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If you’re looking for the standard definition of autistic burnout, here it is: heightened sensory sensitivities, pervasive exhaustion, and loss of skills, including things like executive function and sometimes even speech. All of that is true. And now do you want to know what the lived experience of autistic burnout feels like? When I was a kid, once in a while in autumn we would take my dad’s magnifying glass outside. We’d grab a leaf, then sit on the patio, using the magnif

The autistic women I work with are intelligent, educated, talented, accomplished people. They are writers, teachers, lawyers, therapists, artists, executives, entrepreneurs, and so much more. They raise families and plant gardens and lead community groups and show up without fail for the people in their lives. They are women who seem to not only have their lives under control, but often seem to pull off the impossible without missing a beat.  And they also tend to be the wome

Many of the women I work with have hit autistic burnout multiple times before I see them. The first few times they hit autistic burnout, they weren’t able to recognize it for what it was because they didn’t even know they were autistic until later in life. So for years, they looked to solutions that helped – temporarily. Sometimes they think their work situation is to blame, so they switch jobs – only to hit the wall of autistic burnout again a few months or a few years later

From the time we're very young, we're trained to disbelieve, ignore, and betray our autistic nervous system. Don't be such a picky eater. Look at me when I'm talking to you. Stop being so sensitive. Everyone else is doing {the thing}, why can't you? The list goes on and on. All those messages are introduced to us so early and reinforced to us so often that eventually we don't even need someone else's voice broadcasting those messages to us; we have them playing on repeat in o

When I think about masking, I tend to think of it as a single action. But really, masking often involves two separate actions: first, suppressing your natural, autistic tendencies; and second, forcing yourself to act in a neurotypical way that feels unnatural. Each can be destructive in its own way. The first divorces us from our self. The second binds us to whom we are not. It reminds me of a speaker I heard many years ago who asked: Who are you? And whose are you? One of th