5 minute read
(autistic burnout, social exhaustion, autistic fatigue, autistic experience, sensory overload, social battery)
There was a period of my life where I genuinely believed I had unlocked some kind of forbidden life hack.
While other people fantasized about tropical vacations, girls’ weekends, cruises, my brain quietly whispered:
What if you committed a crime serious enough to go to prison… but not like, morally horrible… and then somehow escalated things just enough to get placed in solitary confinement for several months?
Just for the uninterrupted silence.
At the time, I truly thought this was a completely reasonable thought process.
Because if you think about it, solitary confinement has a lot of appealing features:
- nobody perceiving you
- no small talk
- no group chats
- no deciding what facial expression to make
- no “quick calls”
- no “just checking in”
- no pretending to care about office birthday cake
Just you. In a room. Forever.
And honestly? That sounded less like punishment and more like an all-inclusive spa package.
Then I watched Parasite.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, one of the characters secretly lives for years in an underground bunker, emerging only occasionally at night to quietly steal food from the fridge while everyone else is asleep.
And instead of reacting like:
“Wow, horrifying.”
My reaction was:
“Oooohhhhhh. A private underground snack bunker. Finally, someone who really understands self-care.”
That should have been a clue.
Most people don’t hear “you’ll never interact with another human again” and think:
“Keep going, I’m listening.”
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I wasn’t quirky.
I was in autistic burnout.
Deep autistic burnout.
The kind where your nervous system is so overloaded for so long that even people you genuinely love start to feel like sensory paperwork.
You stop craving connection because connection costs energy you no longer have.
You stop answering texts because every notification feels like someone knocking on the door while you’re trying to recover from surgery.
You don’t hate people.
You just have an operating system that runs a hundred unnecessary scripts in the background at all times.
For a long time, I misunderstood burnout because I thought burnout meant:
- crying constantly
- dramatic collapse
But autistic burnout can look weirdly calm from the outside.
You might still be able to work.
Still force a smile.
Still appear “fine.”
Meanwhile internally you’re one inconvenience away from selling everything and moving to a log cabin in the woods.
Eventually I realized something important:
When solitude starts sounding less like rest and more like a survival requirement, you’ve gone too far.
Now I try to treat my social energy like an extremely limited luxury resource.
Because it is.
I recharge more.
I say no more often.
I recover before I’m desperate.
And most importantly, I try to spend my tiny little social battery on people and experiences that actually matter to me instead of draining it on obligations, masking, noise, and forced interaction.
I still think an underground bunker sounds kind of cozy, though.
Just maybe not in the clinical burnout way anymore.
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