u/Leading_Purpose_2806

Note: This post was intended as an insight into autistic burn out that might help make sense of how terrible it feels, but it ended up being mostly a rant. But I kinda liked the whole thing so here you go.

Does anyone else feel that each burn out takes away the part of you you were most scared of losing?

I think the cruelest thing about burn out, which might be too subtle to be noticed, is that it takes away the entire predictive system of self.

Autistic people live on predictive systems. That’s how we approach the world. That’s one of the few things we can do well. We precieve more than we need and it gets stored and gives us an illusion of certainty that we need to regulate ourselves.

Such a stupid concept. A brain that needs certainty in a universe can only increase in chaos.

But my point was: you reach a point of such bone deep exhaustion that you can’t predict how many hours it’ll take you to convince yourself to go brush your teeth. Let alone do anything else.

And with it you can’t predict how much you can be what you think you are.

And you can’t act in any way to make it true again.

I mean you try. And it works and then you crash. And you try again harder longer. You crash worse. Until you learn to just stop trying. Or actually, your nervous system realizes what you’re doing and presses non negotiable breaks.

A collapse that can go on, for so long, and long enough for you to have forgotten what it was like. You can no longer generate the felt sense of self you had.

I think for many high functioning autistic people we kinda literally build our identity, it requires a certain kind of proof, we don’t have the capacity to claim to be anything we don’t think we are.

It’s just an oxymoron our brain can’t compute.

Even though the capacity to do that is how people actually move about existing, that’s kinda the definition of confidence: a belief in a capacity to take action towards being/doing… etc

Confidence is a feeling that can only prove itself in retrospect.That’s its origin story. Only after that does it become a fact that doesn’t require proof. That’s the normal construction of a brain.

But our brain keeps asking: why? How? So we exhaust our self building proof of what we think we are. And we burn out in the process.

And one of the first things to go and last to come back, because it’s the most energetically expensive part of consciousness, is our identity. Our felt sense of who we are.

Burn out takes away everything, but most painfully our capacity to do anything, let alone the conscious structuring and majoring of an identity.

That should come naturally. It doesn’t.

I could be wrong… this could be my perspective because I lack form of support system. That was partly by choice because from my experience support in my family was an illusion, ungrounded. You get to think you’re being supported while your actual job is to be as small as possible so that people around you can feel big.

Im sorry but when you require people to stay small around you so can be big…. I mean… your size just defined itself… it’s right there in the sentence… has humanity given up on actual rationale and created a collectively accepted irrationality and sold it as logic?

But I digress. I am vey bitter about my own experience tbh, justifiably so, but I wish I’d stop. It’s not serving me in any way. It just fills me with rage, but not rage I can use as momentum. Just rage with which I can dig myself a deeper hole. And sit in it.

TL;DR: autistic burn out sucks.

TL;DR: I’m questioning the impossibility of solving the equation of an autistic burn out. What you need to get out of it is the exact thing you’ve lost the capacity to do. At some point it feels like a car spinning its wheels in the mud only to push itself deeper in it.

Does anyone else feel this overwhelming indignation when a dr tells you that your nervous system shut down all functions to keep you alive, and then praises your resilience for surviving whatever major blow (and I’m sure much more) that decimated you?

As if staying alive is a skill to be applauded?
As if my nervous system did me a favor by shutting down? Because what? It thinks I want to exist as a hollowed out shell, breathing, without any visible reason to justify the immense pain and shame and exhaustion, yet paralysed for a reason you cannot explain.

You literally lose access to yourself…

Why would my nervous system think I want this? Where’s the resilience in maintaining a body that is now only capable of feeling pain, rage, and shame?

When your first thought when you wake up is how you’ll get through another day… and why… and for what?

This cycle of rebuilding and collapsing… I mean at some point you gotta realize the pointlessness of pushing that boulder up the mountain every day wouldn’t you!

My nervous system shut down my access to myself. My access to any capacity that can validate any reason to take up space.

Understand that cognitively I don’t believe that, i have full sympathy for the person inside me experiencing this. I am not saying I don’t deserve to take up space.

I am saying why would you assume I would want to? Why the fuck would someone want to exist in this state? When they don’t have the capacity to generate the bare minimum of personhood. A felt sense of self… I’ve collapse so many times I’m fragmented, in a way that I doubt is repeatable anymore… and this is not depression, it’s just realism…

And out of sympathy for that fragmented self I’m asking:

Who wants a nervous system so resilient that it keeps you breathing for a year or two years, or fucking five years, stuck inside your head observing yourself become 0.1% of what you ever thought you could be.

Watching the world go on without you…

I call it: Applauding rubble.

I don’t have the energy to produce a coherent explanation, and maybe that’s for the best.

Instead I’m going to drop a few sentences that loop, construct, and deconstruct themselves in my head until a coherent description of how I’m feeling comes out.

This relates to autistic burn out, cognitive functions, consciousness and awareness and much more.

I will drop it here.

And I am open to any reaction (that these sentences might trigger in someone) that crosses the threshold of observing (and replying mentally), and moves into a constructed reply.

Hence, I’ll label this a study.

Here are some the sentences that looped themselves into existence:

"I built a self. Literally. That self was someone who did everything I told her. That was my literal identity. And then I ran out of fuel."

"The impermanence of everything has taken away any meaning of being ok."

"Objective reality is impossible. When I internalise that, maybe my mind will rest. There is no: what really happened. There is now. Choices and acceptance without excuse."

"Forward action is constrained by the amount of dissonance it encodes and the capacity of the system to compute said dissonance."

"I've needed to model reality to justify the way I exist. But needing to model reality is what I exist the way I exist. That's the real justification isn't it."

"I am so self assured in every decision I make for myself, however ‘Don't listen to my advice because look at where I'm at’ When I say that, when I notice myself saying that out loud, it means I'm fragments. Pieces. Nothing."

And added note for the cognitive sciences community, I am aware of the personal nature of these sentences, and I have other texts that explain it in a much more objective and scientifically oriented way, however there’s a different essence to present raw thoughts that can imply a much more layered concept, and I wanted to experience the general reaction to that. (And maybe using it as an excuse to not put my literally cognitive science studies under scrutiny).

I don’t have the energy to produce a coherent explanation, and maybe that’s for the best.

Instead I’m going to drop a few sentences that loop, construct, and deconstruct themselves in my head until a coherent description of how I’m feeling comes out.

This relates to autistic burn out, cognitive functions, consciousness and awareness and much more.

I will drop it here.

And I am open to any reaction (that these sentences might trigger in someone) that crosses the threshold of observing (and replying mentally), and moves into a constructed reply.

Hence, I’ll label this a study.

Here are some the sentences that looped themselves into existence:

"I built a self. Literally. That self was someone who did everything I told her. That was my literal identity. And then I ran out of fuel."

"The impermanence of everything has taken away any meaning of being ok."

"Objective reality is impossible. When I internalise that, maybe my mind will rest. There is no: what really happened. There is now. Choices and acceptance without excuse."

"Forward action is constrained by the amount of dissonance it encodes and the capacity of the system to compute said dissonance."

"I've needed to model reality to justify the way I exist. But needing to model reality is what I exist the way I exist. That's the real justification isn't it."

"I am so self assured in every decision I make for myself, however ‘Don't listen to my advice because look at where I'm at’ When I say that, when I notice myself saying that out loud, it means I'm fragments. Pieces. Nothing."

I am not asking if anyone has the capacity for meta-cognition. I am sure most people in this community are, as it comes with the package of being an INTJ.

It’s a simple skill to develop (for those to whom it doesn’t come natural), the hardest part about conscious implementation is accurate self perception.

Meta-cognition is only reliable if one has looked inside, seen the shadows, seen the good and the bad, and accepted the bad as a fact even if it tarnishes their own view of yourself. Building it requires genuine restructuring of self perception.

Only then will your meta-cognition be an accurate thought process you can trust. But I digress.

My question was: does anyone experience it as their first level of thinking, and need to make a mental effort to step out of it and look at things from the ‘first order’?

A lot of people could be doing that and not aware it’s what they are doing, the “symptoms” or “proof” that you are doing it is:

1. People around you find your answers to things a little weird and out of context
2. You struggle intensly and maybe even are incapable of small talk (I am not saying you dislike it, we all do, I am saying

you are

1. incapable of it, or

you have

1. become incapable of it lately)

3. You need to explain a lot of what you say to make sense

5. You try to not even interject because you’re aware of the mental cost of ‘making sense’ to those around you

I think this is a more of a ranting post presented as a curious question. But to be honest it is extremely alienating to exist this way, to the extent of just feeling wrong. When literally no one around is like you, at some point you question the validity of your own experience.

As INTJs, we value our mind above all else. If we can’t trust it, what is left?

And I’ll add, as a final note, as I’m proofreading it pre-posting, I think this entire post, structure and content, is exactly my question/mental prison. And I think people will either intensely relate to it or completely dislike it.

PS. Edited for typos/structure issues.