MORE ACCURATELY, I learned of autistic burnout last week, but set it aside for this week as something to read up on. It turns out to be useful new knowledge as lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life post-diagnosis as compared to life pre-diagnosis.
Rather than trying to craft an overview of autistic burnout, or capture here everything I’ve been learning, for context I’m simply going to link articles and posts I’ve found to be relevant or resonant. Most if not all of these links appear in the first-linked piece, which also offers some helpful pullquotes. If you don’t have time for reading, try the embedded video at the top.
Over a period of years, then, it’s a ticking time bomb. Like arterial plaque increasing the risk of heart attack or stroke, the longterm masking of your autism in order to navigate a neurotypical world increases your risk of burnout.
This got me thinking about the 47 years I lived before receiving my autism diagnosis. I was autistic throughout my life, I just didn’t know it. What effect did that have? To what degree, for example, was I masking throughout those decades without consciously realizing it? If intentional long-term masking (and the other tactics and techniques autistic people use to navigate) can lead to autistic burnout, to what degree would such unconscious efforts explain why my life in middle-age seems so much harder than it did earlier on?
Masking, to be sure, sucks. As do the other tools of navigating the allistic world.
When you know you’re autistic, at least you know the nature of the act you’re putting on. For most of my life (to varying degrees of self-awareness), like most other people, I believed that I was a neurotypical person living in a neurotypical world — but badly, as a failure and a fuck-up. I spent decades doing my best to behave as a neurotypical person, because I had no reason to believe I was anything other than that. I didn’t even think in those terms of art, of course; I simply was like everyone else, just far worse at it than most of the other people around me.