There is a particular flavour of work story that autistic and ADHD people tell each other.
It goes like this:
You joined a company. You were brilliant. You fixed things. You improved systems nobody asked you to improve because you couldn’t stand watching them be broken. You stayed late. You said what nobody else would say in the meeting. You delivered.
And then someone else got promoted.
Or your ideas got rebranded as theirs.
Or you burned out so badly you had to start over completely. Again.
If this is your story, I want you to understand something important:
You were not unlucky. You were targeted.
Not consciously, in most cases. But targeted all the same.
The office culture corporate machine is not designed to reward the most competent person. It rewards the person who navigates the unwritten social game with the least friction. And for us, that game was built without our brain in mind.
That’s not an excuse. That’s the terrain. Know it or keep losing to it.
The Good Dog Problem
Here’s what most neurodivergent people do at work without realising it:
They act like a good dog.
Loyal. Eager. Grateful for the opportunity. Doing the extra work without being asked because the job not being done correctly physically hurts to witness. Honest to a fault. Never playing games. Assuming other people operate with the same level of integrity they do.
This is not a flaw in your character. It is, in most situations, one of the best things about you. But in an environment full of people who’ve been trained to exploit exactly this kind of predictable, unconditional goodwill, it is also a liability.
People who are dishonest by nature understand honest people better than honest people understand dishonest ones. That’s the information asymmetry no one warns you about.
The bluntness that means you can’t lie even when it would help you? Exploitable.
The hyperfocus that keeps you working two hours past the time everyone else left? Exploitable.
The deep discomfort with conflict that makes you swallow your complaints until they eat you alive? Very exploitable.
The absolute inability to say “I did this” without also listing every caveat and person who helped? Catastrophically exploitable.
They are not sitting there twirling a moustache thinking about how to drain you. It’s more boring than that. You just make it easy. And they are, above all else, lazy.
What They Actually Respect
There is a thing that happens in workplaces that nobody puts in the employee handbook.
The people who get the most respect are not the people who work the hardest. They are the people who make their value feel slightly out of reach.
I learned this from sales. In sales you learn fast that desperation is the single most repulsive quality a person can project.
Not because people are cruel, but because the brain reads desperation as a signal: ‘this person needs me more than I need them’.
…And when that’s true, you can be treated any way the other person wants.
The fix is not to become fake. The fix is to understand your value at market rate and behave accordingly.
Your value is not your output in this one company. Your value is what someone else would pay for you.
That is your actual leverage. And the moment you know that number and believe it, something in your posture changes that no amount of small talk coaching will ever replicate.
You stop being a good dog. The ground you stand on feels solid and the space around you becomes yours.
This comes through in your voice, energy and what you’ll accept from people.
I’ll get into how to actually do this so you don’t overshoot it. Keep reading. But first you need to know what you’re dealing with.
The Three Ways They’ll Use You Specifically
1. The Expertise Drain
You know something rare and they don’t. So they ask. And you answer, fully, because you love the topic and you are constitutionally incapable of giving a half-answer when a complete one exists.
Then they implement your answer. Under their name. And they get the recognition.
This is not something that happened to you once. If you’re autistic or ADHD, this has happened to you in some form at almost every workplace you’ve ever been in.
The fix is not to stop sharing knowledge. It’s to make the source of the knowledge visible. Put it in writing. Send the email with your name at the top. If your idea gets discussed in a meeting, say “As I mentioned in my email last Tuesday.” Paper trails are not paranoia. They’re how you hold the rope.
2. The Emotional Labour Extraction
You’re a safe person. You listen. You don’t judge. You give real, honest answers instead of the performative “I totally understand where you’re coming from” non-answers everyone else gives.
So they come to you. With their problems. Their career anxieties. Their marriage drama. Their theories about the manager.
And you, because you are genuinely empathetic and because you find the topic interesting and because you actually want to help, engage. Fully. Every time.
This is not friendship. This is a transaction where you are giving and they are taking. And one day, when you need support, you may find that the relationship does not work in the other direction.
The small talk chapter in the book exists for this reason. There are levels. There is a system. Not everyone has earned your level four.
Protect it.
3. The Burnout Harvest
This one is the most insidious because it doesn’t look like exploitation at all. It looks like trust. Opportunity. Being valued.
They give you more work because you’re good. Then more because you handle it. Then more because you don’t complain. Then you start to slow down. Then you start to make errors. Then they look at your performance review and wonder what happened to the star employee from eighteen months ago.
What happened was simple arithmetic. You cannot fill a glass from an empty pitcher. They kept pouring and nobody refilled the pitcher because nobody was watching it and because you told everyone it was fine.
You told everyone it was fine.
Stop telling everyone it is fine when it is not fine.
The Reframe That Changes Everything
Here is the mental move I want you to practice until it becomes default:
Stop asking “how do I not let this happen?”
Start asking “what does someone who cannot be treated this way look like?”
Because the answer is knowable. You have seen these people. They exist in every workplace. They are not necessarily the most talented people there. They are often not even particularly likeable. But they carry something that makes other people’s brains categorise them as “not someone to mess with.”
That something is self-concept.
They know what they bring. They know what it would cost to lose them. They know what they would do if they were pushed. And they don’t have to say any of this out loud, because people who understand power can read it.
The good news is you can build this. It is not a personality transplant. It’s information plus repetition plus the decision to stop volunteering for your own exploitation.
You know your strengths better than most people will ever know theirs. You have an 8-item list in the book. Pick your best one. Find the market that will pay premium for it. And start treating that value the way a cat treats affection: earned, conditional, and never given to just anyone who asks.
Practical Moves, Today:
Write down the last three times you gave something valuable at work for free.
Ideas. Time. Emotional energy. Expertise. Was it reciprocated? Was it even acknowledged? That’s your data.
Make your contributions visible in writing.
Every significant contribution. Sent before or directly after you make it. Your name on it. No apology. No over-explanation.
Rehearse the word no.
Or its variations. “I can’t take that on this week.” “That’s outside my scope.” “That’s a conversation for my manager and yours.” You don’t have to explain yourself into the ground every time. The explanation is often the thing that makes people push harder.
Know your market value.
Go and look at what your skills are worth on the open market right now. Salaries. Job listings. LinkedIn. Whatever. Know the number. Having the number in your head changes how you move in a room.
Stop explaining your delays. Start documenting your blockers.
If work is slow because you’ve been given five things at once with no priority order and vague instructions, don’t apologise. Send an email listing what you have, asking which takes priority, and noting that the rest is paused until you hear back. This is not difficult. This is documentation. And it protects you when someone decides your “poor performance” is a convenient excuse for something else entirely.
Final Note
The goal is not to become a cynical person. The goal is not to stop being the one who cares, the one who notices, the one who tells the truth even when it costs something.
Those things are worth keeping. They’re rare. They’re part of what makes you genuinely hard to replace, once you’re in an environment that knows what to do with them.
The goal is to stop being easy.
Easy to drain. Easy to overlook. Easy to use and discard.
You were not built to survive on other people’s scraps of recognition. You were built to be in situations where what you bring is so clearly valuable that they have to come correct.
Stop going to the wrong markets with premium goods.
Stop being a good dog in a room full of people who are not worth that loyalty.
The world will not fix itself to accommodate you. But you can absolutely stop accommodating the wrong parts of the world.
That’s not cynicism. That’s strategy. And you’ve always been good at strategy.
You just forgot to apply it to yourself.
Thanks for reading.
God Bless.
Be Good.
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