input is dismissed not because it's wrong but because of who you are—RSD transforms every interaction into a potential emotional crisis that must be suppressed in real time, adding yet another layer to the masking workload.
The cumulative effect is a kind of hypervigilance that never fully turns off. You scan every email for subtext. You analyze every meeting invitation for what it might signal. You replay conversations looking for the moment you said the wrong thing, revealed too much, performed poorly. This isn't paranoia—it's a reasonable response to an environment where the consequences of being perceived as different are concrete and career-ending. The tragedy is that the energy consumed by this vigilance is energy that could have gone toward the work the organization was supposedly paying you to do.
What Authentic Inclusion Would Require
The gap between corporate neurodiversity rhetoric and neurodivergent reality isn't a communication problem. It's a structural one. Authentic inclusion would require changes that most organizations aren't willing to make because they challenge the neurotypical norms that current leadership was selected by and for.
It would mean treating accommodation as infrastructure rather than exception. Not individual requests evaluated case-by-case for "reasonableness," but organizational defaults that work for diverse cognitive styles. Asynchronous communication options alongside synchronous meetings. Written agendas distributed in advance. Flexible location policies that recognize different environments serve different brains. Feedback delivered privately, constructively, and with awareness that not everyone processes criticism the same way.
Consider how simple this would be in practice. Instead of defaulting to hour-long video calls with cameras on, offer a written summary option for people who process better in text. Instead of evaluating engagement by who speaks first and most confidently in a meeting, track who contributes the most useful ideas regardless of medium. Instead of requiring in-person attendance at networking events, create asynchronous channels where relationship-building doesn't require burning social energy in a crowded room. None of this eliminates meetings or in-person events. It just stops treating them as the only legitimate form of participation.
It would mean evaluating people on their work rather than their performance of work. Measuring output and quality rather than visible engagement. Recognizing that the person who sends a thoughtful email at midnight may be contributing more than the person who spoke confidently in the 2 PM meeting. Decoupling competence from social presentation.
At PPG, I built automation systems that reduced error rates by over 80%. I helped a self-organized team raise on-time delivery from 60% to 90% using agile and lean methodologies during a six-month period without a manager. That work happened in focused, independent, asynchronous conditions—exactly the conditions my brain is optimized for. The work that got me noticed, though, was the committee participation, the event attendance, the "executive presence." The substance was invisible. The performance was what got measured.
It would mean taking disclosure seriously as an act of trust rather than treating it as information to be managed. When an employee shares a diagnosis, they're extending vulnerability in a professional context where vulnerability is risky. The organizational response to that vulnerability reveals more about company values than any DEI scorecard. At PPG, I disclosed in February. By April, I was gone. Whether or not the disclosure directly caused the termination—and I'm careful not to claim certainty about causation—the sequence communicated something to every other neurodivergent employee watching: this is what happens when you take "bring your whole self to work" literally.
None of these changes are expensive. Most are free. They're just inconvenient for people who've never had to think about them—which is exactly why they don't happen unless someone advocates for them. And the people most qualified to advocate are the ones most vulnerable to retaliation for doing so. It's a system that selects against its own improvement.
The Belonging That Wasn't
I spent four and a half years searching for authentic community in structures designed to extract performance while calling it belonging. The ERNs promised community and delivered compliance theater. The mental health initiatives promised support and delivered awareness campaigns. The neurodiversity commitment promised inclusion and delivered a perfect score on an index that measured documentation, not dignity.
The invisible labor of neurodivergence in corporate environments isn't just the masking—though that alone is exhausting enough to constitute a second job. It's the additional work of believing, against accumulating evidence, that the organization means what it says. That "bring your whole self to work" is an invitation rather than a trap. That disclosing a disability will be met with accommodation rather than termination. That the resource network named after your abilities actually values what you can do.
It's the labor of translating your experience into language the institution can hear, knowing that the institution has structurally limited its own hearing. It's the labor of advocating for changes that would help everyone—better meeting practices, more flexible communication, feedback delivered with care—while being the one person in the room most likely to be penalized for asking.
"Bring your whole self to work" was the mantra. I did. And what they brought was a termination letter and a speaker invitation they couldn't rescind in time.
The question isn't whether organizations should include neurodivergent employees. They already do—they just require us to fund our own inclusion through invisible labor. The question is whether they're willing to build environments where different minds can contribute without first having to disguise themselves as the same mind. Where the effort of belonging doesn't consume the energy needed for the work itself. Where the invitation to speak about your struggles isn't followed, three weeks later, by an invitation to leave.
For four and a half years, I performed a specific kind of labor that nobody measured, nobody compensated, and nobody acknowledged until it stopped working. The performance didn't fail because I stopped trying. It failed because the effort of maintaining it finally exceeded my capacity to pretend it wasn't effort at all.
I've since found work at a company that honors its development commitments and pays a living wage. The masking hasn't disappeared—it probably never fully will in any corporate environment—but the intensity has diminished in an organization where the gap between stated values and lived experience is narrower. That's not a high bar. It's the minimum. And the fact that it feels like a revelation says more about where I came from than where I am.
That's what invisible labor looks like from the inside. From the outside, it just looks like someone who stopped fitting in.