The Slippery Slope of My Autistic Burnout

The funny thing about autistic burnout is you usually don't know it's coming until you've been in it for a while. When you finally start to wonder why you’re becoming less verbal when you’re feeling stressed. When your responses aren't coming as readily as before. When you're finding yourself leaving more and more events early, or just staying home from them in the first place. 

When you’ve spent months sending your New York nephews to voicemail. 

I thought that I was over the worst autistic burnout experience I've ever experienced in my life. In spring 2022, after my OG Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York friend William Brown died. Ryan and I always pictured hanging out with him when we were still planning to move to Orlando.

The loss of a close friend of 36 years sent me to overwhelm, loss of skills, unbearably depressed hell. (His widower being a total fucking shithead to all of his New York friends didn't help either.) I spent a week crying on the floor and three months barely getting off the couch. I remember feeling lucky that I was “coming out of” the episode when I started a new nonprofit development job that fall.

Now I'm pretty sure those three months of acute autistic burnout really led to three years riding the chronic autistic burnout carousel. When it's so stressful trying to self-care your way out of it, that you keep falling right back into it. Through three years of difficult birthdays and holidays, Shabbats and Passovers. Through many stops and starts with this blog. Through three years of a needlessly stressful nonprofit management job.

The problem is that autistic burnout is not like the burnout non-autistic people experience. Most people become burned out from taking on too much for too long. People like me become autistically burned out from being chronically unable to meet the everyday needs of a world built for people with differently wired brains. 

Since the stress of everyday life is what leads to autistic burnout, there’s not a lot of room to let go of the responsibilities and expectations you need to shed in order to slowly return to being able, simply, to handle your life. What used to be easy becomes nearly impossible. There are only so many household chores, work tasks, social interactions, or even important but energy sapping self-care strategies that you can give up before you're sliding back down that slope into burnout. Over and over, like Diane Freeling sliding into that muddy pool full of skeletons who didn’t like being left behind without their headstones in Poltergeist.

For the past three years, I constantly told myself that I needed to write. I’ve always known that the times in my life when I have felt most myself and most empowered, most able to move forward while keeping all the plates spinning, has been when I have written my blog regularly. I spent most of the time since William died trying to figure out how to make that happen again. 

So what I'm up to probably makes sense now. Changing platforms. Culling my social network. Refocusing on my autistic journey—which is a sneaky way for me to refocus on my autistic health. I’m not sure when it happened, but tiptoeing through my stress, slowly chipping away at things that get dragging me down, opened up enough runway for me to finally get up off the couch.

I feel more like myself right now than I have in years. Since William passed. Maybe even since the late 2000s when my blog was the biggest in Chicago that it’s ever been. I’m curious to see where this heads. 

If nothing else, at least I’m on my feet again.