I was watching the video above earlier this week and it got me reflecting on my own experience with autistic burnout.

I first became familiar with the idea of autistic burnout several years ago when I was confirming my own autism diagnosis. At the time I knew I was burned out at work, but the traditional descriptions of burnout just didn’t seem to completely cover the experience I was having. I had all of the usual trappings, but I was also severely depressed, bordering on suicidal. I was struggling to find anything in life to be excited about. I had no patience for anything anymore, and I just didn’t have the energy to act neurotypical anymore.

When I started learning about autistic burnout, specifically reading the stories from other people experiencing it, I saw myself more and more.

As things went, my burnout got much worse before I found any relief, but lately I’ve been realizing that even though it’s been nearly a year since things started to ease up, I still don’t really feel like the me I used to be.

I got the new job, finished my master’s, work primarily from home, cut my every day stress tremendously. And yet, I still have zero tolerance for things like small chat and even struggle to enjoy my hobbies like I used to. Worse yet, at the first sign of any stress I’m still feeling immediately frayed and overwhelmed.

At the same time, I’m finding the older I get, the more difficult it is for me to mask just in general. There are, obviously, a lot of factors for why this might be, the primary being my work to improve my mental health. Because while I may have been much more successful in masking when I was younger, my mental health was in the gutter. I was getting by in social situations by sacrificing my mental health. I forced myself to appear “normal.” And it ate away at me, day after day, week after week, year after year b

Now I’ve spent literal years working to accept myself and reframe my thinking toward healthier habits. I’ve worked on not just how I act toward myself but how I act toward others and the unfair standards I used to set for myself. All of that means that not only do I refuse to mask in situations I might have when I was younger, but I actively struggle to mask in situations where it was once second nature.

To bring it all back to the video above, and Pete Wharmby’s suggestion that autistic burnout might not be something that is totally recoverable, I’m now wondering if my inability to mask like I used to isn’t also at least partially, a literal reduced ability to mask.

In the video, Pete mentions a trend among autistic individuals (especially those who went undiagnosed as children like Pete and myself) to begin masking at a very young age and continue for a number a years until suddenly they just can’t do it anymore.

For his experience, he thinks this happened beginning in his late twenties, leading him toward discovering that he is autistic when he was in his mid thirties. It suggests that autistic burnout is a long term, wearing condition caused by things like masking (aka our attempts to fit into societal expectations) that only appears after years of stress.

When I think about my own experience in this light, it suggests that my case of burnout didn’t start a couple of years ago, but more than a decade ago when I was still in high school.

My teenage years were not my happiest for a number of reasons that I don’t need to get into here, but especially the end of my high school caree, in my late teens, I hit a point where I could feel that something had to give. And I knew if I didn’t find a solution, what would give would be my life. That’s when I went to therapy for the first time. I was depressed, I wasn’t sleeping, I struggled in social situations to the point of bordering on agoraphobic. But mostly, I was just spiritually exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.

In fact, a song I fell in love with at that time that has stuck with me all these years is Last Night by Motion City Soundtrack. One of the main reasons it’s meant so much to me is the book ended admission that I’d never heard anyone else admit before but which I understood viscerally.

I’m too tired to play pretend.

I just didn’t (and don’t) have the energy to pretend to be someone or something I’m not. I don’t have it in me to be normal.

Now, I wasn’t officially diagnosed as autistic until I was 30, and I didn’t know enough about autism to even suspect it until I was in my late twenties, so it was nowhere on my radar when I was a teenager. And even though I can recall multiple moments where my descriptions of my experiences provided an opportunity for my therapist at the time to suspect, it never seemed to cross her mind either.

So that’s 11 years between the first cracks in my facade of normality and becoming informed enough to make conscious changes to my lifestyle to make things easier for myself. Some of the teachings from therapy through the years, of course, helped. But there was also a lot of struggle where my therapists grew frustrated at my lack of improvement. They would expect me to “get better” and stop dreading social situations. In their view, I was imagining the struggles in social situations and I just needed enough exposure to realize it wasn’t that bad. So to their view, I would hit a wall and stop progressing.

When I think of everything from this perspective, is it really any surprise that a year of reduced stressors hasn’t been enough to relieve my burnout? And after so many years struggling and blaming myself for things I have no control over – after so many years of self-hatred and cognitive dissonance, is it any wonder that I just don’t have it in me to mask anymore?

That’s why I think so many autistic people hit walls like this and suddenly find themselves unable to mask anymore. Because after thirty-odd years, your resolve has been eaten away. And who knows, maybe, if I could take a true break from it all and recover, my ability to mask would return.

But how do you take a break from literally everything? You can’t. So were forced to just continue living our lives at this reduced capacity and find relief where we can get it.

Which goes a long way towards explaining our reduced life expectancy.

No real happy ending for this one this week, other than to say that living my life knowing I’m autistic, learning my limits, and treating myself with kindness is infinitely better than trying to fit in ever was. The people i interact with and the social situations I expose myself to are much more limited than they were when I was a kid, but I really don’t miss any of them that I’ve cut out, nor do I miss the stress that came with them.