What autistic burnout looks like.
And it’s a lot of staring dazedly at things.
My routines have been forcibly scrambled beyond recognition for too many days in a row and collapse is the only way to survive it without doing myself permanent damage. I have at least one violent meltdown a day, but their duration is getting shorter.
Everything makes me tired, especially strong emotions. I have almost zero capacity to be articulate in IRL social encounters, so I am avoiding them as much as possible. I’ll have a meltdown right after if I have to socialize and find it even slightly stressful. I’m beginning to feel more than apathy, sadness and rage again, which is nice. Those feelings are trying to push up like little germinating seeds in soil.
Tasks I normally do without thinking require extra thought. Executive functioning is at an all time low. Strangely, my ability to be descriptive in fanfic writing is really vivid and strong when I can actually stay focused long enough to work on it. (That fanfic is the Shrinking Project story, a Heisei era Godzilla fanfic.)
I almost got lost in the grocery store and at church last Saturday when I lost sight of my mom. I needed Dr. F (counselor) to show me which way led back out to the waiting room because I got lost in the hall by her office.
My dad makes everything really stressful so you can imagine he is impeding my recovery. I struggle the most with the guilt of feeling useless through no fault of my own because my dad constantly accuses me of being dramatic. I walk away from him a lot and at least he leaves me alone when I walk away. Really, if I wanted to be dramatic in front of him, I would fall to the floor and scream until I turned blue.
But I am so tired. Tired of everything. Tired of feeling pushed aside as unimportant.
I’m showing you this because I know I have autistic followers who look to me for a lot of things. Some of you may be facing burnout right now or went through it before. I’m telling you that you are not alone and you are not useless.
Burnout is shutting down and rebooting into safe mode to prevent a complete system failure. Burnout is evacuating a city to avoid a disaster so the people survive it even if the buildings fall. Burnout is a forest after a fire leaves everything in blackened shambles. Burnout is the disarray of two galaxies colliding after millions of years of spinning through each other.
What do all those things have in common?
They take time to recover and restore order.
You’ll be okay and so will I eventually.