I want to lead an aesthetic life. I want to nurture myself and be quirky amd free.
But at the same time, I'm anxious and exhausted. And I'm pretty sure that this is what autistic burnout is: wanting to create a built environment that supports you, but not being able to because you have no support.
I'm on the berge of #autisticBurnOut today.
2 long customer calls and 1 long team meeting, and a friend who say she twisted her ankle and can't work and begs me to go fetch her with my car, plus I haven't have time to go to the groceries yet. I'm overwhelmed.
Can't the wsorld forget that I exist for like an hour?
I think I don't have just* autistic burnout... I have some sort of complex burnout... since 2022 at least. the autistic one is in there, but other types are also in there and they combined...
I call it "messy burnout".
In my case these apply to me:
autistic burnout
burnout from being overworked
burnout from being under-challenged (when too much is too boring)
(maybe "adhd burnout", I still need to learn what that even is...)
I'm fortunate that I managed to improve on most of these, some more than others. But on that journey some of them got worse when I tried to fix another.
What was really crappy when I was (deeper) in #AutisticBurnout last year and having only understood I was #ActuallyAutistic was the fact that I had to and wanted to learn so much about this while being in burnout. I basically spent every last spoon on figuring things out. And there's so many great resources and groups in this day and age, created by autistic people. But for a lot of it I just didn't have the energy. I had finally knew what I was experiencing and help was right in front of me but I could not make use of 99% of it.
Things got a bit better now. A bit... Still can only read or watch so much before I got to stop to reserve energy. Still struggle to interact with the wonderful people that take their time to write responses to my posts.
But I am slowly crawling out of burnout and I somehow managed to prevent my life completely imploding. I have a lot to be proud of and b3 thankful for in the last 12+ months.
Sometimes I wish I had the "eat, sleep, and breathe a special interest I'm passionate about with the ability to drop spontaneous verbal info-dumps on 1.5x speed" flavor of autism.
Instead I got the "must waste significant portions of my life unable to focus on anything, semi-dissociated alone in the dark under a weighted blanket with soft ambient noise because Everything Is Too Much" type. I want a refund.
The phrase "burnt out former gifted kid" has always given me the ick, but there are unique challenges/issues/traumas related to that experience that tend to come up in #autistic discussions and I've never encountered a good description.
Proposal for a slightly less icky alternative:
✨ burnt out former high achiever ✨
There was a time, many years ago, when I intended to go to law school after graduating college. But I suffered #burnout and never followed through. I had already taken the LSAT and been accepted.
I've only just self-DX as autistic. I've been thinking about all the ways that affected my life. I think I am beginning to understand a lot of things that never made sense.
I lost most my friends and family to #COVID, and by that I don't mean that they died, I mean that they are dead to me because them abled privileged fucks don't mask.
It sucks, I've barely been out and have been N95ing everywhere for three years now, I know why, I grew up with (amongst an host of other co-occurrences) #mecfs, bedsticken, in paroxitic pain && total isolation for years at a time and now have had to listen to friends and familly justiy #eugenics out of lazyness.
It's a lonely path, somehow even with constant masking, I still got COVID 3 times. [the third time being RN] I must have gotten it in the staircase cause I mask everywhere else [or in the subway, save for my crew, noone else masks here]
In other news, I quit my job before reaching full #AutisticBurnout in July and I've been looking for a #WorkFromHome#job for the last 4 months.
But rn the key word is #backtotheoffice, they don't offer so-called "unqualified jobs" as wfh positions anymore -not even customer/technical support positions, which has been my bread and butter since I left gastronomy on account of the #pandemic.
Even if it weren't for COVID my disabilities simply does not allow me to commute to the office in winter, that's just a fact [not disclosing any details about said disabilities, OPSEC and all].
Not to mention I've always been one infection and a flare up away from my sickness putting me back in the wheelchair or worse [I know, I remember, and that I won't EVER let happen again]
FYI: the last offer I got was under USD1200 (BEFORE taxes) for 49 hours a week, on prems. No Joke.
tldr; I legit ain't sure I'm gonna make it, but with or without me here is my plea: Burn it all the fuck down!
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My new "try to at least stop the descent into increasingly worse burnout" plan is to increase my protein intake.
My theory is that protein is used to make important brain chemicals, so maybe if I increase the available raw materials to make said brain chemicals, I will have more brain chemicals and that might make me less brain urgh.
I can barely drag myself out of bed most days now and there is literally nothing else I can do.
Autistic burnout recovery is not a linear process. It's an ever-changing, morphing, iterative process, that when graphed looks like a big messy plate of spaghetti.
It describes it as:
“Autistic burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate supports. It is characterized by pervasive, long-term (typically 3+ months) exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to stimulus.” ~Raymaker et al, 2020
Typically the Autistic person in question will still have multiple demands in their life that require cognitive resources, despite having little to no resources left to give. Life goes on, as they say.
Trying to figure out how to pivot and make a career change, even with all the logical advice I've been given, is only reminding me how burnt out and risk adverse I am.
I just can't bring myself to start over again, especially with the amount of financial anxiety I have.
Because all I've learned leads to "You have to start over" and I'm too scared to change.
I feel like I’m trying to climb out of quicksand between a variety of work and home stuff that’s built up over time. Finding little pieces here and there to try and regain order, if not actual control. Often I feel like if I could just hit PAUSE on the work for a week I could do so much. Yeah, I know. So I take the slow route instead. I want this weight off my mind and soul. Has someone actually figured this out??