I Don’t Agree With the Kurgan

“I have something to say;  It’s better to burn out than to fade away!”

Is it though? Because, I burned out almost 5 years ago and I’m still fucking spiraling daily. I genuinely don’t know if there’s an end to it. There certainly isn’t one in sight for me yet. And I’m not talking about the regular, run-of-the-mill burnout. That’s right, however much of a shock it may be to anyone who knows me and reads this, how you feel about it has nothing on how I felt when I was hit with the crushing realization that I am, as I now understand, autistic, and I–quite privately–had a complete and utter internal collapse of self. I wish I just had, like, a mid-life crisis like you see in the movies. Like, “Oh, that Dan! He pierced his nipples, got a dangly earring that connects to them, and he’s dating a couple of really nice strippers! What a card,” or something like that. Nope. Not me. I always have to do things the wrong way. Instead of something dumb and ultimately meaningless like that, my entire fucking psyche just…exploded.

Dude’s just fucking gone.

It began with a series of setbacks I won’t go into that started piling up, new responsibilities joining the mix, then much more serious internal shit I also won’t be getting into started happening, and all of that piled up too until I just, like, shut off. It was like I was a computer and all of my RAM was in use, but I just kept opening up as many instances as possible of the most RAM-hogging processes I could find until said RAM shorted out and I got the blue screen of death. Then, when the computer somehow finally came back on, it was back to factory default settings and all of my programs and files were gone. 

But I’m not a computer, I’m a human being. So, my files being erased is a lot more scary. Now, things that I thought truly defined me are totally alien. Skills I had and honed for years, even decades, are fucking gone (possibly forever). My already not-at-all-robust social life is pretty much non-existent outside of my core family. The smallest frustrations or setbacks feel absolutely insurmountable and often lead to meltdowns or shutdowns, and I am always stressed at max capacity. I don’t remember what it’s like to not be in fight or flight. I don’t sleep, but I also feel like I can’t stay awake. There is such a crushing emptiness in me that is so hard to face that it literally resets me every single time I try to. It’s like a significant portion of me died.

Because, really, it did. If it ever really lived in the first place.

When you realize that the person you always thought you were was a mere construct that you built for survival in a world that isn’t made for people like you and 100% doesn’t want you in it, it’s one of the most horrific, bitterly lonely feelings you could ever have the misfortune of encountering, and I hope like hell that you (whoever the fuck ever even reads this) never do encounter it. And, of course, even knowing the things I know now, I can’t help but feel like I did something wrong. Because apparently that’s how high-functioning autistic kids rewire themselves. Everything is framed like you’re always in trouble and you’re always being rejected, whether or not any such thing is really happening. The fact that it took me so long to realize that I am autistic, even though I literally have autistic family members, is something I’m having quite a bit of trouble reconciling. Because the signs were always there. Like, literally for my whole entire fucking existence.

So, here’s a bit of story time for you.

When I was really little, I learned very quickly that most people I met and/or knew didn’t think or understand things the way I did. Didn’t feel things the way I did, nor as deeply. Didn’t express things the way I did. And I knew that they knew it too, because I was (and still am) constantly told I was too weird, too blunt, too focused on the ‘wrong’ things, too smart for this, too stupid for that, too quiet, too annoying, too lazy, too jumpy, too earnest…just too much.

I was always made to feel like I was in trouble or that I was wrong, even though I was literally just trying to exist. To survive. “Stop chewing on your shirts/toys/nails/pens.” Sorry, I felt like I was gonna die, and that helped me not die somehow. “Stop watching that stupid fucking movie.” Sorry, this stupid fucking movie is the only thing that made me feel like a human all day and I don’t want to feel like an alien. “Stop listening to that album over and over again.” Sorry, that album cuts through to my inner strife in a way literally nothing else ever has, and I need to listen to it to survive and not completely meltdown.

Meltdowns…fuck, man, I’ve had meltdowns my whole life and didn’t even know it. I quite vividly remember the early ones. Especially the ones I had about going to school, which were hand-waved as me being a mama’s boy or a homebody or something. In reality, I was going through intense, personal, internal struggles I neither knew how to articulate nor how to stop. A five-year-old shouldn’t have to not only deal with those intense feelings alone, but also have to hide them so they don’t get in trouble for having them. A five-year-old shouldn’t have suicidal ideation, and even know exactly how they’d do it if it became necessary. That’s right, necessary. But that’s what happened. That’s what I had to do. That’s what my reality was.

I did get to the point that I was able to stave off the before-school meltdowns, so I wouldn’t get in trouble at home. The problem, however, was that they were still brewing, whether they popped off or not. They just weren’t allowed to fire full-force until a later point in the day–just after school breakfast. I started hiding the instant I got into the school proper in the morning, every morning. On days where I was feeling more level or okay, I’d run to the library, grab a Dr. Seuss book (usually “The Sneetches”, an irony I greatly appreciate these days), and read it at one of the back tables until someone discovered me and made me go to class. I preferred those days.

On days where I knew a legit meltdown was going to happen, I’d do everything I could to hold it together on the way to school and through breakfast, then when I left the cafeteria, I’d sneak to this set of always-open double doors at the kindergarten wing. I could squeeze behind the right-hand door, huddle up in the corner, block out the sensory overload, and have the meltdown as privately as possible. Though, I couldn’t really have it. Because I couldn’t let it out. I couldn’t let anybody see or hear it. If I let it out full-force and let it run its course, I’d be found and I’d get in trouble. So, I had to internalize the meltdowns, which quickly made them become total shutdowns, where I’d just sit there curled up in a ball, stone-faced.

Unfortunately, those hiding places were taken away.

Once teachers/admin got hip to my game, they pretty quickly started locking the library doors in the morning, so that was out. Then, they started actually calling my brother over the loudspeaker to find me and get me to class. Of course, he always knew exactly where I was. He’d probably seen me head to those double doors every single time. And, as soon as the adults knew of my most-important hiding space, they started closing the double doors, making  me feel like I was literally and figuratively trapped. I knew I couldn’t find a new hiding place, because everybody was aware of my hiding habits and there was always someone around to shut me down. So, my only option was to internalize more and more and more. Which, of course, is absolutely unsustainable. That’s a word I’ll probably be using a lot the rest of my life. And that unsustainability always led to what I now know to be burnout.

Report cards were always like “Dan’s smart, but doesn’t do his work,” or “Dan seems quiet and withdrawn,” or “Dan doesn’t doesn’t socialize/work well with the group,” or some other red flag “hey, something’s wrong with this kid” shit like that. But the effectiveness of my masking made me seem like I was just a finicky kid being a finicky kid, I guess, so nobody really dug any deeper. My report cards were always like that because I kept having mini burnouts all through elementary school and into middle school. I had internalized meltdowns multiple times a day, they would stack, I’d burn out for a couple of weeks, I’d somehow find a way out, then the cycle would start all over again. That was what my whole existence was from preschool, through elementary school, and into the seventh grade.

In seventh grade, however, I had my first full, years-long burnout.

Sure, I’d get up in the morning, get ready, and go to school, but once there, I was on autopilot. I would just sit and draw and interact with the world as little as humanly possible, because doing so was killing me. I was more stressed out than most people will ever experience, and drawing was the only thing keeping me tethered to existence, so it was the only thing I was either willing or even able to do. I tried with everything I had to keep up appearances outside of school so I didn’t burden my loved ones, but school time was a different beast. I was basically melting down all day long, every day, and the only times I had any reprieve were during lunch and recess.

My science teacher that year happened to be a child psychologist, and to his mind, I was a textbook case of clinical depression or bipolar disorder. I didn’t know what they really were or what I really was, but I figured that was probably what was going on. And my parents, to their credit, acted fast to get me help when he reached out to them. It’s just that the help on offer wasn’t the help I actually needed. I now know that those ‘depressive episodes’ throughout my life weren’t from being bipolar (which I’m fucking not), but rather were autistic burnouts. Every single one of them, some that lasted years like this latest one, came on the back of some upheaval or another (either internal or external), and each time I came out of one, I was diminished in some way. Each time, I lost something of the real me.

Naturally, with the depression diagnosis came SSRIs, and with them came weight gain. A lot of it. Now, I’m not blaming the pills solely. My diet wasn’t great, and I started eating more than I needed to–especially sweet snacks–because it helped dull the horrible feelings that plagued me. With the excessive weight gain, of course, came more ridicule and interpersonal rejection than I’d already been experiencing all my life. Sure, I had friends. Even had a girlfriend. But most of those relationships disappeared when I inevitably failed the seventh grade. Then I was just “Frankenstein” or “that fat retard” or any number of other bullshit names. But I didn’t fail the grade because I was stupid. I failed the grade because my fucking nervous system collapsed and I had no way to know it or fix it.

That burnout lasted through my second attempt at seventh grade and all the way through ninth grade. Not only did it last, but it got more intense. My ninth grade year went worse than my first attempt at seventh grade. Because I was thrust into an entirely-new environment with its own structures and hierarchy and social rules. I didn’t make any new friends in high school. In fact, before the year was over, I lost the handful of friends I had left. Now, I did have a couple of friends I’d met through my brother, and they’re still people I consider friends to this day. But if they weren’t my brother’s friends? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I won’t act like they don’t exist or something. Regardless, I failed the ninth grade way, way harder than the seventh.

Then I just said ‘fuck it’ and got my GED.

After that, I actually started to come back to myself. I even went out and got my first job (which is the only remotely long-term, structured employment I’ve ever had–I’ve only done odd jobs and creative work since). For about a year, I was finally making headway and getting over my burnout…that is until one of my higher-ups at work stole $100 from my register and tried to first pin it on me outright, then–when I emptied my pockets and my locker for our overall boss–shifted to “well, he’s retarded, he probably just miscounted,” like it was nothing. Our boss accepted that, but I sure as fuck didn’t. Because I knew that motherfucker stole it. He was literally the only other person who had access to my register, because he was the only boss working out front that day. When I told this to our overall boss, she got really defensive of the thief…because–drumroll–they were fucking, of course. I knew that, too. It was an open secret.

So, I quit. I quit, I got a rash of shit for quitting, and I started spiralling.

Then, not even a month later, I found out that my girlfriend had been cheating on me for quite some time, and that shit absolutely destroyed all of the progress I’d made and sent me right back into burnout for another year or so. I rebounded a bit, tried college for a semester and burned out. Got out of it again, then tried college again. This time, I almost got two years out before I had another huge fucking burnout. Because I couldn’t fucking handle navigating a world that was 0% accommodating. Not only for my undiagnosed autism, but also for the hearing loss I was beginning to realize I’d been suffering. That bullshit also added to the pile. Not only did I have the autistic noise sensitivity, but I also had an ever-progressing hearing loss. You’d hope that would be the universe balancing things out a little, but in reality it just made the noise sensitivity worse. Because while the pool of things I could hear was diminishing, the sensitivity to those things heightened exponentially.

Somewhat needless to say, I was kinda at the end of my rope from all of that. I knew that if something didn’t change, I might not make it, so it was at this time that I went to a shrink. A shrink who spent maybe 20 minutes with me, didn’t listen to a goddamn thing I said, and then confidently diagnosed me as bipolar 2. With that diagnosis came more pills, a lot more weight gain…but absolutely no reprieve from any of the issues I was facing. So, for years, I just kept barely getting out of burnout (or maybe even just existing in a perpetual state of it), having something happen or being forced to take up some new responsibility I couldn’t actually handle, and going back into a deeper burnout. It has happened multiple times in my adult life. I’d like to say this will be the last time, but I know better. I know it’ll probably keep happening until it either legit kills me or I live out my natural lifespan.

I know this because I still can’t fucking cope with the world.

I can’t cope with the constant stress and people questioning what I could possibly have to be stressed about. I can’t cope with the fact that I am in midlife and have absolutely nothing to show for it. I can’t cope with the crushing loneliness. I can’t cope with being a burden on the only people who actually give a shit about me. I can’t cope with the fact that just taking a 15 minute trip to the fucking Food Lion overwhelms my nervous system so badly that I have to sequester myself for most of the day just to try and patch whatever the most recent inner damage happens to be. I can’t cope with the fact that I have failed at literally every single thing I’ve ever tried to do (barring weight loss). I can’t cope with the fact that some of the only parts of me that I’ve ever been proud of or happy about are just fucking gone. Literally the only thing I can reliably do right now is exercise, because I can completely shut myself off while I’m doing it.

The thing that sucks the most probably? This could last a lot longer than it already has. That’s why I decided I’d better actually say something about it. Because I’ve basically disappeared from my life. Not just, like, social media and professional stuff, but life stuff too. If I go over my miniscule allotment of energy–say instead of one socially-active day, I have two or even three–I have to recover for at least a week. Sometimes the overload triggers physical illness, and I have to miss out on things that I might actually really want to do. I’m having multiple meltdowns and shutdowns every day, just from getting up and doing ‘normal’ stuff. Like I said, I’m pretty much always in fight-or-flight…and I’ve never breathed a word of it to anyone, because I’m still so hard-wired to minimizing myself and not rocking someone else’s boat. But my boat’s about to fucking capsize, if it hasn’t already.

I don’t want to believe this bullshit could last the rest of my life, but that is feasible. I’ve seen and read a lot of shit from a lot of other people in my position, and some of them were able to claw their way out fairly quickly (all things considered). Others, however, weren’t as lucky. They went too deep for too long a time, and they, like me, are having very little luck re-emerging. Or, their updates stopped because they either burned out too much to do it, or they fucking killed themselves.

I don’t want that shit. I don’t want that fucking future.

So, what am I going to do to try to get to some semblance of a life? The only thing I really can do right now. I’m trying desperately to focus on any morsel of positivity I can latch on to. I’m also digging deep to find and exhume the person I was as a child, before ‘fixing’ myself. I’m trying to revive the kid that the very nature of the world both failed, then snuffed out completely. Because I still remember him. I remember him, and I really liked him, and I failed him probably worse than anybody did because I spent my entire fucking life helping suffocate him. Christ, I held the pillow down the hardest. Didn’t even question it. Didn’t bat an eye. It was what I was supposed to do.

But I didn’t know any better. I didn’t fucking know I was doing irreparable, life-long damage to myself–mentally, emotionally, and physically. How could I? That shit started in my formative years. Before I could even really converse. It was all l ever knew, or even had the fucking chance to know. Which means I have a long road ahead of me. Because I have to try to repair almost 40 years of damage I caused through masking–through trying to conform to a world I’m not made for in order to make other people more comfortable. Which is an absolute futility, by the way. Because the world doesn’t actually give a shit about the amount of personal concessions autistic people make for them. They don’t care about the extreme amounts of energy it takes to do basic things. They don’t give a shit about the constant stress and loss of executive function. They don’t give a shit that you make yourself as small and discreet as possible for them. They don’t care that you don’t even attempt to form new relationships because your rejection sensitivity slider has been maxed out for decades. They don’t care that things that come easy to them might not come to you at all.

So, why the fuck should I? Why should I keep fighting a losing battle?

Well, I’m not gonna. Not anymore. I’m not having a good fucking time, but I’m doing my best to hold on to hope. I want to do things. I want to have an in-person social life that extends beyond just my family, no mater how much I genuinely love being around them. I want to have a romantic life. I want to have a professional life. I want to be able to change plans on the fly and not feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. I want to live. Period. Not just exist. No. I need those things. ‘Want’ doesn’t cover it. The crux, of course, is that living the way I have my whole life is, as I said, unsustainable. I know this, because it has broken me time and time again. Which means I have to learn how to live as a late-identified autistic person rather than trying and trying and trying to live like a neurotypical person within a neurotypical framework that I will never be equipped to live in. I. Do, Not. Fit. In.

And, make no mistake, this writing isn’t a cry for help. It’s not a ‘poor me’ thing. It isn’t a plea for pity or hugs or platitudes or anything like that. What it is is about understanding, not just for me, but for people who know me as I historically have been. What it is is my first step toward a little fucking pinhole of light. The first step toward rebuilding myself not as the person society unanimously failed at forcing me to become, but as the person I should’ve been allowed to become naturally, way, way earlier in my life. It’s going to take a lot of solo work on my part, and it’s likely going to take a lot of patience and understanding from those who know me and see me frequently. Because I have to be a little selfish right now. I have to focus on, look out for, and preserve myself, because I never have.

So, to anyone who’s been wondering where the hell I’ve been lately, or noticed some changes in me and were curious what was up, now you know. Literally everything in my life is on pause, not even by choice. I just can’t do it. I can’t function. My nervous system said, “hang on bub, this ain’t working” (because apparently my nervous system is Wolverine) and completely halted any functions other than survival functions. Unfortunately, it’s probably the best thing that could’ve happened. Because, ultimately, it’s the only way I’m going to be able to not just survive, but thrive.

I’m gonna hold on to that for dear life, believe me.

#autism #autistic #autisticBurnout #burnout #life #MentalHealth #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #writing