What Is Autistic Burnout, Anyways? Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

So let's say you're an autistic person with level one support needs. Except this blog entry is already getting long, so I don't want to go into all of the symptoms and issues that an autistic person deals with. So let's just use the idea of a blind person, because it might be easier for people to visualize. (No pun intended.) You are a blind person and you've been told that in order to survive, you're going to need to go out and get a job. But in order to get a job, you're going to have to make people feel comfortable around you, and the only way to really do that is to convince them that you can see.

I know that this would probably be impossible in real life, but remember this is a metaphor for what an autistic person would go through. 

So you know you have to get a job in order to survive. And because all living creatures have an instinct to try to survive, you figure out how to do it. You find strategies for every single aspect of your life, so that you can appear to be sighted. 

But remember that because you're pretending to be sighted, cannot have any support or special tools. You can't have a white cane, you can't have a seeing eye dog, you can't use braille, you can't use clocks that say the time out loud, you can't be observed touching things around you too much... You have to stay focused all the time once acting like you're sighted. 

For some people this happens at home as well. So you come home from a long day of pretending to be sighted, and you're exhausted. But your family members, although they do know that you are blind, find it really inconvenient that you're blind and they don't want to make any provisions or allowances for you. So you are expected to behave in the same ways that all the sighted people in your family act and do all the things that the sighted people do. 

If you slip up or start to get frustrated, people get impatient with you. They call you lazy and selfish. They say things like, "Everyone has problems. What makes you think that being blind is any more difficult than our problems?" and, "You're just not trying hard enough. If you really wanted to, you could do these things." Or, "Why do you have to make everything about the fact that you're blind? It's like you're obsessed with being blind." Or, "You know you're not really a blind person. You are a person with blindness. Remember you can do anything anyone else can." 

As time goes on, can you imagine that you might start to get depressed or feel a sense of despair? The pressure gets more and more intense. You may feel deep shame about who you are, because you've been told all your life that you should be able to do these things easily, and so you just must be a failure if you're struggling this much. 

You start to feel fatigued all of the time, from trying to do the right thing and not upset people. Every single thing you do requires a strategy, a plan, a way to make it look like you've got it under control. When you wake up, you usually feel more tired than you did when you went to bed. 

Your other senses become heightened. You may have always had sensitive hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but now the world seems to have been turned on to top volume. All of the sounds hurt your ears. All of the smells give you a headache or make you nause. Everything tastes so strongly and doesn't even taste like it's supposed to. Your shoes feel like they're squeezing your feet and your shirt feels like 100 tiny needles touching your skin. 

You become more emotional. You're so used to feeling anxiety about trying to do the right thing, that now everything makes you anxious. The anxiety becomes debilitating. You become irritable with everything and everyone. Sometimes you just start crying your eyeballs out and you don't have a way to explain why. (Boy. does that make the people around you mad. They say you're acting like a child and trying to get attention.)

You start to have a lot of headaches and stomach aches. You've never really slept well, but now you toss and turn all night. To ease your anxiety, you find yourself rocking back and forth or pulling on your own hair. You always did these things to some degree, because they somehow help you feel more grounded in your body, but you could usually hide it when you were out in public. And now it seems like you're doing these things all the time. People are starting to notice. 

You even feel like you're having trouble thinking straight lately. It's like you're losing your memory little by little... Not all the time but a lot of the time. You have more troubles solving the kinds of problems that used to be able to solve, or dealing with situations you've worked through before. 

You're struggling so much at your job now. What is happening to you? You're going to have to find a way to fix this or you're going to lose your job. And if you lose your job you're going to end up homeless. It's even more difficult to be homeless when you're blind. You keep trying so hard but you keep messing up. No matter what you do you keep messing up. 

That's when you start to develop depression. The deep painful type of depression that makes you fall to your knees crying at night. It gets harder and harder to wake up in the morning. Trying to delay getting out of bed for as long as possible, you stopped taking showers. You stop paying so much attention to the outfits you pick out for work. And once you're at work, you're no longer trying so hard to trick people into thinking you're sighted. It's no longer worth it. 

You can't even buy your own groceries, for goodness sake. First of all the grocery store is excessively loud... Would they please stop yelling announcements into the speaker? And what is that incessant beeping noise piercing my eardrums?... And there's another strong smell around every corner. Plus half the time you get lost in there. 

You hate yourself so much, so incredibly much, because you know that you're supposed to be doing what all of these people around you are doing. These people who are your age and younger, and they're so successful. You failed it being successful. You tried your very, very, hardest, and you still failed. 

That is autistic burnout. 

I hope I've made some sort of sense! 

If you have any questions or thoughts, leave them in the comments!