I have a confession to make. I am more than 30 years old and I still really don’t have a system of tracking and recognizing when I’m approaching autistic burnout. The situation Anne Corwin describes here, running on momentum, operating on a depleted state until a crash happens, is the story of my life.
I’ve written on burnout before, but it seems particularly relevant after last year’s COVID lockdown. A lot of people got a taste of burnout during that time. Sometimes it was the lack of people, sometimes using technology like Zoom, sometimes it was simply cabin fever. Or all of these, plus more.
Perhaps it was a familiar sensation for some people. For me, it certainly was. It was, in fact, almost normal.
How It Started
Autistic burnout has followed me my whole life, beginning with the demands of school. The fact that I liked learning and was fairly decent at learning in the school setting helped somewhat. But the fact is that the demands of peer interactions, the incessant noise, and the roughness and tags in my clothes all stole my energy. I was expected to develop at the same rate as my peers. But in a lot of important ways, I simply couldn’t keep up. I withdrew into myself rather than reach outward the way my peers did.
I’ve mentioned that I was bullied in elementary school, quite possibly as young as 1st grade or even Kindergarten. I can’t quite remember, but I do recall very little help was forthcoming from either the school district or my parents. Efforts were made to enlist my teachers, mostly with no results. The bullies still targeted me day after day. So naturally I withdrew more, because I just needed to survive the day. Every day was like that: the environment exhausted me, and then people went out of their way to make it worse.
That was how my life went, and it continued even after my dad’s job necessitated moving to another state.
Crashes
I can count, on one hand, the number of times in my adulthood that I’ve publically crashed and inconvenienced or upset the people around me. Two.
Once, when I was already doing poorly and we visited my grandmother in a temporary nursing home, I became overwhelmed and had to leave the building to hide in the car. At the time, my mother suggested I learn to predict things like that, so everyone wouldn’t be uncomfortable again in the future. In retrospect, it was a hideously ableist thing to say. Uncharitably boiled down, that translates to, “it is not acceptable for you to visibly be upset, so expend extra effort so others won’t be discomforted by you having emotions.”
I’d be mad about it, but that’s the exact tripe society teaches most women. She merely repeated the same toxic expectations expected of all of us.
The second time was the visit of a then-friend from college. We talked for a very long time, and my brain began to fill up with words. I didn’t recognize I was running out of energy until it was too late, and I ungracefully bundled her out of the apartment and said goodbye. I’m quite sure she was hurt, and when it was later discussed, she suggested the exact same thing as my mother.
I’ve never been able to follow their advice. If I was a car, the gas gauge would be stuck just above Empty, with the warning light on. I simply don’t seem to have a functioning interface to tell me I’m 15 minutes or 2 small failures away from a crash, or a meltdown.
Mostly, I simply avoid the possibility of a crash. That means avoiding a lot of social situations, outings, and possible adventures. Not a healthy, viable solution, I don’t think.
Still Overwhelmed
In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve moved that much beyond that “I just need to survive today” mentality, even after literal decades. I’ve learned to think in the long term, make important decisions wisely (or as wisely as possible). Projects have due dates, after all. I made and kept various medical and social appointments. I managed myself well enough to graduate from college with a Bachelor’s degree and hold an internship and a couple jobs.
It’s probably fair to say I developed the adult skillsets around the existing survival mindset. Autistic burnout is an ever-looming threat, fended off a day at a time.
The thing is, the world hasn’t become much less overwhelming. Existence is still loud and full of sounds that cause me pain. People are still demanding and not understanding. And though I’ve raised my voice to protest and explain, it still doesn’t really feel like people are listening.
My personal experience aside, one could argue things have actually gotten worse. Take 2016’s sharp nosedive into open tribalism and white supremacy. The decades of murder, violence, and exclusion visited upon the black and brown communities coming into sharp focus for white middle class people like me. And of course 2020, the year many people locked ourselves away except for work. It was the best way to avoid killing our friends and family with a virus we weren’t prepared for.
I’m not the only one feeling overwhelmed. A lot of my autistic friends went into almost total radio silence during the pandemic. I haven’t asked whether that’s because they, too, had collapsed in on themselves in autistic burnout. I hope not.
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