Shannon Parris in her home office on Thursday, July 10, 2025, in Ross Township. (Photo by Caleb Kaufman/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
While neurodivergent people — including me — often do much better as entrepreneurs than as employees, there’s a disconnect between disability programming and small business support.
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When my twins were infants, my husband was afraid to leave me alone with them.
Though I didn’t experience postpartum depression or anxiety, I worried I might because of my mental health history. I have never harmed my children or knowingly put them in harm’s way.
But when they were tiny and screaming and always touching me, I would freeze. I don’t think I was a danger to them, but a new mother who can’t move, alone all day with two babies, is understandably a cause for concern for a new father who needs to return to work.
Shortly after this started, I read “What Happened to You?” by Dr. Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey and learned that circumstances of early trauma often establish our bodies’ preferred sympathetic nervous system responses.
In my case, because I was orphaned as an infant, it’s likely I dealt with my earliest experiences of dysregulation by dissociating, or disconnecting from my thoughts, feelings, sense of identity and environment. This is the way I’ve typically dealt with dysregulation as an adult.
Because my only option among “fight, flight, freeze or fawn” was “freeze” when I was an infant, it’s my default response. I get stuck, immobilized, dissociated.
This realization, like many throughout life, was about understanding my identity through the lens of being an adoptee. This has been a central project in my life since I was an adolescent. I became depressed as I became self-aware. My teenage years through emerging adulthood were about trying to figure out 1) what is wrong with me, 2) what I’m passionate about and 3) where I belong.
And my adult years? I now employ myself full-time as a nonprofit and small business coach and consultant, preferring work that advances equity and uplifts people with marginalized racial, gender and neurodiverse identities. Here’s how I got from frozen to fulfilled.
My neurodivergence trifecta
I was formally diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder when I was in college — my first disability diagnosis. I didn’t identify as disabled at the time; in hindsight, I certainly was.
As hard as I’d worked to understand and reconcile my early experiences, it felt like there were always missing pieces to knowing who I am. I was a high-achieving student, but I struggled immensely and privately with my mental and physical health and codependent and perfectionist tendencies. Even after a decade of working full-time, my fear that I couldn’t work full-time, despite evidence to the contrary, was only intensifying.
One day after I started my job managing a business accelerator for a local nonprofit organization post-maternity leave, it dawned on me: I’m not as neurotypical as I’d always assumed. That’s how I began discerning that I might be neurodivergent.
“The truth is, I feel like I don’t know how to be a person.”
That’s the first thing I said when I started neuropsychological testing — a structured assessment of cognitive, behavioral and emotional functioning using written tools, standardized tasks and interviews. That statement was apparently remarkable enough that it made it into the neuropsychologist’s evaluation report explaining the rationale for my diagnoses.
During that process, I wandered off internally during an ADHD test. The task was to pay attention to the neuropsychologist while she read a story aloud so I could answer questions about it. Instead of listening and trying to remember the details, I started thinking about the best approach to complete the task successfully. Then, I couldn’t answer any of the questions because I hadn’t been paying attention.
At nearly 35 years old, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder — my neurodivergence trifecta.
In what felt like an instant (neurodivergent people often don’t perceive the passage of time the way neurotypical people do), I felt like I knew everything I needed to know about myself after repeatedly coming up short in my lifelong pursuit of self-awareness.
Setting myself free
The parts of my identity that you can perceive — that I’m a cisgender Korean woman in a heterosexual monogamous relationship, a mother of twins, a daughter, friend, cat person, progressive — are all important, but they don’t dictate how I perceive, move through and experience the world.
My neurodivergent brain does.
My identity as multiply-neurodivergent filled in every gap of my self-understanding that remained after a lifetime of trying to know myself and find where I belong. When I gave myself permission to accommodate myself instead of fighting my very nature, I set myself free.
It turns out that neurodivergent people often develop or are misdiagnosed with mood and anxiety disorders because moving through the world as though we are neurotypical is extremely hard. We have many physical comorbidities; I’ve experienced unexplained physical symptoms and chronic pain, too. Suddenly, things that felt like loose threads my whole life were brilliantly woven together by understanding my neurodivergent identity.
I now openly identify as multiply-neurodivergent and multiply-disabled.
By the time I was diagnosed, I had been in the traditional workforce for years, simultaneously succeeding, burning out, excelling, shutting down. After spending two years doing a job I loved at an organization I hated while interviewing for dozens of other jobs, the pressure of needing to perform well but not knowing how to behave during an interview sent my sympathetic nervous system and (then-unknown) OCD into overdrive.
Around this time, I had the opportunity to participate in the Program to Aid Citizen Enterprise’s BIPOC leadership development program, as well as New Sun Rising’s Nonprofit Resilience Program, which enabled me to hire a consultant to help me launch a consulting business — something I’d previously never seen myself doing.
I participated virtually from home, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With mandatory remote work, society’s norms suddenly aligned with my needs and abilities. I wouldn’t have pursued or accessed these opportunities otherwise.
The intersection of disability and entrepreneurialism
I wouldn’t have been able to start my business and employ myself without neurodivergent-affirming, accessible support. None of the support I received was positioned this way, but I sought it out, knowing and being open about my needs, and advocating for myself in any way that would support my success. Not every disabled person wants to or is able to do this — or even knows they can.
After a decade of navigating my career with a multiply-marginalized identity — some aspects of which I didn’t know about until recently — I’m invested in making affirming, psychologically safe work accessible to as many people as possible. As a coach, I work directly with these individuals to increase their skills, advocate for themselves and chart sustainable paths for employment or self-employment. As a consultant, I work with organizations to create more equitable and accessible strategies, programs and work environments.
There is public data and academic research that demonstrates that while people with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed than others, they’re also more likely to be self-employed. Additionally, there are higher rates of ADHD, dyslexia, depression and other disabilities among entrepreneurs compared to the general population.
In the U.S., 1.8 million people exist at this intersection of disability and entrepreneurship, and these people may have less access to financing, business education and sales opportunities than non-disabled entrepreneurs.
But here’s the upside: Entrepreneurship is a viable employment option for disabled people. It provides us with greater access to and flexibility at work. Small businesses account for two-thirds of the jobs added to the U.S. economy in the last 25 years, demonstrating that when disabled people start businesses, they create jobs and, presumably, more accessible work environments for themselves and others. They also earn more than wage workers with disabilities.
However, there is a gap between the high unemployment rate for disabled people and the viability of entrepreneurship for disabled people. There’s also a disconnect in Pittsburgh between employment support for disabled people and the entrepreneurial support community. These operate as two separate sectors that don’t engage with one another or inform each other about the needs of a population they are both seeking to serve.
I believe that if we reframe entrepreneurship as a competitive and empowering alternative to traditional employment for disabled people and provide them with targeted, accessible support, we can address this employment gap. We can help disabled people access higher wages and increased job satisfaction if we support their ability to start and grow small businesses. I believe these businesses will spark innovation and accessibility in ways that enrich all our lives and make Pittsburgh a better place for more people.
Disabled people don’t just need employment support programs. So often, these focus on low-wage and low-skill positions, addressing the needs of only a small subset of the disability community. Entrepreneurship programs are underutilized because most aren’t created with accessibility in mind and, consequently, are ineffective for this community.
We need something more specific: entrepreneurial support tailored to us and designed to meet our needs, which is best understood by asking disabled entrepreneurs directly.
I believe that when I have had opportunities, I’ve been able to make a difference for other disabled people. I know that my experience isn’t universal — far from it. But I believe that if there were better supports for neurodivergent and otherwise disabled people to explore nontraditional paths to employment, many would fare much better.
It feels like an understatement to say that self-employment and entrepreneurship changed my life and set me free. When I look around at the life I’m creating, it’s a life that I would want for my children. I didn’t feel that way when I was an employee.
My twins are five years old now; they’re entering kindergarten next month. I can say with confidence that learning I’m disabled and making life and career choices that align with that knowledge has made me a better and more present parent. Whatever paths my kids take, I know that they’ll know how to prioritize what is affirming, fulfilling and psychologically safe because I’ll show them what’s possible and insist they don’t settle for anything less.
Shannon Parris is a multiply-neurodivergent, Pittsburgh-based consultant, coach and disability advocate on a mission to reshape how we work, lead, and belong — because most workplaces weren’t built for everyone to succeed. She can be reached through her website shannonparris.com.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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