Reading what little academic research there is on autistic burnout and trying to be all cool and professional about it, but then I come across something like this and have to stop and have a bit of a cry:

“Participants also related struggling with boundaries — for example, not understanding that they were able to say ‘no’ to tasks or expectations, how to negotiate their own limits with external demands — or understanding how to self-advocate…”

Raymaker et al., “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood, vol. 2, no. 2, 2020.

I mean… ya know?

Thinking too about autistic burnout as a chronic health condition, and how this fact can co-exist with the notion of autism as a neutral, non-pathological mode of being. That is, while autism itself is not inherently a disordered state of existence, being autistic in an autistiphobic world and having to consistently submit to neuronormative expectations does result in burnout, which is disabling. Which might be why I relate so strongly to so much literature and theory around chronic illness. Autism isn’t the disorder; burnout is.