The Canary in the Coal Mine

Some people notice the problem before everyone else does.

Not because they are negative. Not because they are difficult. But because they feel the mismatch earlier.

That is one of the ideas that stayed with me most from this conversation with Kirstie Pomilio Egan, co-founder of Shkudo. She uses the phrase “canary in the coal mine” to describe how neurodivergent people often pick up on dysfunction, friction, and human strain in systems long before those problems become visible to everyone else.

Kirstie’s story is not just about late diagnosis. It is about what happens when intelligence masks struggle, when people-pleasing becomes identity, when burnout forces a reckoning, and when grief changes the direction of a life.

It is also about what can emerge on the other side.

By the time we spoke, Kirstie was coming out of two years of burnout, newly diagnosed as autistic and ADHD, and beginning to make sense of a life that had often looked capable and high-functioning from the outside while feeling confusing and unsustainable from the inside. At the same time, she was helping build Shkudo, a platform designed to make invisible distress in the workplace visible before it is too late.

You can also watch the entire interview on YouTube:

Boris:
For me it’s evening here in Japan. What time is it over there in Switzerland?

Kirstie:
It’s almost one thirty in the afternoon.

Boris:
Amazing. I’ve really been looking forward to this. Thank you for taking the time.

Kirstie:
Thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it too.

Boris:
Before we get into the bigger questions, maybe just introduce yourself a little. Where are you in life right now, and what are you working on?

Kirstie:
I’m American, but I’ve been living in Switzerland for twelve years. I originally came here with a spouse, and I’m staying here for myself. It’s been about eight years now of trying to do everything independently and make it work here as a foreigner.

I’m just going back into the workforce right now after two years of burnout. That was also the period where I finally received my diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum as well as ADHD. So there’s been a lot happening behind the scenes. A lot of self-discovery. A lot of puzzle pieces coming together. And a lot of things from the past suddenly making sense.

Right now I’m working in HR, and I’m also working on a project with three other co-founders. We’re building a mental health platform for professionals, for HR departments, and for companies, to try to prevent the kinds of experiences we all had ourselves. Whether you’re neurodivergent or not, there are issues that HR just can’t solve. Since Covid there are people left and right burning out, quiet quitting, really struggling in silence without much support. So the four of us are working together on that. We joke that we’re four weirdos with a dream, trying to make the invisible visible before it’s too late, before people are sick or without a job.

Boris:
And that application is called?

Kirstie:
Shkudo.

Boris:
And where does the name come from?

Kirstie:
One of our founders is Portuguese, and in Portuguese it means shield. So one of the taglines we played around with was that we’re your workplace guardian.

Boris:
I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. But maybe let’s go back first. Back to before the diagnosis, before you had the language. What did life look like growing up as a high-achieving but unsupported neurodivergent person?

Kirstie:
I struggled a lot in ways I didn’t even realize I was struggling.

Especially socially. I thought I was like everyone else, but there were all these things I would hyper-focus on, especially trends. I wanted so badly to fit in. If there was a toy or an outfit or something that everyone else at school had, I had to have it. It didn’t even matter if I actually liked it. I had to meet the status quo to fit in.

And it’s funny looking back, because I think everyone else knew I was neurodivergent before I did. The mean kids at school knew there was something different about me long before I had any idea.

I was empathetic, but also sensitive in a way that I didn’t know how to process. I would have meltdowns, which I now understand as autistic meltdowns. But when you’re twelve years old and sobbing on the floor and being told by your parents or a teacher that you’re too old to be having a tantrum like a toddler, it just becomes shame. What was actually happening was that I had enough. I had hit a boundary or a mental energy limit and it was too much. I was flooded with emotion and that was the release. It was almost primal. And I think even back then I was already burning out a bit.

Boris:
Was that happening every day, or more in waves?

Kirstie:
A few times a week, at least. Often from being misunderstood. I felt like I was constantly overexplaining myself and not getting my intentions across. I remember one teacher saying I was lying because I knew the answers to things and could do certain things more quickly. I was just so frustrated. Like, how do I stand up for myself to an adult?

And at the same time, people around me thought I couldn’t possibly have a real problem because I was intelligent. I was in this program in the US called GATE, Gifted and Talented Education. You had to go through all this testing. I remember being in first grade and sitting there for four hours doing cognitive puzzles, logic, creativity, language, all of it. So I had this high IQ and I was high-performing as a child, and that created this disconnect where people assumed way too much from me.

So the message I got was: you’re so smart, you can do anything, why are you behaving this way?

And what they couldn’t see was that I didn’t have the other tools. I didn’t have the emotional regulation. I didn’t have a way to understand why I wanted so badly to connect socially with my peers and yet there was this huge invisible wall I couldn’t get through.

So I masked. I would have friends for a while, then different friends. It was like I had seasons of friend groups. I took on their style, what they liked, how they moved through the world. Whether I liked those things or not didn’t even matter. It was almost like a survival method, becoming a chameleon in different social groups so I could try to experience what felt like authentic relationships.

But behind the scenes, none of it was authentic. I just didn’t know that at the time. I thought that’s what you do. And I think everybody experiments socially when they’re young, but it hits much harder when you’re neurodivergent and have no idea that you are.

Boris:
So you were basically relying on your high intelligence. You were in a gifted program, you had probably good grades, and then you were really good at masking that. What would you say were the costs of that high masking, that you had to pay over time?

Kirstie:
Even as an adult now that I’m aware when I’m masking, it’s such a toll on your energy. It’s constantly blocking things out, even though I know that it’s bothering me. My brain can automatically put on a setting: the baby’s crying over there, or this… I used to freak out about my socks as a child. They had to be a certain fabric or they would bother me all day long. Or even now as an adult, this pair of shoes is cute, but it doesn’t feel good. And so I’m walking around all day and my brain is taking energy blocking out the pain in my feet or something like that.

Something that can be seen as just a normal day out in the city or a normal day at school as a child is somehow exhausting. And you have nothing left to give at the end of the day because your brain is running ten to fifteen background processes that other people’s aren’t.

Not only am I managing the overstimulation of my clothing and maybe the sounds around me and certain types of other stressors or triggers going on, even though it’s easy in the moment for my brain to manage those, I’m going to pay for it later when I come home and I just don’t want to do anything and I need to sit for an hour just to process the day. Just sit and do nothing.

As an adult, especially when I was working full-time, I was working as a special education teacher. It was amazing. I could make amazing relationships with the students. I loved doing the lessons. I loved that environment. But when I would come home, there were days where I went eight hours without going to the toilet myself, without peeing, forgetting to drink water for eight hours because I was full-focused on that environment and what I needed to do.

I would come home. No way I wanted to take the time to cook a healthy meal, for example. A lot of evenings it was crackers and cheese, and during the workday surviving on coffee and whatever chocolates were in the break room for the staff. It took a toll on my health. It took a toll on my psychological well-being.

The weekend comes, I would like to do something with my friends, but that would also somehow put me in a bad mood. I would get defensive almost if I felt like my free time also had demands in it. Even though I love my friends, I love my family, I want to see them. It just felt like so much more of an extra burden on my energy and my time. I wasn’t getting laundry done. I had these normal things. I completely lost the balance between home and work.

And there were days where I would come home from work and I have a dog, he would be barking at me because he’s happy to see me and where were you and let’s go out and take a walk. And I would just break down in tears because that would push me over the edge. It’s loud. And even though he means it in a happy way, I had just had enough. I would just crumble to the floor and be crying because that was the last straw for me. After eight to ten hours of pushing everything away, home in my safe space where I can unmask, the walls would come down and the tears would start.

Boris:
It’s maybe interesting to think in life phases. You described school, then university, then starting work life. How would you say the situation changed over those stages?

Kirstie:
It’s very interesting to reflect back. As a child I was thriving in some ways because certain things were decided for me. School from this time, you do a sport or an activity, everything is scheduled. And I had freedom to choose what I was going to wear that day or what I wanted for lunch.

I got older, in university, and I think I started to not be able to be by myself. And I think that was maybe the ADHD coming out, because with the autism there’s also the struggle between the two diagnoses. I didn’t want to be by myself. I always wanted to be around people. It was like I was needing that stimulation. There was a lot more unstructured free time.

And for me, I did find as a neurodivergent person that drinking alcohol, not only was it what you do as a college student, it helped me unmask a bit. It helped me melt that barrier I mentioned before, the social barrier. It helped me almost feel like I was interacting normally. I was the funny one when I would drink. And that became quite dangerous.

I was in my four-year undergraduate university and I had a lot of problems with alcohol.
I would black out. Everyone’s feeding me the shots because they want to. I was like a little monkey performing. I was so silly and this and that until it hit a certain point, things would go wrong and no one wanted to be responsible for that. It took me a long time to realize this isn’t normal.

Boris:
It was probably normal college life, right? But then not normal at the same time.

Kirstie:
Exactly. The neurotypical students could more easily have a boundary with it. You know what, I feel like I’ve had enough. Or I’m going to feel bad tomorrow. For me it was like, no, this is my time. Everyone is finally interacting and I have a group and this is what we do.

I look back and cringe. The people that knew me back then wouldn’t recognize me now and I don’t recognize that person. A lot of it wasn’t me. It was a part of me thinking that I needed that, needing to do that, and then of course becoming addicted to the attention and the feelings.

And I think a lot of us, whether we were neurodivergent or just people who grew up differently, self-medicate. Alcohol, marijuana, whatever. It’s a way of somehow processing it or letting it out, unmasking in a way, or just numbing yourself.

Boris:
And after university?

Kirstie:
Then as an adult, my first few years out of university, I moved in with a partner and I struggled even more because I had nobody except him. In college, you can just walk down the hall and there’s your friends. And again, there was still structured time and things that were very clearly expected of you. You needed to be in this lecture at this and this time. These are the times that you are eating meals.

As a new adult out into the world, I couldn’t structure that myself. And again, it was this struggle of the autism versus the ADHD, knowing I need to do things myself because no one’s going to do it for me. Making appointments. Calling the doctor. I was also doing a master’s degree at the time and it was distance learning, so it was mostly online and we would meet two times a year for conferences. Having to structure all of the learning myself and the studying, I struggled so much. I think at one point I wasn’t going to finish in the two years with my master’s degree because I just couldn’t get it together.

And again, that was reflected in how people saw me. My ex-partner would use my name as a term. Like, “Oh, you pulled a Kirstie again.” It was normal that I was somehow just a mess of a person, couldn’t keep it together, could not get my stuff together. And now I realize it wasn’t really something that I had control of. It was not knowing that I needed support as a person on the autism spectrum and having ADHD.

Boris:
Like even harder if you don’t have the language for it.

Kirstie:
Exactly.

Boris:
That tension between autism and ADHD, I’m super curious about that. How does that feel from the inside? And then not having an understanding of what’s going on must be even harder. The trying to make sense of it, you probably then tried to explain it to yourself in different ways. What were the misinterpretations of yourself or of the context that happened?

Kirstie:
It was so confusing for me because I knew I wasn’t lazy. I was like, okay, maybe I’m just somehow avoiding things. I was very, and still am very, spiritual. So I would meditate or think or smoke and really think about things in a philosophical way, like why am I avoiding this? And I studied psychology in university. I constantly wanted to understand myself and other humans.

For me it was so natural because I’m so sensitive and empathetic. I was constantly questioning these things.

Boris:
But then you learned about neurodivergency in the studies.

Kirstie:
Yes, but I still didn’t think that was me. Especially autism. The way that it’s presented and understood in the world is not the way that I experience it. As someone, as a woman, and again someone who had high-achieving grades and IQ and high levels of accomplishment and not being on the other side of it, where people need obvious support, where children know from a young age because they need speech therapy maybe, or they have more trouble socially, where it becomes very obvious… that felt completely different from me.

In our courses, these diagnoses were only touched on in maybe one or two classes. One of them was, funnily enough, called abnormal psychology, where we studied the DSM. Another class we took was personality theory. Everything was looked at as a sickness. The textbook definitions of things. So for me, I couldn’t relate to those things. Maybe also as an autistic person taking that literally and not being able to map it onto how I might be experiencing it.

When someone thinks of someone on the autism spectrum, they think of Rain Man, or now more modern, Sheldon Cooper. But not me. I always joke with people and say, I didn’t get the math-and-trains flavor of autism. I got, like, fairy’s mushroom trip, every Zooey Deschanel character in an independent film ever flavor of autism. So I think I slipped through the cracks for a very long time because my interests were just seen as: she’s just a weird artistic girl. I also studied art and psychology together in my undergrad. So it was easy for people to say, she’s just one of those weird creatives, and I could get away with my quirks inside that.

Boris:
Yeah, almost like the ADHD and the autism are neutralizing each other. Like a kind of minus minus plus or something like this.

Kirstie:
Yeah, neutralizing each other, though there’s still a big battle happening every day in here.

Boris:
Exactly. It’s even harder without the language. And that inner tension between autism and ADHD — how does that actually feel from the inside?

Kirstie:
Every minute. It depends on the context, but it’s really every minute.

People sometimes ask which one I like more, and honestly I would just like them to get along. I’d like them to sit around a campfire and hold hands and sing Kumbaya because the struggle can be intense.

I know I thrive with schedule, rhythm, set expectations, repetition. The autistic side of me would make life very simple if it had full control. Same meals, same structure, same sequence, same order. But then ADHD comes in and basically throws everything into the air. I can do the structured thing for a while, feel amazing, feel proud of myself, and then suddenly the ADHD is like, no, this is boring, let’s do something else, let’s go to the lake, let’s order takeaway, you deserve a reward.

And then that one reward day becomes two or three and suddenly the whole structure is gone. So the autism is almost like a super-ego that thinks it knows exactly what I need, and maybe it does. And then the ADHD is this little monkey brain constantly saying, no, what if we do this instead, what if we do that, let’s make it fun.

Sometimes that’s beautiful, especially creatively. One summer I woke up every day thinking, I want to paint a mural on the wall. I ended up doing it for seven straight hours. Didn’t stop to eat, didn’t do anything else. And I still love it. But the other side of ADHD is that if there’s any friction at all — if I have to wait for something, if I can’t do the idea immediately — the energy drops. The idea goes lukewarm. So yes, sometimes it feels like autism and ADHD together create almost a third category, because they can mask each other out and also fight each other constantly. Sometimes it’s all or nothing. Sometimes it’s everything all at once.

Boris:
Then at some point you move to Switzerland and there’s also the question: is this me, is this my wiring, or is this just culture?

Kirstie:
Exactly. For a long time I thought, okay, maybe I’m just a little weird. Creative, unique, fine. Then I moved here and started wondering: are these just language-barrier struggles? Cultural differences? There’s that funny meme, “Are you autistic or are you just German?” And I really did ask myself some version of that.

There were things I loved immediately. Like how quiet public transport is here. Everyone just understands that you’re not chatting loudly. I liked those things. But I also struggled a lot.

I had jobs where I was teaching and communicating all day in German, with parents, therapists, staff, state offices, all of it. And my advisor would sometimes come to me and say, that email was way too harsh. But from my perspective, I was just using German in the most direct and efficient way I knew how. I learned the language, I used the words, I said what I meant.

And then I realized that even when people here speak High German and not Swiss German, there can still be all this tiptoeing around things. It drove me insane. They would say things like, “Do you maybe want to make some copies in the copier room?” And I’d be thinking, why are you phrasing a command like a polite question? I don’t care if it’s polite, just tell me clearly what I need to do.

And it worked the other way too. I asked a lot of questions, not because I didn’t understand, but because I wanted to understand everything properly so I could do it perfectly the first time. But that got read as me being stupid, or difficult, or threatening authority. Then if I pointed out a problem or offered three ways it could be improved, people didn’t want to hear it.

That’s where that phrase came in for me: neurodivergent people as the canary in the coal mine. We often pick up on things before they have fully impacted the culture or the company. We notice the mismatch, we notice the dysfunction, and we say it. And people don’t like that. If you can offer solutions, they still often don’t want to see the problems. They want everything to stay robotic and familiar even when it clearly isn’t working and clearly isn’t human.

Boris:
Did moving to Switzerland speed up the process of figuring out what was going on? Or would you still be in the US not knowing about it?

Kirstie:
It’s a good question. So if I didn’t make the decision that I did to separate and divorce from my ex-husband, I would be in Texas right now and I would probably have multiple children. And I can’t imagine that life for myself, because I was following the script. Especially as a woman.

And I think there’s a part of me, and I’m not sure which if it’s the autism or the ADHD, this people-pleasing part, where breaking out of this situation and asking who am I actually, without the context of a student, a friend, a wife, who am I and what do I want… that became very real.

And we spoke about this briefly before, but in 2017 I lost my sibling. I lost my sister, who now I absolutely know was also neurodivergent, based on our struggles and just how we were emotionally and socially, so very similar, and how she must have really been struggling to have this impulsive decision. And that was the point where I said, I’m not moving back to the States with you. I’m not going to make my life again about following around. He’s an academic, and it would have been the same story over and over again, going to where the job was for the research or a position, starting over myself again. And I just thought, I absolutely cannot, in this context, do it again and again without knowing myself.

And I said, I’m staying here because I can feel her. I really just felt like we shared this, my sister and I. We changed ourselves to be what our partners wanted us to be. I’ll be anyone as long as you please love me. I saw this over and over again. Changing my interests or my style based on a partner because, please accept me and please love me and not wanting to be rejected in a certain way. And it was the same story over and over again. Whether in childhood it’s with friends and groups and communities, when you’re an adult a romantic interest to most people becomes more important, so then that’s how you orient yourself.

And I knew that her and I shared this. We were so obsessed with wanting to be loved and looking into a partner as a form of escape in some way. And I thought: I need to figure this out, and I want to do it here. Because I had made friends and put down roots and really started a life here and was a part of different communities, and I just didn’t want that all ripped away again.

So I fought really hard. I was able somehow to convince the Swiss government to separate my permit from his. I figured out in quite a short amount of time how to find a job to be able to keep the apartment that we had, which I still live in now because of the dog. I didn’t want to change his life completely. And when I first moved here with him for the first year, I was only making 500 francs a month at some side job, being an assistant to a teacher in a preschool, fun just to get out of the house.

And how I completely one-eighty revamped my life out of necessity for survival at that point, how far I’ve come since then, it’s amazing. And sometimes I forget to give myself credit for where I was in 2014 when I came here, and where I am now. It’s amazing.

Boris:
That was the deeper reckoning then.

Kirstie:
Yes. I started to question my neurodivergence, and it was a big topic with my therapist. At that time it wasn’t something I felt I needed to pursue as an official diagnosis on paper. In therapy we were able to work on things where I felt, okay, it doesn’t need to be confirmed, it doesn’t need to be in the system. I was quite paranoid about that for a while.

But then with this recent burnout, I thought, this is the time where this could actually help me, provide me some protection, and absolutely open up resources that I would have otherwise been locked out of. Why am I not taking advantage of that, if it could help me?

I was afraid of medication even until about a year ago. I was so paranoid. And it’s been life-changing.

Boris:
How quickly did you and your therapist figure that out?

Kirstie:
She would ask me questions. Funnily enough, she’s not really an expert on autism. I’ve seen her since I came here, so we have a close relationship now of eleven years. She thought maybe it could be something, but she would always ask me: why do you think that? Or why do you want to know that about yourself?

And I was like, listen, there’s something going on here besides just being depressed and unable to keep it together. I learned about executive function and everything changed. Whoa, wait, I’m not just lazy.

She was much more clued on the ADHD than I was, and I was like, I’m pretty sure that I’m on the spectrum. Actually one of my very close friends here, he’s diagnosed on the autism spectrum, with Asperger’s, and he didn’t receive that diagnosis until he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. There were things in our daily life where we would spend time together and he’d ask me, why are you doing that like that? And I would explain it to him and he’d be like, that seems a lot like neurodivergence.

Slowly, he was able to see it from a distance. And they say that neurodivergent people often find each other and attract each other whether they’re conscious of it or not. So many times it was just like: wait, that’s not my personality, that’s autism. Again, who am I?

Then I did some questionnaires, some self-diagnosing questionnaires, and it was like every time, nineteen out of twenty, you have a high probability to probably be autistic. It was like, okay, all right, I get it.

Boris:
And that whole process eventually also connects to what you’re now building with Shkudo.

Kirstie:
Yes. At the time I was still on burnout leave, but I missed contributing. I missed working on something meaningful. I wanted to feel that rhythm again.

I had put out some feelers, mostly through LinkedIn, about whether I could bring my psychology background and lived experience somewhere useful. Then I met someone who was starting to build this app and was looking for exactly that combination. Someone with psychology, but also someone who had lived through difficult workplace experiences and actually wanted to make things better.

So we met for coffee, he pitched it, and it clicked. He was more on the business side, not a therapist, but he wanted to make an impact because he had also had negative workplace experiences. Then I brought in Moon, who you know as Rykka, as our UX/UI designer, and then they brought in our programmer. So suddenly we were four people, all bringing a piece of our own lives into the product.

That’s what makes Shkudo special to me. It’s not a neurodivergence-only product, but it is being built by neurodivergent people. People who feel and notice things very deeply. It’s not some soulless tech product. We actually care about what happens to a person at work when there is nowhere safe to take what they’re dealing with.

Boris:
So how does it work?

Kirstie:
From the company side, think of it as a subscription model. A company brings us in, employees get access, and the organization can start to see broader patterns without seeing individual conversations. Things like burnout risk, absence, demotivation, shifts in mood over time. It’s a way of taking the temperature of what is happening beneath the surface before everything blows up.

From the employee side, the point is that there is somewhere to go immediately, anonymously, and externally. If someone is dealing with a manager they feel is emotionally abusive, or they are drinking every night to cope with work, or they’re pregnant and already sensing hostility and fear about what returning to work will mean — they can come in and talk to someone without that instantly becoming an internal company matter.

That distinction matters so much because HR, in reality, is often overloaded. Payroll, onboarding, process, admin, business goals. The human-to-human part is often the first thing to disappear. So what we’re building is really a support layer in that gap.

And the anonymity is crucial. The company cannot be reading those conversations. The CEO cannot be the admin of the same platform where employees are supposed to be honest. No way. We are the external layer. If somebody eventually wants to bring an issue forward internally, that can happen, but only consensually and only when that person is ready.

That’s why I like the phrase early warning system. Because that’s really what it is, both for the employee and for the workplace. A chance to catch something while it is still nameable, before it becomes full collapse. Just like the canary in the coal mine.

Boris:
That also avoids the weird experience I had once with company stress tests. You fill out a survey, it tells you you’re highly stressed, and then you’re left thinking: okay… now what? Who sees this? What happens next? What are the consequences?

Kirstie:
Exactly. People need guidance, not just diagnosis. And also not just a complaint machine. We’ve thought a lot about that. It’s not only about finding what’s wrong. People can also report that they’re doing well, feeling supported, recovering, more motivated, whatever it is. Companies can see change over time, and whether something they did actually improved anything.

It’s not: here are all your problems. It’s: here is the actual human climate of your workplace. Here is what’s shifting. Here is what needs attention before it becomes crisis.

Boris:
And because all of you are building it from lived experience, I imagine that changes the product in small ways too.

Kirstie:
Very much. Tiny wording choices. Interface details. Whether something feels cold or human. Whether something is phrased in a way that would instantly make me shut down if I saw it on a screen. We move quickly because we’re all bouncing ideas off each other from different lived realities. Sometimes someone says, no, that absolutely needs to be there, because I’ve lived that scenario. Or someone else catches a tone issue or a UX issue.

That’s the part I love. It’s not just that we all care. It’s that each of us catches what the others might miss. And in a moment when so many products are hiding behind AI, that human quality matters even more. Sometimes the differentiator is simply that there is actually a person there. A real response. A real soul in the thing.

Boris:
To close, if you could change how people talk about burnout and neurodivergence in the workplace, what would you most want them to understand differently?

Kirstie:
One sentence from my psychology studies has stayed with me for years: abnormality is the normality.

Nobody is actually normal.

And once you really understand that, so much changes. Because suddenly it stops being about “special treatment” and starts being about reality. People work differently. People need different things. Quiet. Time to arrive in the morning. Different feedback styles. Different sensory environments. More clarity. More directness. More structure. More flexibility.

What still surprises me is that adults will bend over backwards to support children with special needs, and then the same care disappears in adult work environments. Why? Why do we stop being human with each other the minute it becomes a workplace?

I think a lot of neurodivergent people end up naming needs first, not because we are uniquely demanding, but because we are the ones who feel the mismatch first. We are the canary. But I guarantee there are usually five other people who would benefit from the same change. They just won’t say it.

So for me it comes down to this: understand your own needs and boundaries, learn to express them, and then build environments that respect the fact that no one is a cookie-cutter robot. If we did that, we would improve work for everyone, not just for people with diagnoses.

Boris:
I remember once recommending someone for a management role, and the response from leadership was basically, we can’t hire him because I heard he has ADHD. And at the time I was already in the process of getting my own diagnosis. So hearing that while being inside management myself — that lands in a strange way.

But yes, that line really stays with me too. Abnormality is the normality.

And maybe that’s also the bigger hope here. That this doesn’t just stay a conversation about diagnosis. That more founders build work environments that actually fit real human beings.

Kirstie:
Exactly. I hope so too.

Boris:
Thank you. I really loved this conversation.

Kirstie:
Thank you. Me too.

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