A Trip Down Burnout Lane

If you want to listen to the audio version of this episode - you can find that here.

I’m sixty days post-move. The downsize, the tree change, the closer-to-family, idyllic country-living dream. Which makes it a little hard to explain why, two weeks ago, I got so dehydrated I started having dizzy spells because I’d simply forgotten to eat.

My cognition is slower.

Light and sound are louder than they should be.

My temper is short, and there’s this heavy, full-body resistance to every single thing on my list - including the things I actually love.

I know what this is. I’m heading into burnout again.

I’m writing this from inside it, rather than waiting until I’m safely on the other side and can package it up neatly, because the version of this conversation that actually helps someone is the one I’m sitting in right now. Not performing recovery. Just naming it, out loud.

So here’s what I want to do: walk back through the burnout episodes I’ve had across my life, about six I can name, and talk about what I didn’t have language for at the time because every one of them, I now understand, was autistic burnout.

I didn’t know that for almost twenty years.

And now I do.

The uncomfortable part is that I can still show up. In short, intermittent bursts, I can project the image of someone who is completely fine - the Zoom call, the smiling story, the normal chat at kinder pickup. In those moments the mask hardens until it’s almost immovable; even when I want to drop it, my nervous system rarely lets me.

A truth I keep coming back to, and one I’ve talked through with AuDHD coach, Meghann Birks- Wayward Women, is that capacity and capability are not the same thing.

I’m capable of a great deal.

My capacity right now is a fraction of that. The worry that lives underneath, and I know it does for so many of you, is that people will think I’m putting it on, exaggerating, or being a hypochondriac.

So here’s the reframe everything else rests on: I have to allow for the fact that some people will think that, and still do what I know I need to do. There’s real grief in the gap between what I’m capable of and what my capacity will currently allow.

Both are true at once.

Autistic burnout isn’t “I had a big week and I’m tired.” It’s the cumulative cost, over months, sometimes years, of masking, sensory load, an interoceptive system that doesn’t flag hunger or thirst or overwhelm until it’s far too late, and life conditions that were never built for your nervous system. Eventually the bill comes due: executive function collapses, sensory tolerance drops through the floor, emotional regulation goes out the window, and the basics like eating, drinking, replying to a message - become genuinely hard.

The reason so many of us miss it is that the diagnostic picture of autism was built on boys: loud, externalised, disruptive. Women’s presentation is internalised, and we’re socialised not to disrupt. Good girls are quiet girls. So our burnout gets filed under depression, anxiety, OCD, perfectionism, stress, hormones, hypochondria - anything but the actual thing.

Here’s what mine looked like.

Episode 1: Year 11. I’d spent my whole school life proving I was smart, because the smart version of me was the one who got praise and connection. Then I just stopped doing assignments, homework, slept in class with a book propped in front of my face. Everyone was perplexed, including me. At home, in private, I had frequent meltdowns, this sense of so much pressure building that I might explode. I thought it might be depression, but I’d never felt sad about anything in particular. There’s a name for what was happening in this burn out that I didn’t have then: the valve release.
You hold it together in public, then the second you reach safety, the suppressed stress pours out. Nobody outside the home sees it, so nobody outside the home believes it.

Episode 2: College and undergrad. Twelve months in a Sydney college that was sensory hell — loud, relentless, drunk 19 year olds everywhere. Afterward I started restricting food, and my executive function began to vanish. I’d walk into an exam and be unable to write my own name, then dissociate until the time ran out. Other days I’d lie in bed and watch the clock tick past the start time, unable to move. My thoughts screamed at a volume I couldn’t turn down. I counted compulsively and thought I had OCD. Songs looped in my head and wouldn’t stop, I know now that’s internalised echolalia. I was smart, motivated, and I cared deeply. My nervous system took me out anyway, because the conditions exceeded its capacity. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s burnout.

Epsiode 3: 2nd year as a Social Worker. Two years after my sister-in-law died, eighteen months into a child-protection role that would break a seasoned worker, let alone a first-year grad. After a fortnight where I was nearly assaulted on a visit and had a near-miss in the car; I cracked, and my GP signed me off for a month. The meltdowns and dissociation came back. I once put tea towels on a lit gas stove with no memory of doing it. I tried to fix it with meditation and yoga, running burnout protocols on a nervous system that just needed me to understand it was autistic.

Episode 4: After my sexual assault. This doesn’t require much of an explanation - does it?

Episode 5: Postpartum. Finishing a renovation, selling the house, moving with a two-year-old, both of us deep in our own neurodivergent awakenings. I ended up in hospital with a breakdown and panic attacks, and was told to look up some breathing apps and handed a script for Valium. A cardiology clinic told me the cure for what I thought were palpitations was to drink less coffee, (without asking how much I drink). Then I went home, typed my symptoms into Reddit, and found women like me who’d already mapped the whole thing. What I was experiencing was a difference in interoception - the way I read internal signals like heart rate and anxiety. Every symptom I’d been told was in my head had a documented explanation no clinician had given me. A Google search did what specialists couldn’t.

And every one of those appointments was preceded by extensive mental rehearsal and scripting - I’d replay conversations, rehearse my symptoms, pre-draft my responses. Autistic women do this constantly, and the side effect is that we present so well everyone assumes we’re fine underneath. We’re not fine. We’re well rehearsed.

Episode 6: Right now, May 2026. Which brings me to the sixth episode - the one I opened with. The difference this time is that I have the language. Big changes are a burnout trigger for me - good to know going forward. It doesn't make the burnout smaller or easier, but it does make it workable. I'm not waiting for someone in a white coat to tell me what's wrong. I already know, and I already know what I need.

One: you can look fine and be in crisis at the same time. For two decades I thought my overwhelm response was a panic attack. From the outside I looked like I was just sitting, staring off. Inside, the world was loud and whooshing, my thoughts screaming, and I couldn’t move or speak. This goes for burnout too. Masking is a part of self protection. When the threat is high, so is the need to mask. The medical system doesn’t see it because it doesn’t look like the textbook.

Two: internalised symptoms get missed by everyone, including ourselves. Echolalia, scripting, interoceptive differences, sensory sensitivities that turn up in burnout, valve-release meltdowns no one witnesses. All well documented. None of it was ever offered to me in a clinical setting. If you don’t start talking about your internal experience - no-one can tell help you understand it.

Three: this is far more common than you think. I hear versions of this story constantly. The misogyny of the medical system and the overrepresentation of male presentations of autism have trained us to look for the wrong thing. So let me say it plainly: it’s not you. You’re not broken. You’re likely just undiagnosed.

Speak up. Investigate. Google it, search it on Reddit - you’re allowed to go down rabbit holes about your own health when the system has no reference point for your care. Give yourself permission to stop performing fine, and to accept that some people will be triggered by your needs or your self-advocacy. That doesn’t mean you stop.

Once you have the language, you stop trying to fix the wrong problem - you stop doing more yoga and start reducing input; you stop pushing harder at the thing that’s already overdrawn.

In the spirit of practising what I preach, I’m taking June - and possibly July - off social media. This is me teaching what I most need to learn.

A couple of housekeeping notes before I go. The Long Game is open now until the end of May, then closes until the end of July and reopens in August, though it keeps running the whole time, because it’s a special interest of mine and doesn’t drain me the way social media does (a perfect example of the difference between a drain and a refuel for an autistic nervous system).

On Thursday I’m running a free workshop, Easy on Purpose, for neurodivergent mothers who want to stop white-knuckling their health and fitness - register here

During the break I’m releasing two new courses, and my mailing list gets notified first (both also available as a one-off purchase, both neuroaffirming and trauma-informed).

• Pregame: Foundations is an identity-based fitness behaviour course — the work beneath the workout, uncovering the patterns behind everything you’ve done with your body and building a new fitness identity from the ground up.

• Precision Phase is an evergreen course that steps you through a 12-week deficit, setting up your nutritional strategy and supporting you the whole way.

If you want in before the break, DM me READY and we’ll find the right fit.

I’ll leave you with something bigger than self-care, because I don’t think this is a self-care issue. I think it’s a political one.

We live inside systems that profit from us never stopping. Patriarchy and capitalism both run on women who keep going - who absorb the unpaid labour, hold the family together, answer the email at 10pm, push through burnout and call it resilience. These systems thrive on us not taking time to look after ourselves.

They’ve taught us our worth is our output, and they’ve been careful about which output counts: only the kind that produces a capitalist outcome. The resting, the healing, the mothering, the regulating of your own nervous system so you can survive another week, none of it shows up on the ledger, so we’re trained to treat it as indulgent.

That’s a construct, designed to keep you depleted and compliant.

So here’s my actual pitch: if you want to be a revolutionary, rest. Take the leave. Take all hundred days of sick pay if you have it. Quiet quit.

I say that knowing exactly who I’m talking to - most neurodivergent women have set a baseline of exceptionalism so high they’ve lost sight of what normal effort looks like. You could work about half as hard as you do now and still meet, probably exceed, your neurotypical peers. Pulling back isn’t falling behind. It’s stopping the bleeding.

Rest is not the reward you get once you’ve earned it. It’s the thing they don’t want you to take.

So take it, not as a treat, as resistance.

And remember: when nothing is certain, anything is possible. You’ve got this. And I’ve got you.

• Six things you need to know about internalised autism — Solution Psychology

• Understanding undiagnosed autism in adult females — UCLA Health

• Misconceptions — Autistic Girls at School

• The female presentation of autism — Literally Ausome

This piece touches on burnout, disordered eating, sexual assault and mental health crisis. If it brings something up for you, please reach out to someone you trust or a professional for support.