The meeting format is designed to reduce the sensory, social, and executive function burdens that normally come with socializing. Our members are clinically-diagnosed, self-diagnosed, and questioning. AWG is volunteer-led and not associated with any other umbrella organization or company.

Please consider joining us on Zoom. Our member profile is inclusive. Meetings are always free and no registration is required. Members share by speaking or typing. We have many members who come just to listen. You never have to turn on you mic or camera if you don't want to. You don't have to come to every meeting, or stay the whole meeting, in order to be a full member. Disclosure of diagnosis/gender identity is welcome but never required for participation. 

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I hope you enjoy AWG Shares Magazine. And please do join us in a meeting sometime if you can.

          Annie Mydla

          Founder and facilitator, AWG

“I have, throughout my private war, been a she, a you, a Donna, a me, and finally, an I… If you sense distance, you're not mistaken; it’s real. Welcome to my world.”

- Donna Williams

The good news is that once you understand autistic burnout, you can redesign your life to expedite recovery and prevent it from happening again.

There are three primary features:

1. Extreme sensory sensitivity. Your already-sensitive nervous system becomes hypersensitive. Bright lights or loud noises feel physically painful.

One of my clients was at Costco – wearing her sunglasses inside – and the bright lights, crowds, and noise were so overwhelming that she started physically shaking.

2. Chronic exhaustion. You feel physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted all the time. No amount of rest helps. Even showering or making a sandwich feels overwhelming.

Another woman couldn't leave her couch for weeks, not even to spend time with her kids.

3. Loss of skills. Executive function declines. Brain fog, memory impairment, and sometimes loss of speech. This is especially alarming when you don't understand it's burnout-related, and you fear you'll never regain those skills.

Think of your capacity as a bucket. And think of the demands placed on you as the water that’s coming out of a faucet, filling your bucket.   

Ideally, your capacity equals or surpasses the demands placed on you.   

In autistic burnout, though, the faucet is absolutely gushing water, and your capacity bucket is constantly overflowing. 

For autistic people, our everyday demands are greater than they are for most people: sensory input, social interaction, transitions, and masking all drain our energy. Many of us mask constantly, so even "doing nothing" is exhausting. 

Without enough rest, alone time, and self-care, your capacity bucket is perpetually overflowing. That's autistic burnout.

Autistic burnout can look like major depression but treating it as if it were depression makes it worse. 

When someone is depressed, they tend to isolate. So as part of recovery from depression, they’re often encouraged to spend more time with people, get out of the house, and participate in activities as much as they can. 

But when you’re in autistic burnout, your central nervous system needs as little sensory input as possible. Increasing your sensory input, your socialization, and your participation in activities will almost certainly exacerbate your burnout, not heal it.

Too often, people recover from autistic burnout only to return to the exact life that caused it, creating a burnout → recovery → burnout cycle. 

Many of us have spent decades living how we think we "should" live. We've masked so long that we've lost sight of who we truly are and what we need. 

I help women and non-cis individuals build lasting recovery by redesigning their lives to align with who they truly are. This involves becoming aware of what gives you energy vs. what drains it: 

At its core, this work involves undoing lifelong invalidation and reconnecting with your body's signals: what feels safe vs. painful, what to gravitate toward vs. avoid. 

You've been nudged toward burnout your entire life — every time someone told you you're "too sensitive," pushed you to "just do the thing" when you lacked capacity, or encouraged you to be who they wanted. 

The way out of burnout is through listening to your own voice. I help women give themselves permission to trust their inner voice and learn to honor its truth. 

Next month, I'll share specific changes my clients have made to recover from burnout and stay out of it.

If you'd like help recovering from autistic burnout or redesigning your life to align with your needs and values, you can visit www.AuDHDwomen.com to schedule a free consultation. This service is for women and all members of non-cis genders (FTM/MTF trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, autigender, and more).

Orlando, I think you suffer from a strange melancholy. Which is, you suffer in advance. Look at me. Look. You are too serious, Orlando. And yet not serious enough. 

– Orlando (movie), 1992

I would use it for breakfast with hot milk and Nesquik every morning. It was green, it had painted eyes and a little nose, and I adored it. One morning, my mother, in the haste of trying to keep on top of the morning routine, accidentally broke it. I remember as if it was now the way it crashed onto the floor and broke into pieces. I burst into tears and started crying desperately – and I very rarely cried as a kid. It was my favourite cup, and from one moment to the other, it was gone. Just like that. I would never again have breakfast with it, the nose and the eyes would never be whole again. The breaking was final.   

Autism is often described as causing difficulty with change. Many autistic people struggle with last-minute changes of plans. I don't. If a plan changes last-minute, I adapt easily, it's not a problem. But there's something deeper about change that disrupts my being: its finality. Oh my god, it completely tears me apart. Something was there, and then it's not. A thing happens, and it's already gone. It was important, then everyone has forgotten about it. You were friends with someone, but now you barely talk. The coffee shop at the corner has closed. Technology changes. Time passes. I can't stand it. I wish the world could stop.

Surely, to someone who doesn't have this issue, this will sound like unnecessary existential angst. But the thing is, it is the default expectation of my brain that once you establish something, it's established – it's there, solid ground. If that ground moves or disappears, then I struggle to walk, or even just stand still. I don't mind a last-minute change of plans – but I am devastated by any reminder of the passage of time. I just don't understand how people can bear it. Plus, time always just goes by too fast. Before you know it, what feels like yesterday is 10 years ago. It just terrifies me. Admittedly, part of the reason for this also has to do with my perpetual state of "being behind in life". Autistic Medium writer Jim Irion has written interesting things about chronophobia in autistic people in relation to those social dynamics. 

My autobiographical memory – how I am able to remember my life – is not exactly normal, either. When it comes to change, I have come to realize that too much change, too quickly, affects how much I am able to remember. Too bad I have that sprinkle of ADHD, existential restlessness, or whatever it is, that constantly draws me towards new beginnings rather than stability. My twenties are a blur because I travelled a lot, and changed houses like every 6 months, as if I had been on the run from the police or something (no no, I am a law-abiding citizen, absolutely.) I changed a ridiculous amount of jobs and social groups (never really being fully part of any of them, yay), and changed my mind about career and life priorities an even more ridiculous amount of times. Unfortunately, this is another in-built feature of my brain. 

On the other hand, repetition helps me solidifying my memories – I may not remember a place I visit once, but I will remember it much better if I visited even just twice or three times. Beyond that: I need repetition to stay sane. When too much happens, my brain genuinely just can't process it, and trouble begins. What happens, mainly, is that I will dissociate my way out of this world, with pretty serious consequences. My brain needs solid things to lean on – pillars that I can trust. I need to let context become background, and even let background become the boundaries of my world, until I can just take it for granted and forget about it, in order to have a world that I can function in. That is the best way I can describe it, I think. Change does not feel fluid to my brain, it feels like each and every time something solid has broken. It feels like a perpetual breaking of my being, in a way – a generalized sense of grief without a specific object. I know it sounds intense, and it is, so I need to minimize that. It is extremely limiting, I won't lie. 

When it comes to physical environments in particular, post-burnout, I dread anything unfamiliar. I do not go to the closest pharmacy, the new music venue (when I go out, once every blue moon), the fastest train station – I go to the ones I already know. I absolutely hate visiting new parts of the city. I feel lost every time I go somewhere unfamiliar. I no longer want to travel. Well, I do, there are so many places I'd like to see, but I dread it. I dread even just getting to the airport. When it comes to culture, I have to avoid a certain kind of book or movie. I started reading The Overstory – a very good and quite autistic-coded book which tells human stories from the point of view of trees. To a tree, several generations of humans are a rapidly changing phenomenon that it sees in its lifetime. I had to stop reading it. It was giving me the dread. Similarly, I finished Wild Swans: Three daughters of China – a great book that tells the story of XXth century China through three generations of women – but that bird-eye perspective on history was pretty destabilising. I don't have personal ties to China, I am just that sensitive to it. 

In hindsight, all my life I instinctively deployed small strategies to cope with impermanence and with how my memory works. I am not a hoarder, but I keep things. I kept my sister's set of foldable cutlery for camping (from her Boy Scouts youth), without using it a single time, for 10 years, through what I reckon must have been at least 10 changes of houses across different countries. My sister had thrown it away 10 years prior, but I saved it (then gave it back to her, she was astonished, it felt like an ancient archeological finding to both of us. I think she threw it.) I have small trinkets from places I visited, things that remind me that something has happened, and that make me feel like a part of that experience is still with me. Pictures I care about a lot. Without that, I would forget about a lot of things, and I would get that dread about the fact that it's gone. Nostalgia is definitely my biggest illness, but I can't help, truly. 

It took me a long time to piece together that my difficulty with change is, in fact, one of the major drivers of my depression. The passage of time can be so painful to me that it can make me tempted to cut time short altogether. "The only thing that doesn't change is the fact that everything changes", the Buddhists say. "La vie est mouvement" ("Life is movement") says French rapper Keny Arkana (goddess of spiritual rap.) And it's so true. When we are alive, we are warm, because our molecules never stop vibrating, our heart never stops beating, movement is the essence of what makes life alive, and that is incredible. It just seems that my brain is fundamentally at odds with a basic fact of this world. There is that movie, The Legend of 1900, about a pianist that spent his entire life aboard the same ocean liner. He was found on the vessel as a baby, he never set foot on land, never left the vessel. He spent his entire life playing the piano on the ocean liner, and all he knows about the outside world and its music trends is from the passengers. At the end (spoiler), the ocean liner is no longer used, and it's scheduled to be scuttled, but 1900 (that is his name) refuses to leave the vessel, because the world is too big for his imagination, and he'd rather die there. I remember watching this movie as a child, and wondering if I would have liked a life like 1900, and feeling conflicted about it. I still do. 

The world is too big – it makes me too curious and too overwhelmed at the same time. I need anchors, and I need freedom. Thinking about it – I could have stayed in the tiny village where I am from, never leave, and be 1900. There are pockets of the world where nothing changes. And yet, I didn't.

According to reports, the autistic person "finally lost it" after a whole week of people commenting on their autism. AWG Shares has obtained an exclusive interview with the person.   

Speaking on a videocall without camera, the person said: "I came out as autistic this week and god knows everyone has opinions. Just yesterday, a colleague had told me that I can't be autistic because I look nothing like the only autistic person he knew, which is their cousin's daughter's best friend's brother, who can't talk. The day before, my new therapist had told me that he didn't think I could be autistic because 'I am so self-aware'. The postman on Monday noticed that I had received a letter from an autism charity, and he said 'Oh I'm so sorry about your kid. My niece has that too.' The mum of one of my kid's classmates told me to take vitamin D. Donald Trump said we should be forced to take fucking Leucovorin. My mother told me I am her special angel. My friend told me that I should get a second opinion, and not to rush to put 'labels on myself'. The Daily Mail said it's a trend. My doctor told me that he doesn't think I am autistic, so he denied the referral for a diagnostic evaluation. My work's HR told me that they couldn't give me accommodations without a diagnosis. But my doctor had denied me the referral, so how do I get a diagnosis? My uncle suggested I pray every day, and if it doesn't work, I get an exorcism. An online influencer said that autism doesn't exist, because it's all just 'trauma.' My sister said 'well, yeah, but you are not autistic autistic, are you. Maybe just a little bit.' My other sister said 'yeah well, I already knew, you've always been such a weirdo.' Not sure which one is better. Even my dog barked at me when I said the word 'autistic' while registering a voicemail! All of this in the space of a week. So I thought, 'okay, let me get a massage on Sunday'. To relax, I thought. I went to this 'inclusive massages' place. I thought 'great, it's safe here' so I made the mistake of telling them why I was there.   

When the massage therapist told me that I couldn't be autistic because 'I could keep eye contact and her diagnosed autistic son couldn't', it was the last straw. I had taken all that I could take. A switch flipped in me, I don't know how this happened, but I suddenly transfigured into a monstrous creature dominated by rage. I tripled in size. I felt scales growing out of my skin. My eyes became wide and red, fuming horns sprouting from my head, recurved nails grew from my toes. I stomped on the massage bed with my new giant dragon foot and broke it in half at once. I squandered the speakers, and that annoying relaxing music finally stopped. I really wrecked havoc. The massage therapist looked at me terrified. I ran out of the beauty centre with big, heavy, steps, to scream outside. A monstrous, deep, non-human scream came out of my throat, reverberating over the roofs of the whole city:   

"AAAAAAAAARRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!" that's when my fury came out as fire from my mouth. I burnt the massage therapist's car with one, uninterrupted flame. I don't regret it. It was really satisfactory - it repaid me for the whole week of stress. More relaxing than a massage, really. I know it counts as arson, but I was transfigured. I was not myself, I was possessed by the fire of Frustration. The car was nothing more than a little hill of ashes when I left. On Monday I was back in the office in my human form, negotiating with HR to obtain the right to work from home."  

Dr. Donna Henderson helpfully frames this autistic tendency as a “need for explicit context”. As a fiction writer, I understand and often love metaphors in reading, but the vagueness that constantly comes up in causal speech can be so confusing. As a very frightened kid trying to make sense of a bewildering word, I inadvertently created rigid rules out of a lot of things that my parents meant to be interpreted flexibly.   

“Need for explicit context” not only helps explain me––it’s a helpful suggestion for what others can do to help their autistic loved ones.