The Skylight Moment
What leaving a big corporate role taught me about masking, difference, and what success actually means.
I was in a leadership meeting. Important people, important decisions, the kind of room where you’re supposed to perform attentiveness.
I was leaning back in my chair, head tilted back, looking up at the sky through a skylight in the ceiling.
Then the room went quiet.
“Are you all right?”
I was fine. More than fine. I was tracking every word that had been said. I could have repeated the conversation back almost verbatim. My brain was fully engaged — just not in a way that looked like engagement to the people in that room.
That moment stung. Not because I was embarrassed. But because somewhere underneath the sting was a question I couldn’t yet answer: why did I have to keep explaining myself?
That was about six months after my ADHD diagnosis. And it was the moment things started to shift.
The First Exhale
A couple of weeks ago, I did my last day at a large New Zealand organisation where I’d been Head of Architecture. Then my wife and I got in the car and drove north.
Ten days. Dunedin to Nelson, with stops along the way. Te Waikoropupu Springs — water so clear it looks invented. Takaka. Queen Charlotte Sound, where we watched dolphins and visited a predator-free island sitting quietly in the middle of the water. We ate dinner at nice restaurants. We talked. We just were.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realised my shoulders had dropped. My stress levels — which I had apparently been carrying at a setting I’d normalised — had shifted. I felt well in a way I hadn’t in a long time.
We also stopped in to see an old boss of mine, now at a new company, for my first piece of client work. A specific problem. My skills, my knowledge, applied to help solve it. No stakeholder politics. No competing agendas. Just two people who respect each other, working through a challenge together.
It was, quietly, one of the best pieces of work I’ve done in years.
The Weight You Don’t Know You’re Carrying
Here’s what I want to be clear about: I was good at those big roles. Really good. Thirty years in technology, leading architecture across complex enterprise estates — ERP, integration platforms, data and AI — I know how to operate at that level.
And I genuinely didn’t hate it. Not most of it.
But there’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes from spending years being pulled further and further away from the work that actually gives you joy. For me, that joy lives in being close to the problem. In the room with the people doing the work. Fixing things. Building new things. Watching a team bring something to life while you help them see what’s possible.
The bigger the role, the more of your time gets consumed by something else entirely: managing the distance between wildly differing stakeholder opinions, navigating political landscapes, performing a version of leadership that the organisation recognises as leadership. All of it legitimate. All of it necessary. And after enough years of it — exhausting in a way that’s hard to name until you’re out the other side.
I wasn’t burned out in a dramatic sense. I was just tired. Tired in a way where, if I’d stayed, I would have started to become someone I didn’t want to be. Negative. Diminished. And that wouldn’t have been good for me, or for anyone around me.
Leaving wasn’t a reaction. It was self-awareness.
What the Diagnosis Actually Changed
The ADHD diagnosis didn’t change who I am. I’ve always been this way.
What it changed was my ability to understand myself.
Think about being called “intolerant” at boarding school. A kid who questioned the status quo, who sometimes reacted in ways that weren’t considered “normal,” who didn’t fit the shape the institution expected. Not a bad kid. Not an unintelligent kid. A kid whose brain worked differently — and who had no framework for understanding why, and was surrounded by people who had no curiosity to find out.
Fast forward thirty years. I’m sitting in a leadership meeting, genuinely present, looking at the sky through a skylight — and the room interprets it as absence.
Same person. Same brain. Still no framework, at that point, for any of it.
The diagnosis gave me that framework. And with it came a kind of archaeology — going back through decades of moments and finally understanding what they were. The times I was “too much.” The times I was “not enough.” The meetings where I was the most switched-on person in the room, in ways nobody could see because they were looking for the wrong signals.
I’m not saying every difficult moment in my career was about neurodivergence. That would be too convenient, and also not true. But a lot of things I had internalised as personal failings turned out to be something else entirely. That reframing matters.
The Cover Is Not The Book
Here’s the thing about masking: it costs you. Every day.
Masking is what neurodivergent people do when they learn to perform neurotypicality convincingly enough to get through the room. To not make people uncomfortable. To be readable in the ways the environment demands. To not look like you’re looking at the skylight.
Most people who didn’t know me well would have said there was nothing unusual about me. I presented fine. I did the job. I moved through the world in a way that looked like belonging.
But the cover is not always what the book is about.
And here’s what I want people to hear clearly, from both sides: this is not a permission slip for anyone to be difficult or excuse poor behaviour as “just how I’m wired.” Knowing yourself better is not the same as being absolved of responsibility for how you show up. Difference does not give any of us a free pass to be an arse in the world.
But equally — and this is the part organisations and individuals still have a long way to go on — the fact that someone doesn’t look like they’re paying attention doesn’t mean they aren’t. The fact that someone processes differently, communicates differently, or needs a different environment to do their best work doesn’t make them less. It makes them different. And different, understood properly, is an extraordinary asset.
The responsibility here belongs to everyone. To those of us who are wired differently, to understand ourselves and show up as fully and honestly as we can. And to everyone else — leaders, colleagues, institutions — to get curious. To ask questions. To resist the lazy shorthand of “normal” and “not normal.”
What Success Looks Like Now
I’ve had status. I’ve had security. I’ve had influence. For years, in roles that society would happily put in the “successful” category.
That’s not what success means to me anymore.
Success, right now, is how I feel. It’s what my presence brings to other people, and how they feel having spent time with me. It’s working on problems that matter, with people I respect, in ways that don’t require me to perform a version of myself that isn’t real.
It’s my wife and I driving through the top of the South Island, stopping at a spring where the water is impossibly clear, and feeling — maybe for the first time in a long time — like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
The last couple of weeks have been a beginning. Not a destination. I don’t have it all figured out. But I know what I’m building toward: work that’s genuinely mine, a way of being in the world that doesn’t cost me more than it gives, and — if I do this right — the chance to make people feel something good when they leave the room.
That’s enough. More than enough, actually.
If any of this landed for you — whether you’re neurodivergent, or you lead people who are, or you’re just quietly exhausted in a role that looks fine from the outside — I’d love to hear from you.
And if you’re curious about the work I’m building, you can find me at darrylmunro.nz.
I love this - and I especially love it for you. Great start :)