What Makes Work Meaningful When You're Neurodivergent?
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What Makes Work Meaningful When You’re Neurodivergent?

Belonging, purpose, flow and the story you tell yourself

Content note: this post mentions burnout, workplace bullying and a severe anxiety attack.

I was late identified as neurodivergent, which meant years of thugging it out. I did what I ‘should’: got the job, kept the job, paid the bills. And let’s be honest, fair money matters. The rent doesn’t care how your nervous system is going.

That is the conflict I hear from almost every ND person I work with. How do you earn a decent living without wrecking your nervous system to do it?

At 40, after one too many rounds of burnout, I got pragmatic. I stopped beating myself up every time I struggled to cope and asked a better question: what exactly was it I couldn’t cope with? The answer surprised me. It was rarely the work itself. It was everything wrapped around it. So I went remote, years before COVID made that normal, and it turned out to be a sustainable answer for me.

Your answer will look different. Some fixes are much easier to put in place than others, and nothing in this post is pretending it’s simple. But one idea has helped me make sense of why some jobs worked for me and others quietly flattened me, so I want to share it.

Meaning isn’t the same as liking your job

In her 2017 TED talk, There’s more to life than being happy, writer Emily Esfahani Smith argues that chasing happiness can leave people feeling empty, and that a sense of meaning is what holds you up when life goes sideways. In her book The Power of Meaning she sets out four pillars of a meaningful life: belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling.

The four pillars are hers. The ND lens on them is mine. When your brain works differently, each one lands differently, and work is where a lot of us feel it most.

1. Belonging

Fitting in is the shape-shifting you do to be accepted. Belonging is being able to stop.

You already know why belonging at work is harder for ND people: the unwritten rules, the office politics, the ‘culture fit’. The bit worth hearing again is that the gap isn’t all on you. Autistic researcher Damian Milton calls it the double empathy problem. When people experience the world very differently, understanding breaks down in both directions, not just one. Reframing Autism has a great plain-English summary.

Like most ND people, I masked to fit in for years without even knowing I was doing it. Later I did it knowing full well. What surprised me was that remote work helped me belong. As a relationship manager I had a client list around town, and the relationship was about helping their businesses. The parameters were clear. I got to decide how much time I spent face to face and how much I worked from home. My clients valued me, and honestly, that felt good.

Belonging doesn’t have to mean being one of the gang at Friday drinks. It can come from relationships with clear edges, where what you bring is valued.

Ask yourself: where have you been valued for what you bring, rather than for how well you blend in?

2. Purpose

Smith describes purpose as being about what you give, not what you want. It can come from your work, but it can also come from caring for the people you love or from your community.

My sense of purpose sits with helping others. If I’m honest, it probably comes from knowing exactly how it feels to be different, with a stack of challenges nobody else can see or recognise, especially around capacity. That kind of lived knowledge is useful, and a lot of ND people carry their own version of it.

If your paid job doesn’t give you purpose right now, that doesn’t mean you have none. Sometimes the job pays the bills and the purpose lives somewhere else. That’s allowed.

Ask yourself: what do people often ask for your help with?

3. Transcendence: flow

Smith describes transcendence as those moments when you’re so absorbed in something that time falls away and your sense of self goes quiet. If that sounds a lot like flow, that’s because it is. And here’s what a lot of us miss: for many ND brains, flow is a real strength.

We overlook it because, in the right conditions, it comes so easily. Hand many of us a problem we care about and a bit of quiet, and we’re gone for hours. It doesn’t feel like a skill, so we don’t count it as one. It is one.

Researchers are starting to take this seriously. Monotropism, a theory first set out by autistic thinkers Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson with Mike Lesser, describes attention that gathers on a few things at a time, more torch beam than floodlight. Building on that, a 2024 paper by a group of autistic and non-autistic researchers, including Damian Milton and Fergus Murray, proposed an autistic flow theory. They argue autistic people are well placed to find and manage flow, and that the harder part is often getting out of it again.

So the useful question is: what helps you drop into flow? For some of us it’s a quiet room and no ‘quick catch-ups’. For others it’s a deadline, the same song on repeat, or a problem that genuinely interests them.

Then look at the flipside. Plenty of employers love a multitasker who’ll switch between jobs all day. For some ND brains that’s welcome variety. For others it’s a nightmare. The key is knowing which one you are, before a job description decides for you.

And the honest bit: flow and hyperfocus aren’t quite the same thing. Small studies with university students suggest people with ADHD report more hyperfocus but not more flow, and that hyperfocus can look more like being stuck than being in the zone (CHADD has a readable summary). Flow leaves you lit up. Hyperfocus can eat your weekend, skip your lunch and feed burnout. If that sounds familiar, have a read of Burnout isn’t a personal failing or try the free Burnout Check.

Ask yourself: what helps you drop into flow, and what pulls you out of it?

4. Storytelling: the story you tell yourself

Smith’s fourth pillar is the story you tell about your own life, and the reminder that you can edit it.

For ND people, the work story is often written by someone else. Most of us have felt different for as long as we can remember, and for many that’s been a negative experience. Capacity issues get framed as incompetence, when they’re nothing of the sort.

Add Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and that story gets louder. RSD isn’t a formal diagnosis, but it’s a widely used term for the intense, almost physical sting of rejection or criticism, real or perceived, that many ND people know well, and many therapists now work with it. Alex Partridge talks about it often on the ADHD Chatter podcast and has written a whole book on it, Why Does Everybody Hate Me? One piece of feedback becomes ‘I’m useless’. You leave before you can be let go. Or you don’t apply at all.

Here’s a chapter of mine. My pattern spotting would often decide what I did next, and I could never offer a logical explanation for my choices, even when they worked out brilliantly. Many years ago I had a manager who couldn’t handle that. She became more and more demanding, to the point of bullying, about why I was doing what I was doing and why I wouldn’t tell her how I was planning my day of sales calls. The truth? I wasn’t planning it the way she wanted. I followed my gut and did the work. It got results. That should have been enough, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t just that job. It was a whole life before it that ran the same way, more times than I can count. I was made wrong without ever knowing why. So the story I told myself was that I was broken and not good enough, because that’s exactly how it felt. That manager triggered an anxiety attack so severe I ended up in the emergency department, and it took months to recover.

The story I tell now is different. How I work is different, and my capacity certainly is. But I’m very capable, and in some situations I’m a better problem solver than plenty of neurotypical people. I remind myself of my thinking style and the strengths it brings, not just the flaws listed by people who never got it.

Ask yourself: what story have you been telling about your working life, and whose voice is it really in?

Bringing it together

You don’t need one job to give you all four. Most of us won’t get that, and chasing it can be its own kind of exhausting. Look instead at which pillars your work gives you now, and which you can find somewhere else.

A quick check:

  • Belonging: Where am I valued for what I bring?
  • Purpose: Who benefits from what I do?
  • Transcendence: When do I drop into flow, and what pulls me out?
  • Storytelling: Is the story I tell about my work true, or just familiar?

Coming soon: the Work Fit Profile – to help you work out the conditions, environment and kind of work that suit your brain. Want to hear about it when its live, drop me a line here

Further reading

Alex Partridge, Why Does Everybody Hate Me? Living and Loving with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (Sheldon Press, 2026), and the ADHD Chatter podcast

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