Autistic Burnout

First, it's important to understand that autistic burnout is not the same as neurotypical burnout. When neurotypicals get burnt out, it's usually because they have been pushed too hard in a specific area without appropriate supports. I do not intend to minimize this as it's a struggle, too. 

But autistic burnout comes from everything and affects everything. I once heard someone describe it as a brain shutting down and rebooting in safe mode and I feel that's pretty fucking accurate.

Autistic burnout comes in two forms: daily and  long-term. Autistic burnout is often caused by masking (pretending to be neurotypical), but can also be caused by sensory overload, or lacking supports in general.

Daily burnout

Daily burnout comes when someone has overdone things during the day and comes to a point where they cease to function. When I used to work full time, I'd come home and be unable to cook dinner, clean up, or do any evening tasks. I didn't understand autism or that I am autistic so I had internalized the belief that I was lazy. 

When I stopped working and started being a SAHM all of a sudden I wasn't exhausted every evening and I was able to stay on top of my daily responsibilities with ease for the most part (I have always struggled to some degree because of autistic inertia, which I can also talk about some day). At this time I remember saying that I just wasn't cut out to work an eight hour day and while I still did not understand why, the fact that I was succeeding at this time as opposed to when I had been working in an office for eight hours a day was very clear to me.

Daily burnout is just that: daily. One usually recovers for the next day.

Long term burnout

Long term is different. Recovery can take weeks, months, or years. Some people never fully recover. My mom was diagnosed with a "nervous breakdown" but I am now certain it was severe long term autistic burnout.

My experience

In 2016 my family began facing certain struggles and I was the sole person working on supporting everyone, making sure their needs were met, fighting the system for their rights, and also trying to succeed in university. While I have many supportive and loving friends, they were all living their own struggles and my family is not supportive, those that are still alive, anyway. All of the effort I poured into this, combined with my fears and other emotions, plus a new diagnosis of a rare, painful, and scary disease, combined with a Trump presidency and a descent into fascism, and then also my cat tried to die and I had to feed her via tube three times a day for several months… All of that eventually took their toll on my poor brain and it shut the fuck down in November 2019, rendering me too disabled to work or function mostly at all. (Which in turn affected my physical health further and the whole thing snowballed for the next two years.) When my kids' dad died in June of 2020 it only got worse.

As autism itself, autistic burnout is different from person to person and mine looked like: near complete loss of my executive functioning, near complete loss of my ability to mask, plus depression like whoa which shot hateful thoughts at me all day every day and made me incapable of not crying all the time, regardless of whether I was in public or not. I have always had autistic meltdowns but they increased in number and severity. At times I was punished for them. I did not know who I was anymore. It was horrible.

I thank goddess (um, and, frankly, weed) for my sudden understanding that *I* am autistic one night a couple of months before my burnout hit. Knowing I am autistic, and understanding what burnout is helped me to heal so much faster than I ever could if I believed I was neurotypical. A teacher friend who had had a student with a severe brain injury introduced me to the term “brain rest” and while it may technically be different than healing from autistic burnout, having the term and knowing it to be neurologist -approved, gave me the power to allow myself to rest my brain. I smoked a lot of weed and played a lot of video games and just allowed myself to rest, not stress, and to have happiness flow through me in a way it wasn’t doing very often at the time.

Please don’t think I was being lazy. I worked hard at the same time. I worked hard on my psyche, coping skills, and interpersonal skills. I worked hard at keeping up with my life to the best of my ability. But there was so much that I couldn’t do at this time that I refused to allow myself to be angry or to shame myself. Because those things would have inhibited my ability to heal - I’ll never know exactly why my mother didn’t recover from her own autistic burnout, but I do believe it’s at least partly because she never stopped hating herself.

I am still not quite my normal self again, and it’s possible I never will be, but I am SO MUCH BETTER than I was three years ago. I also attribute this to Adderall and appropriate medication and dose for depression (trintellix for me). Without these store bought brain chemicals, I would still be very, very broken.

What you should take from this

Brains are delicate, neurodivergent brains are particularly delicate. Our needs *must* be met for us to avoid trauma and to thrive. It is not laziness, it is not incompetence, it is not anything the neurotypical capitalist world will tell you it is. It is okay to produce less. Your mental health must always be your priority, because without it, you will have nothing. And I am not saying that as a lecture to anyone struggling because the truth is that for far too many of us, we have no choice in this world: keep producing or die. This is a call to action for my neurotypical friends to be our allies and our supporters and work to help make the world more accommodating for all of us, neurodivergent or not.