Some are even naming it: burnout. We are, all of us, charred remains, nothing left of us but blackened bones. It is a state of being in which I have some expertise. Autistic people are intimate with burnout, particularly those who, like me, were not diagnosed until late into adulthood. Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm. For me, the years trying to conceal my sensory distress and social dislocation in everyday life meant that I bounced in and out of burnout.
