Autistic/ND Burnout — an essay of introspection and reflection
Introduction
If you were to ask me what burnout is… I honestly don’t know how to define it, but I’ll do my best to share a subjective perspective of what it can feel like (feel free to share your experiences with it as well if you feel comfortable).
Burnout… A thing that I’ve made a hell for myself in as I struggle to be kind to myself. A thing subconsciously living inside my mind ever since the pandemic hit. It’s like something that you’re still searching for answers in… but at the same time, you can’t see the obvious answers right in front of you. Burnout is more like a bed that you don’t have the battery to get the hell out of because you’re just being there, without having the internal motivation to get out of bed some days. Sometimes it feels more like a point in your life where you need the reality to hit you about the fact that you’ve been in a state of sleep while awake, but also a state of you not being fully aware and awake like a wandering soul seeing shit through the eyes of your own body.
“What does burnout mean to you?”
This is a question I haven’t thought since I feel like I am becoming more passive with myself and with life because there isn’t a fucking point in being both a people pleaser and someone you aren’t anymore. I’m also learning that I cannot ever make others happy nor can I win against neurotypical standards that continues to fuck me up.
What Burnout Feels Like
Burnout is also more like a prison you’re stuck in… something that is more of a social limbo where you need to check in with yourself but it makes you essentially behind everyone else. It’s something that makes you a person with less fuel than usual, with more difficulty in trying to understand yourself and to truly understand your own emotions. That also includes the internalised ableist, racist, xenophobic, and bigoted biases that continue to be stronger and that continue to be picked up.
However, you also don’t have the battery to combat bullshit you have to deal with since it’s vital to be able to combat the bullshit you’ve subconsciously internalised. It’s not just the people around you parroting bullshit that they’ve noticed from their own upbringing, but also the shit still ingrained in their subconscious.
Those who shame you for expressing your limited tolerance with people are the pieces of shit in your life because not everyone is fortunate to have good luck with people (social shit as well), and with prejudging people before befriending them. I’m not going to lie, as someone who trusts too easily, me not prejudging people before befriending them has gotten me nowhere in sorting my own shit out as I’ve surrounded myself with past assholes, who are implicitly bigoted, ableist and racist, but I guess I am currently working on that. There’s always going to be people who will not only lie about you, but will also lie while making accusations against you over shit you didn’t even do. Anyone, regardless if someone’s an adult or minor, is more than capable of using personal information you provide against you and are more than able to frame you of shit labels you aren’t.
I want you to try to do something for yourself (this is completely optional):
Begin by closing your eyes and by resigning yourself to anything you’re able to remember. Think of the times that you were shamed for taking breaks or that you were expected to put others’ needs above your own, and if you didn’t, then too bad for you, you were expected to get over yourself. Those who’ve shamed you only think about their own self-serving belief that they’re ‘helping’ you, which is far from true.
All they are doing is setting you up to be taken advantage of by abusive pinfucks who use tactics manipulators and abusers have against you. You hide from yourself that you’re not actually doing better but worse from other people, and from yourself. People who ask you how you’re doing may not want the real truth (depending) on how close you are to people outside of your close social circles. They only want surface level bullshit with a dash of fuckery on surface-level solutions that only work for specific people.
Imagine being in a dark room, alone, and you feel like you can’t take anymore of life’s bullshit, feeling like you’re not actually helping yourself help you get better. You’re all cooped up and you feel like you’re almost at your breaking point.
Remember the times that you were given a lot of unnecessary bullshit for needing to take breaks or even with all the internalised self-help bullshit you’re invalidating yourself with as it’s an extension of the self-help and self-love bullshit people invalidate and emotionally abuse you with.
As an Autistic trans man who’s multigender, I relate to this with my own experiences that only apply to me, since experiences with burnout vary from person to person. Those experiences with burnout itself also vary based on a person’s intersections of where they’re both oppressed and privileged. It’s (unfortunately) very easy to forget to be intersectional about it while only focusing on aspects that are relevant to you. Burnout is a panopticon hell that feels like it is a making of your own, but that is the exact opposite of what others and even yourself would like to believe.
It’s a hell that builds up based on how many outside factors that add onto self-doubt and self-hatred towards yourself, and with people deflecting their contributions to that self-doubt and self-hatred by claiming that you are ‘at fault’ for being so burnt out and for being unable to be so kind to yourself. That onus is then placed onto you for having difficulties with boundaries (even though you’re not actually at fault for having those difficulties as boundaries are a lifelong thing for anyone to learn) in protecting yourself from instances of discrimination and bigotry, and also in instances of people acting like fuckshits towards you.
It consumes you like you’re reduced to nothing more than a tired, weary, exhausted shell of a human being who once felt hopeful about society’s bitch ass in hopes that it would stop being less ableist, racist and bigoted, even though it’s already an ableist motherfucker in the first place. It eats at your remaining will to carry on and to live with bullshit people pile onto you as expectations of who you’re ‘supposed’ to be shapes you. Shit, I’m still needing to learn the fact that not everyone hates me, but not everyone has to like me or want me as a friend because I don’t like everyone either, nor do I have to be anyone’s friend either (and I know how the previous instances of that has turned out from my past experiences on Discord).
There’s some painful, but genuine shit (pertaining to burnout) that needs to be said. It’s shit that no one ever tells you about:
Both marginalised and racialised Autistic and ND persons are still continuously expected to prove their worth to live to white, privileged neurotypical persons (in general) as they keep expecting us to cater to NT and white social and societal expectations since they’ve shown how badly they’ve fucked up at having a supposed (or lack thereof) capability at understanding our honest experiences about what burnout really feels like from individual to individual.
Various, personal accounts of burnout are silenced and invalidated by people who claim that one is making shit about themself (even though that is far from the truth). In reality, those who claim that folks dealing with burnout are making shit about themselves are the ones who make shit about themselves and expect shit to be about them (it’s definitely the fucking projection) and they’re just projecting their ableism and overall bigotry onto others who don’t fit into their NT narratives (that have been proven to be false and debunkable) of how people (or humanity in general) actually work.
These individual accounts of burnout have been invalidated by people with zero comprehension of how burnout actually makes a person feel. This includes lived experiences providing personal, but solid perspectives on what burnout actually feels like.
ND and Autistic perspectives of burnout are continuously ignored, disrespected, drowned out and dismissed, and so are marginalised and racialised ND and Autistic voices on them (that includes the inalienable right to have access to them). We’re made out to be ‘confused children’ who don’t know themselves and are void of our intimate understanding of our bodies (including the ND and Autistic body-mind connection), emotions, and our own inner worlds and minds. To be frank, I find those assumptions to be bullshit because ableist, racist, and overall bigoted pissfuckasses (again) have proven to not only be ignorant, but also full of shit from the part of assholes.
We’ve also demonstrated numerous times (and more than numerous times) a more genuine understanding of our experiences with burnout than any bigoted, racist and ableist jackass ever will.
Burnout and Stigma
The amount of stigma associated with burnout and with Neurodivergent and Autistic issues is a real thing that is still pervasively normalised (regardless of societal progress with mental health and with what self-help collectively [and individually] means from society to society) as an additional layer to systemic and intersectional ableism. NT, white, Eurocentric, Christian/Xtian, abled, non-intersex & allocishet (etc) society punishes us with its intersectional ableism, racism, colonialism, xenophobia/misia, and overall bigotry.
Masking your own burnout isn’t just a painful experience. It is also a bittersweet experience since stigma on it can come from people you’re close to in your life, regardless of your boundaries and relationships with them.
Some Brief Thoughts on My Personal Experiences with it
I don’t talk about my experiences with burnout as often, as I have a tendency to bottle shit up and to keep shit to myself (and also a fear of misremembering shit on purpose, including a fear of lying about my memories unintentionally and intentionally), and also because “I have nothing to do” for the comfort of others (meaning: to coddle and make others think that I ‘have nothing to do’ when in reality, I tend to be caught up inside my head and I’m more of an overthinker and an overworrying guy).
Life Lessons To Keep In Mind & Conclusion
There are some life lessons around burnout that need to be stated and taken into consideration…
Your experiences with burnout will be your own, and you’re the expert on them. You cannot understand every single experience of burnout, no matter how much you educate yourself on them and how much internalised bigotries you can realistically unpack. You also cannot unpack everything regardless where your intersections of privilege and oppression lie.
To me, burnout is more of an experience where you’re only able to speak for yourself to get out there in a world of inaccurate misinformation of burnout being signs of Autistic regression, gender dysphoria, and/or something else.
A last life lesson:
Setting boundaries and learning to trust yourself takes fucking LIFE to learn and manage. It also takes having shit days with yourself including any experiences of internally going through hell with self-doubt and self-hatred you also need to manage for the rest of your life in making shit easy for yourself (as a semantic way of saying that you need to keep letting yourself heal). You also cannot ever deal with your shit alone (which is something that I need to apply to myself as well).
You’re a social being who NEEDS people, not the other way around, as the Self-Help/Love industry tries to intentionally bullshit you with. Also, fuck the medicalisation/therapisation and HRification of human experiences, emotions and relationships. Fuck the inappropriate usage (or bastardisation) of therapy speak and the normalisation of victim-blaming, sanism, ableism, abuse and manipulation tactics as well (they don’t serve you and will not save you from the shit you’re currently dealing with).
