The Weight of One Shift
For years, I believed I was just one self-help trick away from becoming “normal.” But the truth is, my autistic body and brain require care, not constant pushing.
For years, I believed I was just one self-help trick away from becoming “normal.” But the truth is, my autistic body and brain require care, not constant pushing.
Nine Miles, Four Hours, and a Meltdown
I signed up to a gig app for working general labor shifts.
I signed up for one 6-hour shift.
I’ve been in autistic burnout since my gender-affirming chest reduction operation turned into a post-operative MRSA nightmare in December 2023.
I took the bus to my shift, and couldn’t work past 4.5 hours. On the bus ride home, mishaps took place because I live in the Midwest in a red state where public transportation and services are vastly underutilized and underfunded. The journey ended up taking me 3.5 hours to travel 9 miles home.
I made it home and had a meltdown. Rushing to turn off every fan in the house until there was total and absolute silence, I ran a cold shower over my body to reduce the heat rash and hives swelling across my face, neck, and chest. I turned off every light and closed my blackout curtains.
I couldn’t even bring myself to cry.
Every day since that day I have averaged 8.5 hours of sleep every night and 3 hours of daily nap time.
To understand this in context you need to understand that growing up and as a young adult, I could never sleep more than 6 hours a night. I frequently woke my parents up at 4 am or earlier as a child. When I had my own kids, my abusive ex-husband chronically forced me to go without sleep for periods longer than four hours. We were married for 7 years. When we got divorced I ended up with a nasty meth habit for about 18 months. I finally kicked that habit in 2017.
I then worked a corporate tech job where I forced myself to engage in burnout workaholic corporate work culture in order to remedy the errors of my ways and any issues with my custody of my children. I worked 60–70 hour weeks and averaged 6.5 hours of sleep every night.
Until 2023. I crashed. I mean I crashed BAD. I didn’t think to postpone my gender-affirming surgery. I had waited too long. But my body rebelled afterwards.
I have been in autistic burnout so long, I don’t even think my conscious brain understands it. So when I tried to push past my body’s limits again, it crashed hard again.
I am finally feeling rested today and more like myself. Five days later. But the fact that I worked one 4-hour general labor shift and took a few hours-long bus ride and it knocked me on my ass to such a large degree has reset my brain.
I really am autistic. It’s not that I have fought the diagnosis by any means, but internally I still feel like maybe I am just one self-help tip away from being neurotypical. Call it magical thinking, I guess. I’m not sure why I do it to myself.
On the bus ride home, mishaps took place because I live in the Midwest in a red state where public transportation and services are vastly underutilized and underfunded. The journey ended up taking me 3.5 hours to travel 9 miles home.
What Autistic Burnout Really Is
Research and lived experience define autistic burnout as more than fatigue, it’s a pervasive, long-term state of exhaustion, loss of function, and heightened sensory sensitivity. It often follows months or years of masking in environments not built for autistic brains, where every routine interaction—lighting, noise, social expectation—stacks like bricks until they collapse a person’s ability to function normally.
Psychologists have described three main features of autistic burnout:
Chronic exhaustion
Heightened sensory sensitivities
Loss of skills and executive functioning
These aren’t temporary setbacks. They can last months, even years, and they often mimic depression or anxiety, which means autistic burnout is frequently misdiagnosed. In fact, one study found that 61% of autistic people who experienced burnout felt it explained their previous mental health diagnoses more accurately than depression or anxiety ever did.
Why “Normal” Tasks Can Feel Impossible
During burnout, things that appear “small” from the outside become monumental obstacles: grocery shopping, answering emails, washing dishes, or—like in my case—taking the bus and working a short shift.
Executive function collapses. Planning, organizing, and decision-making feel like scaling a cliff without ropes. Sensory sensitivities skyrocket, so sounds, lights, or even the hum of a fan can feel intolerable. Self-care tasks like eating, showering, getting dressed become daily mountains to climb.
Burnout is not laziness. It’s not unwillingness. It’s the nervous system’s way of forcing a shutdown when it cannot withstand more input.
Burnout is not laziness. It’s not unwillingness. It’s the nervous system’s way of forcing a shutdown when it cannot withstand more input.
The Weight of a Late Diagnosis
For those of us diagnosed late in life, burnout often comes with an added layer: decades of self-blame. We internalize the idea that we’re just “not trying hard enough,” or that the right productivity hack could fix us. So when burnout finally knocks us down, it feels like proof of personal failure instead of the neurological reality it is.
Late diagnosis means we went years without understanding our energy limits, without tools to cope, and often with the pressure to work twice as hard to “make up for it.” By the time we recognize autistic burnout, we’ve usually been carrying invisible weight for decades.
We internalize the idea that we’re just “not trying hard enough,” or that the right productivity hack could fix us. So when burnout finally knocks us down, it feels like proof of personal failure instead of the neurological reality it is.
Energy Accounting & Spoon Theory
Some autistic advocates describe managing life in terms of “energy accounting,” borrowing from the Spoon Theory. Every action costs spoons, or energy units. You can’t spend what you don’t have without consequences.
Work a shift, take a long bus ride, try to cook dinner afterward and you’ve gone into energy debt. And unlike financial debt, you can’t just grind harder to earn it back. The body shuts down. The only repayment is rest, quiet, solitude, and often an uncomfortable surrender to limits we don’t want to acknowledge.
And unlike financial debt, you can’t just grind harder to earn it back. The body shuts down. The only repayment is rest, quiet, solitude, and often an uncomfortable surrender to limits we don’t want to acknowledge.
Rest is a Radical Act
What I’m learning is that my need for rest is not indulgence, it’s survival. My long naps, my blackout curtains, the cold showers to calm my skin, the silence I create in my space—these are not avoidance strategies. They’re medicine.
Research into autistic burnout confirms this: recovery only comes when we remove demands, reduce sensory input, and allow ourselves to rebuild slowly. Burnout teaches the body to say “no” when our mind still says “push through.”
A Reset is Not a Failure
That one shift didn’t expose a weakness in me. It revealed a truth I keep trying to unlearn: I am autistic. I cannot push my body and brain the way I used to, the way the world tells me I should. And maybe, just maybe, that’s not a failing at all—it’s a reminder to live honestly in the body and brain I have.
That one shift didn’t expose a weakness in me. It revealed a truth I keep trying to unlearn: I am autistic.