How to drive N channel gate correctly from Adafruit Feather pinout?
Your problem is that the GPIO pin is referenced to ground - and the MOSFET is isolating that ground.

You need instead to switch the power not the ground - and for that, you use a P-channel MOSFET.







simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab

To hold the power on you now set the GPIO LOW instead of HIGH.

If you need to switch a higher voltage than the operating voltage of the MCU you will need to add another N-channel MOSFET to pull down the P-channel's gate.