Burnout

Burnout

When I first found out I was autistic, I was so excited! I had missing information I needed to fill in the gaps of who I was. But there was so much work to do that it was kind of overwhelming to think about. Plus I got a phone call from work about things to do before the start date, so I started working on that stuff. My “stress-less life” is coming to a close. I’m ready to tackle the next big thing…or at least I thought I was.

Since receiving the diagnosis, I’ve had a sort of paralysis in doing anything, getting out of bed, making decisions, even forcing myself to eat. It’s not easy to admit, but it happens sometimes. It’s a problem with executive dysfunction. I talked to my psychologist, and she said to simplify my choices, make it easier on myself, try to schedule when I do things so I can motivate myself to do things during a certain time, etc. A couple days ago, I started getting sleepy and not wanting to talk to people as much. It started Thursday when I had a hang out with a friend. It was the first in-person hang out that I’d had in a long time. It went well, even though both of us are okay with silence, so there was no awkwardness between thoughts and neither of us felt rushed to fill the silence. A strange thing happened about halfway through though. I felt my face fall flat. “Oh no” I thought. “I need to do something with my face!” So on a scale of one to ten, ten being full-fledged manually making faces like a machine and one is naturally not even thinking about my facial expressions (I’m never near a one), I went from a three or four to a ten. It felt like my face was a puppet, and I was working behind the scenes as fast as possible to make the correct facial expressions while trying to listen to what he said. It went from a “normal” conversation to one of the most exhausting conversations I’ve ever had in a split second, and it terrified me.

My mask had slipped, and I was afraid it had crumbled. Even before that, I started to have tears in my eyes with no reason why for hours at a time. Usually I could keep up a smile around my husband, but that wasn’t happening. He finally asked what was wrong, and I couldn’t explain it correctly. A diagnosis rationally shouldn’t change anything about a person, and those who haven’t had diagnoses explain symptoms they’ve had for months or years (or in this case all my life) don’t understand the impact having a name for the missing ingredients can have on a person! Heck, I’ve had several of them, and this one is messing me up in ways I hardly understand.

So if someone is freshly diagnosed and they tell you, give them a hug if you can! Tell them you love them. Don’t tell them that it doesn’t change anything about them, because more than likely it somehow does in ways they can’t put into words yet.

One more thing before I end this post. I was feeling especially lonely on the autistic front, so I searched autistic Facebook groups and ran across one that I joined. It had a list of rules that basically meant support the person, don’t diagnose them or their family members, and don’t put them down. I thought I had gotten the hang of it, and then this morning one of my comments got deleted. I felt crushed. I was about to make a comment on another post, and the list of rules came back up to read. I read through them again and couldn’t find where I had gone wrong! I wanted to cry. This was supposed to be the place where I was free to fit in. When all of society had rules and regulations that I couldn’t understand, an autistic community was supposed to be a place where I could be myself. I wanted to leave. But I reached out to the moderators and asked what happened, which comment was deleted, and which rule I broke so it wouldn’t happen again. They couldn’t find it. I’m crushed. It makes me feel like nobody is safe to talk to because I will mess everything up.