Why the nonprofit sector is built for an ADHD brain, and why it burns us out

I spent almost thirty years in this sector before I understood something that had been true the whole time.

I was good at this work. I loved it. I also went home most nights worn down in a way I couldn’t explain, certain that if anyone looked closely they’d see how much effort it took to keep up. For a long time I read that as a personal failing. I thought I was getting away with something.

Then, in the last year, I was diagnosed with ADHD. And a lot of things I’d carried for decades rearranged themselves at once.

The clearest of them was this: the nonprofit sector is one of the best places on earth for an ADHD brain to work, and one of the fastest ways to burn one out. Both are true, and they’re true for the same reason.

The part that took me longest to see is this.

An ADHD brain doesn’t run on discipline or routine. It runs on a specific kind of fuel: urgency, meaning, novelty, challenge, and the sense that something depends on you. Give it those conditions and it doesn’t just function. It comes alive. Focus that felt impossible all week arrives in an instant when the stakes are real. Ideas connect. Energy shows up out of nowhere. The work that drains other people is the work that lights you up.

Now think about where that brain lands when it walks into a nonprofit.

Most jobs offer one or two of those hooks. This sector floods you with all of them at once. Everything is urgent. Everything matters. There is always a crisis, always something new, always someone who needs you. The mission is real and the need is endless. For a brain wired to run on exactly that, it isn’t a hard place to survive. It’s the perfect fuel.

So we rise. We become the person people count on in a crisis, the one who holds ten things at once, the one who pulls off the impossible ask on no notice. The grant written over a weekend. The board meeting you walked in and steadied. The year everyone said couldn’t be done. At first glance, it looks like a woman thriving. And for a while, she is.

That’s the gift. Here’s the trap, and it’s the same thing.

The fuel is real, but the sector gives you no way to ration it. The urgency never lets up. There is no slack, no backup, no permission to stop. We treat underfunding as a virtue and exhaustion as proof of commitment. We hand one person the workload of three and call it dedication. So the surge an ADHD brain is built for becomes the baseline it is asked to hold, every day, for years.

That a brain cannot do. What ran brilliantly in bursts starts to cost more and more. Focus gets harder. Everything takes more effort. The recovery time gets longer. And because the whole thing still looks like high performance from the outside, no one notices, least of all you. You feel like you’re slipping, and you assume it’s you.

It isn’t you. It’s borrowed fire. It works. It delivers. It looks like thriving. It was never built to last.

For women, it’s even harder to see. ADHD in women is missed for years, because it rarely looks like the restless boy at the back of the classroom. It looks like the girl who holds everything together and works twice as hard to do it. By the time we reach a leadership seat, we are experts at masking, and leadership only asks for more of it: look composed, hold steady, don’t let them see the cost. So the strain stays hidden, from the people around you and from you. You can go a long time before you understand what’s happening.

I went a very long time.

That’s what this is for. Borrowed Fire is where I’m going to name this pattern out loud, the one most of us were never given the language for, and write toward something more sustainable. Not a way to care less. A way to keep doing work you love without it taking you apart.

I’m writing it for the women in this sector who are brilliant and worn out, whether or not they have a name for why yet. I’m writing it for the people who lead them, fund them, and depend on them, and who can’t afford to keep losing them. And I’m writing it because I spent decades believing the exhaustion was the price of caring, and I no longer think it has to be.

More soon.