The other piece to this with what I experience and you might relate to… trying so hard to heal from burnout and doing everything right creates another pressure on ourselves… taking the pressure off to heal and embracing that I live with a disability means healing isn’t my aim anymore. I too am a “recovering therapist “ and I think we are just so deeply marinated in the world of “get better get better get better “ that this becomes part of the problem too.
This is painfully familiar. And what keeps screaming for me as I read it is that you didn’t fail to heal. The environment failed to stop demanding.
There’s a brutal lie baked into the culture that says if we just set better boundaries, pivot smarter, optimize harder, we’ll recover. But when the water itself is toxic, rearranging your swim strokes doesn’t save you.
What you’re describing isn’t a personal shortcoming or a lack of resilience. It’s the predictable outcome of living with an exposed nervous system inside a society that rewards extraction, visibility, and constant availability, then calls it “success.”
I’m really glad you’re choosing yourself anyway. That choice is not weakness or quitting. It’s refusal. It’s staying alive in a world that keeps asking people like us to disappear quietly.
Thank you for naming this so clearly. It matters more than you know.
My last meltdown was in October. It stopped everything too retreats, 1:1 coaching, cooking, traveling, i moved to a smaller appartement, quit Instagram. Stopped reading YouTube comments, quit whatsapp.Hired a private chef and so many other arrangements.
Yet It seems that each time I made an improvement in one area and gained energy back, another thing i thought was done easy cheesy is becoming impossible all of a sudden or asking me a 3 hour nap.
I think it is very hard to nourish both our autism and adhd but I think identifying the strength of both sides of us and how they actually work for the same goal is helpful.
For exemple in my business my autism creates steady income when my adhd alone is my money maker but with a lot of ups and downs. I have decided to let my autism take over this year and find another outlet for my adhd that is not work related.
It is really hard for sure. I’ve cut down soooooo much in my personal and professional life and it really hasn’t had an impact. It hasn’t even made a dent. I think what I and so many of us truly need is a real reset where we step away from almost everything and anything, but, because we have bills to pay……
Thank you for sharing your experience. I was talking to people in my autistic parents group the other day about how ND people don’t operate on the “normal” timeline. In any way, especially when it comes to health, patterns of burnout and recovery, it makes sense to me that for us to find relief, any measure of re-balancing and health, we have to step outside of this mainstream world timeline, into a pocket Al our own whenever we can for as long as we can. I hope this for you.
I totally relate to everything you’ve said. I’m a late diagnosed AuDHD and a business owner. I feel like my world collapsed last November when I’d pushed and pushed myself through a long period of burnout-forever a people pleaser!! I’m now so stuck in a cycle where I’m not able to function. WTH!
Thank you. I feel this. I don’t know if I will ever “get better” or ever feel better. I struggle with a life of instability. I can’t keep a full time job. I can’t live up to my potential. I’m exhausted, despairing, anxious. Almost hopeless. Again. I don’t know how to respond to this. I am on disability. I can keep a job for 16 hours a week. On my Workman’s Comp right now for a fall at work. I have time right now to decompress. I was having major meltdowns before my fall-trying to navigate the most simple things. I have potential but I don’t know how or in what direction to go. My faith in myself is waning. I apologise for the depressing comment. I just want to thank you. I don’t feel so alone. I just feel alone in that it seems most people with ND are productive and I wonder what’s wrong with me? I don’t want pity or sympathy. I’m just tired.❤️
I can‘t bring myself to write the whole thing again, the point is - I don‘t know you but I implore you to not let things get as bad as I did. You fear nervous system shutdown, and I want to share that it happened to me. In August my whole body and mind went offline. Full on ME/CFS with PEM. I was almost bedriddden for weeks. I haven‘t been able to work since then. I know we all can‘t afford to go off work but when the body decides for us, we have to leave anyway, all while being so fucked up that it‘s impossible to enact any agency or turn the shitshow around because the brain is fried and the body is on emergency shutdown. 0/10 do not recommend 😭
Patrick - if you read this, please know that I see you. And YOU are not alone. I imagine you may need to hear that as badly as I do sometimes. I know I needed to read this tonight and know I was not alone. Knowing how it feels to live like this - makes it hard (in a painful sense) to see it in someone else, hard in that I would never want anyone to experience what I experience - and as there is familiarity in how you've described your experience of it, I am sad to know that is the case. I will be thinking of you.
Yep. Audhd with 3 companies here too. Lifelong burnout going back to at least age 11, im 56 now. You describe it brilliantly, I don’t have spoons for that shit. I’m just head down enduring all day every day of my life. And now I live in another country so residency etc is another threat vector to deal with.
Something *might* be shifting for me though. Discovering PDA and recognizing the intensified burnout cycles that entails and slowly making changes to adjust to demand perception. It’s been a couple years, it’s slow, but it might be the key to unlocking the feedback loop and finally rebuilding the airplane I’m still trying to fly. Best wishes for your 90 days. Hang in there. You’re not alone.
I feel this. Thank you. I would say more...but again I'm sick after a weekend of not realising that I'm sick...but yet knowing Monday is undoable. And yet, in the seat... I may not even have a virus, but long term burnout is a virus of its own. I often say I need a month off. It is not a wish. It is a dire need and no one understands how much.
I think when you / we say 'I need a month off...' what we actually need, but can't verbalise, is 'I need a lifetime off'. For years, I saw myself as a rechargeable battery that kept needing a recharge - except each charge came sooner, lasted less long, and became increasingly unable to recharge to full capacity.
These days, 62 years into however long I have on this planet, I have started to finally accept that, like a rechargeable battery, there comes a point where we simply don't recharge at all, save for a minor, pathetic-seeming 'blip' to indicate there is still some basic semblance of life, though not in any recognisable form.
Yet still my push-me-pull-you twin self remains unable to comprehend this.
As a life-long people-pleaser I have no idea what my true self looks like: my ADHD driver (right here, right now, no past, no future) continually forgets what my autistic self cries out for - leaving me in shame-land, having to make yet more apologies: there is no way my twin self will be able to turn up as promised and fulfil the commitments my ADHD driver still makes.
I am SO tired. And wracked with the semi-self-loathing this condition perpetuates. But I am immensely grateful that there are people like Patrick and all of you, his AuDHD followers, who get it.
I'm wondering if the desire to retire is more common in autistic and/or ADHD people... I remember thinking how cool it would be to have my whole day to do whatever I wanted.
This makes so much sense to me. One pattern I see often after autism discovery is that burnout can actually feel worse before it improves because masking used to absorb a huge amount of environmental friction without being visible.
Once that layer drops, it becomes easier to see how much signal your system has been carrying the whole time. Then growth as an entrepreneur adds another challenge because the environment begins expecting more access to you right when you are learning what access is actually sustainable.
The only thing i can offer for everyone is to stay vigilant about real self care. You have to give up the ego and what other people think and put yourself first. We never learned to do that. Slowing waaaaay down to a snails crawl and stayed there for 3 solid years (my job, food, sleep) before i began to feel better. Thats actually when I got my diagnosis. It was only because I slowed down to realize what was happening, did I begin to put the pieces together.
Its taken us ALL a really long time to get where we are. WE HAVE TO ALLOW OURSELVES GRACE as we continue to crash and crawl out of it. Understanding our individual NEEDS is going to go a long way but our nervous systems also need time to catch up. That may take a bit longer for our bodies to understand we are recovering now.
It feels like you already know this: your honesty will now be your compass. The letting go won’t be as hard as you think, especially as your life has already started to shift in a big way. The changes will lead to more changes, the importance of your life will change. The acceptance that health can only come first was a huge shift for me when I had chronic heart failure. (Burnout from grief) I felt I had to heal myself, so I changed the way I lived life, and healed over a period of time. It took guts, commitment, focus, forgiveness and a strong desire to live a better, more rewarding life.
The other piece to this with what I experience and you might relate to… trying so hard to heal from burnout and doing everything right creates another pressure on ourselves… taking the pressure off to heal and embracing that I live with a disability means healing isn’t my aim anymore. I too am a “recovering therapist “ and I think we are just so deeply marinated in the world of “get better get better get better “ that this becomes part of the problem too.
So true
💯
This is painfully familiar. And what keeps screaming for me as I read it is that you didn’t fail to heal. The environment failed to stop demanding.
There’s a brutal lie baked into the culture that says if we just set better boundaries, pivot smarter, optimize harder, we’ll recover. But when the water itself is toxic, rearranging your swim strokes doesn’t save you.
What you’re describing isn’t a personal shortcoming or a lack of resilience. It’s the predictable outcome of living with an exposed nervous system inside a society that rewards extraction, visibility, and constant availability, then calls it “success.”
I’m really glad you’re choosing yourself anyway. That choice is not weakness or quitting. It’s refusal. It’s staying alive in a world that keeps asking people like us to disappear quietly.
Thank you for naming this so clearly. It matters more than you know.
Oh lord !!!!
This hit my soul
My last meltdown was in October. It stopped everything too retreats, 1:1 coaching, cooking, traveling, i moved to a smaller appartement, quit Instagram. Stopped reading YouTube comments, quit whatsapp.Hired a private chef and so many other arrangements.
Yet It seems that each time I made an improvement in one area and gained energy back, another thing i thought was done easy cheesy is becoming impossible all of a sudden or asking me a 3 hour nap.
I think it is very hard to nourish both our autism and adhd but I think identifying the strength of both sides of us and how they actually work for the same goal is helpful.
For exemple in my business my autism creates steady income when my adhd alone is my money maker but with a lot of ups and downs. I have decided to let my autism take over this year and find another outlet for my adhd that is not work related.
I touch on it in my last post
Hopes it help🙏🏾
It is really hard for sure. I’ve cut down soooooo much in my personal and professional life and it really hasn’t had an impact. It hasn’t even made a dent. I think what I and so many of us truly need is a real reset where we step away from almost everything and anything, but, because we have bills to pay……
We really do
Really relate. Thanks for putting words to this feeling.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I was talking to people in my autistic parents group the other day about how ND people don’t operate on the “normal” timeline. In any way, especially when it comes to health, patterns of burnout and recovery, it makes sense to me that for us to find relief, any measure of re-balancing and health, we have to step outside of this mainstream world timeline, into a pocket Al our own whenever we can for as long as we can. I hope this for you.
I totally relate to everything you’ve said. I’m a late diagnosed AuDHD and a business owner. I feel like my world collapsed last November when I’d pushed and pushed myself through a long period of burnout-forever a people pleaser!! I’m now so stuck in a cycle where I’m not able to function. WTH!
Thank you for describing this so perfectly 😞
You are very welcome
Thank you. I feel this. I don’t know if I will ever “get better” or ever feel better. I struggle with a life of instability. I can’t keep a full time job. I can’t live up to my potential. I’m exhausted, despairing, anxious. Almost hopeless. Again. I don’t know how to respond to this. I am on disability. I can keep a job for 16 hours a week. On my Workman’s Comp right now for a fall at work. I have time right now to decompress. I was having major meltdowns before my fall-trying to navigate the most simple things. I have potential but I don’t know how or in what direction to go. My faith in myself is waning. I apologise for the depressing comment. I just want to thank you. I don’t feel so alone. I just feel alone in that it seems most people with ND are productive and I wonder what’s wrong with me? I don’t want pity or sympathy. I’m just tired.❤️
Oh no I think my comment didn‘t post…
I can‘t bring myself to write the whole thing again, the point is - I don‘t know you but I implore you to not let things get as bad as I did. You fear nervous system shutdown, and I want to share that it happened to me. In August my whole body and mind went offline. Full on ME/CFS with PEM. I was almost bedriddden for weeks. I haven‘t been able to work since then. I know we all can‘t afford to go off work but when the body decides for us, we have to leave anyway, all while being so fucked up that it‘s impossible to enact any agency or turn the shitshow around because the brain is fried and the body is on emergency shutdown. 0/10 do not recommend 😭
Patrick - if you read this, please know that I see you. And YOU are not alone. I imagine you may need to hear that as badly as I do sometimes. I know I needed to read this tonight and know I was not alone. Knowing how it feels to live like this - makes it hard (in a painful sense) to see it in someone else, hard in that I would never want anyone to experience what I experience - and as there is familiarity in how you've described your experience of it, I am sad to know that is the case. I will be thinking of you.
Yep. Audhd with 3 companies here too. Lifelong burnout going back to at least age 11, im 56 now. You describe it brilliantly, I don’t have spoons for that shit. I’m just head down enduring all day every day of my life. And now I live in another country so residency etc is another threat vector to deal with.
Something *might* be shifting for me though. Discovering PDA and recognizing the intensified burnout cycles that entails and slowly making changes to adjust to demand perception. It’s been a couple years, it’s slow, but it might be the key to unlocking the feedback loop and finally rebuilding the airplane I’m still trying to fly. Best wishes for your 90 days. Hang in there. You’re not alone.
I feel this. Thank you. I would say more...but again I'm sick after a weekend of not realising that I'm sick...but yet knowing Monday is undoable. And yet, in the seat... I may not even have a virus, but long term burnout is a virus of its own. I often say I need a month off. It is not a wish. It is a dire need and no one understands how much.
I think when you / we say 'I need a month off...' what we actually need, but can't verbalise, is 'I need a lifetime off'. For years, I saw myself as a rechargeable battery that kept needing a recharge - except each charge came sooner, lasted less long, and became increasingly unable to recharge to full capacity.
These days, 62 years into however long I have on this planet, I have started to finally accept that, like a rechargeable battery, there comes a point where we simply don't recharge at all, save for a minor, pathetic-seeming 'blip' to indicate there is still some basic semblance of life, though not in any recognisable form.
Yet still my push-me-pull-you twin self remains unable to comprehend this.
As a life-long people-pleaser I have no idea what my true self looks like: my ADHD driver (right here, right now, no past, no future) continually forgets what my autistic self cries out for - leaving me in shame-land, having to make yet more apologies: there is no way my twin self will be able to turn up as promised and fulfil the commitments my ADHD driver still makes.
I am SO tired. And wracked with the semi-self-loathing this condition perpetuates. But I am immensely grateful that there are people like Patrick and all of you, his AuDHD followers, who get it.
I completely agree. I have fantasized about retiring since I was a child. A life free of demands, simply being able to exist.
I'm wondering if the desire to retire is more common in autistic and/or ADHD people... I remember thinking how cool it would be to have my whole day to do whatever I wanted.
This makes so much sense to me. One pattern I see often after autism discovery is that burnout can actually feel worse before it improves because masking used to absorb a huge amount of environmental friction without being visible.
Once that layer drops, it becomes easier to see how much signal your system has been carrying the whole time. Then growth as an entrepreneur adds another challenge because the environment begins expecting more access to you right when you are learning what access is actually sustainable.
That overlap period can feel especially intense.
The only thing i can offer for everyone is to stay vigilant about real self care. You have to give up the ego and what other people think and put yourself first. We never learned to do that. Slowing waaaaay down to a snails crawl and stayed there for 3 solid years (my job, food, sleep) before i began to feel better. Thats actually when I got my diagnosis. It was only because I slowed down to realize what was happening, did I begin to put the pieces together.
Its taken us ALL a really long time to get where we are. WE HAVE TO ALLOW OURSELVES GRACE as we continue to crash and crawl out of it. Understanding our individual NEEDS is going to go a long way but our nervous systems also need time to catch up. That may take a bit longer for our bodies to understand we are recovering now.
It feels like you already know this: your honesty will now be your compass. The letting go won’t be as hard as you think, especially as your life has already started to shift in a big way. The changes will lead to more changes, the importance of your life will change. The acceptance that health can only come first was a huge shift for me when I had chronic heart failure. (Burnout from grief) I felt I had to heal myself, so I changed the way I lived life, and healed over a period of time. It took guts, commitment, focus, forgiveness and a strong desire to live a better, more rewarding life.
Sending love ❤️🩹 you are not alone in this.