Guest Column by Dr. Quynh-Huong Nguyen, Neurodivergent Life Coach at Patterns Pivot
Pattern Pivot is a life coaching practice helping neurodivergent communities navigate identity, cultural expectations, and family pressure, recognize survival patterns and build sustainable, values-aligned lives.
Content note: This essay discusses late autism/ADHD diagnosis, workplace discrimination, and current federal disability policy. It does not include graphic content.
When I was finally diagnosed as autistic and with ADHD as an adult, I did not feel broken. I felt like someone had finally handed me the instruction manual to a machine I had been reverse-engineering my entire life. Every social rule I had studied instead of intuited. Every meeting I had rehearsed in the shower beforehand. Every time I had been called “so articulate” right after a conversation that had taken every ounce of processing power I had. None of that had been a personal failing. It had been masking, and masking is exhausting work that rarely shows up on a resume.
What I did feel, almost immediately, was a very different question: if this is just how my brain works, why does keeping a job feel like the hardest part of having it?
That question is not mine alone, and it is not new. Philosopher Robert Chapman argues in Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism that the entire category of neurological “normal” was not discovered, it was constructed, largely in service of industrial labor demands that needed workers who could perform a narrow, standardized kind of productivity (Chapman, 2023). Under that framework, disability is not simply a medical fact about a person’s brain or body. It is also a relationship between a person and an economic system that decided, often a century or more ago, which kinds of minds were worth accommodating and which were not.
That framing changed how I understood my own history. I am Vietnamese American, queer, and I left a traditional nonprofit career after years of being told, in various indirect ways, that my value was tied to how much I could produce without needing anything in return. I did not leave because I stopped caring about the work. I left because the cost of performing “normal” inside that structure had stopped being sustainable, and because I had started to understand that the exhaustion was not a character flaw. It was the predictable result of a system that was never built with a brain like mine in mind.
Here is what the research actually says about that gap. A 2025 systematic review in Cureus examining workplace accommodations for autistic adults found employment rates for autistic people have historically hovered around 50%, even among those capable of and interested in full-time work, and that the accommodations known to help, structured routines, clear communication, sensory considerations, are still inconsistently available or enforced (Heinze, 2025). That is not a story about individual autistic people failing to adapt. It is a story about workplaces that have not been required to adapt back.
And the pressure to require that adaptation is currently moving in the wrong direction. On August 21, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor finalized a rule eliminating the Section 503 disability employment goal, the benchmark that had asked federal contractors to aim for a workforce that was at least 7% people with disabilities, along with much of the data tracking that made it possible to see whether companies were meeting it. That rule followed a March 26, 2026 executive order restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements for federal contractors more broadly. Effective September 21, 2026, the federal government stopped asking its own contractors to measure this at all.
I want to sit with that for a second, because it is easy to read a policy summary and move on. Measurement is not a small bureaucratic detail. It is how gaps get identified before they get addressed. Removing the goal does not close the disability employment gap. It just stops anyone from being required to look at it.
And the gap is not small. Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bureau of Labor Statistics data show an employment rate gap between disabled and non-disabled workers of roughly 22.8% versus 65.2%, a disparity researchers have described as larger than any racial, ethnic, or educational attainment gap currently measured in the U.S. labor market. Larger than any of those gaps. Sit with that too.
I think about that statistic through more than one identity at once, because that is how I actually live in the world. I am not autistic on Mondays and Vietnamese American on Tuesdays and queer on Wednesdays. Those identities do not take turns. When cultural taxation research describes the unpaid emotional and educational labor that employees of color are routinely expected to perform for their institutions, translating, explaining, representing, on top of their actual job description, it rarely also accounts for what that labor costs someone who is also managing sensory overload, executive functioning demands, and a nervous system that does not recover from a twelve-hour day the way a neurotypical colleague’s might (Nguyen & Ricafort, 2025). The load does not add up neatly. It compounds.
I do not think the answer is convincing individual neurodivergent people to work harder at appearing normal. I have already run that experiment, for decades, and the primary result was burnout. I think the more honest question is the one Chapman’s work keeps pointing back to: what would it mean to stop treating “employability” as a fixed trait located inside a person, and start treating it as something that is also, always, a property of the workplace itself. A workplace that requires eye contact, back-to-back meetings with no buffer, and constant context-switching is not neutral. It is a workplace built for one kind of brain, at the expense of every other kind.
Under an administration actively dismantling the tracking mechanisms that made this gap visible, that reframing matters more, not less. If the data disappears, the easiest thing in the world will be to conclude that the gap disappeared with it. It did not. It is just no longer someone’s job to notice.
I left traditional employment, in part, because I got tired of being the evidence in a system that had already decided not to look for evidence. I am building something different now, not because I think individual coaching replaces policy, and not because I think anyone can accommodate their way around a labor market actively rolling back the requirement to accommodate at all. I built it because I wanted to be useful to people who are tired of being told, implicitly or explicitly, that the exhaustion is theirs to solve alone.
It is not broken to need a different kind of workplace. It is broken that we built workplaces narrow enough that so many of us need one.
What I Couldn’t Name Then
I used to think my struggle to keep a job at the pace everyone else seemed to manage was evidence that something was wrong with me specifically. I did not yet have language for masking, for the cost of performing “normal” inside a structure that was never built to hold me, or for the fact that the workplace itself, not just my brain, was one half of the equation.
The Pattern
When employment outcomes for disabled and neurodivergent people are consistently worse than for almost any other demographic group, and the policy response is to stop measuring the gap rather than close it, the problem is not individual capacity. The problem is a system that built “employable” around one kind of brain and then called every other kind of brain the exception.
Your Pivot Question
- Where in your work life have you been quietly absorbing the cost of a system that was never built for how your brain or body actually works?
- What would it look like to name that cost out loud, even just to yourself, instead of treating it as a personal failing to fix in private?
If today’s story felt familiar, you’re not alone.
Patterns Pivot helps neurodivergent people, and the people who support them, recognize the patterns shaping their lives: what keeps repeating, why, and what’s actually being asked of you. We do it through life coaching, workshops, consulting, and research-informed storytelling. Nobody here is broken, and most patterns started as survival.
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References
Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality: Neurodiversity and capitalism. Pluto Press.
Heinze, J. (2025). Workplace accommodations for autistic adults: A systematic review. Cureus, 17(4).
Nguyen, T., & Ricafort, J. (2025). Cultural taxation and the unpaid labor of representation in institutional settings. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. (See also: prior Patterns Pivot essay, “They Call It a ‘Soul Connection.’ They Rarely Pay for It.”)
U.S. Department of Labor. (2026, August 21). Final rule rescinding Section 503 utilization goal and related data collection requirements for federal contractors, effective September 21, 2026.
Executive Order 14398 (2026, March 26). Restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements for federal contractors.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York & U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Labor force data on employment rates by disability status.