u/Stone-Salad-427

I sued Meta over a year ago with claims that seemed “crazy” but the evidence and corroboration kept stacking up.

Meta makes racist products that harm children and society. It’s time to say goodbye 👋🏼

Hello!

I have been out of work for over 3 years now after experiencing a catastrophic functional collapse due to autistic burnout, which then of course significantly exacerbated my ADHD, POTS, MCAS, and hEDS. I am very fortunate to have received some private disability benefits which were a benefit from my previous employer, and they require I also apply for social security disability. This has been a task I've put off for a long time because of, you know, functioning. I see threads in this sub often about disability re: autism (should I file? how to articulate? what's process like?) so I thought it could be at least validating and at most useful to share my write-up for the SSD app of how my current disability makes working as I previously did unsustainable.

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My current medical conditions prevent me from performing the core duties of my prior Director-level product marketing role reliably or sustainably. The job required constant executive functioning, ambiguity tolerance, interpersonal interactions, context switching, conflict resolution, and deadlines. These are the exact areas most impaired by my conditions.

Autism/autistic burnout especially when combined with ADHD significantly impairs task initiation, sequencing, prioritization, working memory, task switching, and completion, especially when tasks involve multiple steps, ambiguity, competing inputs, or unclear expectations. I often know what needs to be done but cannot bridge from knowing to doing without external support. I’ve hired external support a couple of times but had to stop it because it was too difficult to manage interacting with others around any sort of deliverable, or remembering to pay people etc. 

I frequently lose access to words, clear thinking, planning ability, and basic task execution. Shutdowns can include being unable to speak or get out of bed. Meltdowns can include extreme emotional dysregulation, striking my own head/face, or self-harm urges. Active suicidality has been more stable only because I have dramatically reduced demands.

My prior role required resolving conflict, negotiating tradeoffs, reading implicit expectations, and influencing people who did not report to me. When expectations are implicit, inconsistent, or suddenly changed, I can become overwhelmed or escalate into panic or shutdown. Even supportive interpersonal interactions can be too demanding if they require consistency, decision-making, or communication.

Meetings, appointments, phone calls, unexpected interruptions, or conflict require extensive masking and recovery. After social or cognitive demands, I may collapse, cry, and/or experience a meltdown. My occasional ability to hyperfocus on a special interest or be “on” for 30 minutes is not evidence that I can work consistently; the pattern is intense effort for a short period followed by exhaustion, shutdown, or several days of recovery.

Sensory processing limitations further impair functioning. Interruptions, auditory input, and sensory unpredictability reduce my ability to cope and increase overwhelm. 

My physical conditions compound these limitations. POTS causes orthostatic intolerance, racing heart, fatigue, lightheadedness, brain fog, and reduced ability to stand or remain upright through long meetings or events; I am often horizontal. MCAS causes stress-triggered multi-system symptoms, including throat tightness, rashes/hives, swelling, GI symptoms, brain fog, and word-finding difficulty. hEDS causes chronic pain, joint instability, plantar fasciitis, fatigue, and frequent injury. 

I need help with self care, meal planning, grocery shopping, home maintenance, parenting logistics during shutdowns, and multi-step tasks like appointments, taxes, and prescriptions. 

Zuckerberg has long been fascinated by Augustus Caesar, the emperor who transformed a republic into an empire and justified harsh means through the promise of order. That is one version of Rome: the ruler’s version, the story of conquest and extraction. But the classical tradition also gives us Philomela, Lavinia, Cassandra, and Penelope: women whose speech had to be contained because it threatened male power.

Women whose tongues were cut out, who were locked away, in an effort to silence their claims against powerful men. Later in Scotland and England, women were similarly punished with the branks, an iron cage locked over the head with a flat bit that pressed down the tongue, sometimes spiked.

Last week, Sarah Wynn-Williams sat in silence for an hour at the Hay Festival alongside Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr. Not silenced by iron, but by paper.

This article explores the tactics used as modern day paper branks: forced arbitration, non disclosure agreements, expensive legal proceedings to make an example out of truth tellers.

Please read and share, and more importantly, buy Sarah's book. While she might be muzzled with paper branks, like Philomena and her loom, Careless People is Sarah's cloth.

I’ve been disabled for a few years.

Going for the second part of a neuropsych tomorrow to evaluate my asd and specifically the autistic burnout costing so much function. I am struggling significantly with executive function, interpersonal anything, self care, sensory overwhelm.

The trick is it’s a 5 hour long appointment and I am still recovering from the first 3 hour appt a month ago. I can’t human for that long.

And they’ve changed the time, the length, even the doctor on me… there’s so much uncertainty and I’ve been a wreck.

My MCAS, POTS, hEDS all acting up because of the stress.

Trying to succeed within a system that is inherently unaccommodating in order to be accommodated is a real mind fuck.

Thanks for listening. ♥️

I wish I were pitching feature stories, writing op-eds, sitting on a backlog of content to share on Substack. I wish it were easier to feed my family, not in the financial sense (although that, too), but in the planning, shopping, and preparing of meals. I wish I were more on top of my kids’ medical appointments, extracurricular demands, more able to support their budding social lives.

But I’m not. I can’t.

Not for a lack of desire. It’s the invisible chain of executive steps. It’s sensory overwhelm. It’s the inability to navigate interpersonal ambiguity. Meal prep, for instance, requires knowing what is already in the fridge, deciding what to make, considering what everyone will actually eat, remembering others’ schedules and planned events, building the grocery list, sequencing the trip or ordering the groceries, putting it all away, focusing on the multi-step process of cooking while constantly interrupted, timing it all right, then recovering from the cognitive load of the whole thing.

For most of my life, my neurodivergence was the vehicle by which I drove harder and faster, until autistic burnout was what careened me off the cliff of my purported capacity. Raymaker and colleagues (2020) describe autistic burnout as pervasive, long-term exhaustion (mental, emotional, physical), loss of function (difficulty with executive functioning, communication, daily living, or previously manageable responsibilities), and reduced tolerance to stimulus (increased sensory overwhelm and lower capacity for cognitive/social demands).

Perhaps you relate because you’re also navigating this burnout, or maybe because you’ve reckoned with your limits some other way, due to chronic illness, disability, caregiving, job-loss, or grief. Maybe it’s perimenopause, adjusting to sobriety, or crawling through mental health issues.

And yet recovering is treated as a consumer choice made from abundance, when for many of us it must be attempted from depletion. Wellness culture promises we can buy or hack our way to a better us, but what about a relationship with limitation that doesn’t require us to overcome it? Attunement over optimization, or an ethic of accommodation and self-compassion rather than self-punishment.

Therapist and researcher Megan Anna Neff, who is herself autistic, teaches that autistic burnout recovery requires a genuine and sustained reduction in demands, not a new system for managing them. The instinct, one I have had a hundred times, is to rebuild the productivity structure, to install the right app or adopt the right routine that will finally make output feel manageable. How many times have I been “almost there” on a Notion system to finally make it all work? Dr. Neff explains that the optimization compulsion is itself a symptom, soothing in the moment but avoidant of the actual need. The actual need might be less. Not better management of too much. Actually less.

Unpredictably, writing is sometimes easy. Other times, I spend weeks wandering through the hours with an empty whiteboard for a mind, unable to locate the marker. Both of those are me. “But I might lose subscribers” is a worry somehow eased through acceptance. I might, and I’ll survive.

I’m doing what I can, as I’m able. The version of me that crushes a live, global news interview is not more real than the version that cannot answer the door. I’ve learned that while many will take the most visible version of us as the truest one, we are allowed to know otherwise.

If you haven’t experienced capacity loss yourself, it’s hard to understand that both versions can be real. People tend to anchor to whichever one they saw first, or whichever one they need you to be most. Our mountaintops become the new baseline–every moment that falls short of it feels like failure, evidence of something wrong or worse, deception.

Capitalism doesn’t run on compassion, we have to carve it out for ourselves. There are likely many people in your life who stand to benefit from believing it’s a lie. For me it’s the former employer I’m suing, my disability insurance, the man I’m divorcing. Maybe, for you, it’s the friends whose own self denial depends on yours, or the partner who’d rather you suffer than he step up.

“Their job is to invalidate you,” my therapist said once, “your job is to take care of yourself anyway.”

Variable capacity demands we stop treating our peaks as promises. The version of you where capacity and ambition were aligned was not a lie, and neither is the one who can’t get out of bed.

I am not offering a solution. Wellness culture has enough of those, and most of them were designed for people with a surplus I don’t have and you may not either. I’m suggesting the metaphorical freezer dinner (or a real one, if cooking is as hard for you, too). I’m suggesting paper plates. I’m suggesting that peanut butter on crackers can be a complete meal.

My kids don’t have a mom who is on top of everything, but I’m modeling that I can love and accept myself anyway. That I can ask for help, that my worth is not measured by my output. That some mornings I can make waffles from scratch, but most of the time I rely on someone I never expected to be my lifeline, their dad (who, fortunately, is not the man I’m currently divorcing), to plan and execute the meals that land on my table.

Learning the actual shape of our capacity rather than the shape we wish it had, or the shape others need it to have, is the beginning of becoming truly well. Not optimization, not hustle. Just: this is what I have today, and I will work with that, and that will have to be enough. Sometimes it will be, and sometimes it won’t, and both are survivable. Gentleness can guide me either way. And sometimes, there will even be waffles.