Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:
To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler
You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it
If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life
If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.
Go through a sensory checklist.
SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights
SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.
TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?
TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?
SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?
INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.
Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.
This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.
If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.
What a great post! So helpful.
People often ask me about my unmasking journey and express surprise to hear that such a big part of it has been 1) accepting I must avoid light/the sun and 2) wearing clothes I can stand.
Iβll play it jokey and say it like βwell it took me far too long to realize that my former wardrobe made me want to jump off a bridge.β Or βturns out my old underwear was anti-autistic.β Or βfor whatever reason when itβs too bright, I canβt think.β
It sounds silly to some people. Itβs very hard for the average allistic person to understand how severed I was from what my physical person was feeling. It served me to be disembodied to survive for a long time. Until it didnβt.
