 It started with a simple question.
I was sitting in a room with a group of women at our local business network when a therapist asked us to think about what a best friend actually does. How they speak to you. How they show up for you. How they treat you when things are hard. Then she asked us whether we were being that kind of friend to ourselves. I could only honestly answer: no. There was something almost desperate in that realisation. Not a gentle nudge of “I should be kinder to myself.” It was a knowing that landed in my body — a recognition that I had to do something about this. That I couldn’t keep going the way I had been. This was just before my autism diagnosis. I was about to receive the piece of information that would finally make my whole life make sense. But first, I had to reckon with what I’d been doing to myself in the meantime.
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 I am writing this from inside chronic autistic burnout that began with a traumatic year in 2024. I want you to know that upfront — not as a disclaimer, but because it matters. Because the words are harder to find today. Because I nearly didn’t write at all. Because that, right there, is exactly what autistic burnout does.
This week I had a meltdown because of my mother - in front of my mother for the very first time. After a lifetime of holding it together until I was alone, I just couldn’t hold it back. I sobbed and sobbed. I am sixty-something years old. It has taken that long for the mask to slip in front of her. To let her see that I'm not the "confident, in control, reliable and capable person" she has always believed me to be the one she has leaned on for decades. Some masks go very, very deep. What Autistic Burnout Actually Is Autistic burnout is not depression. I want to be clear about that, because for decades, that’s what I was told it was. Doctors, well-meaning and wrong, would listen to my description and reach for their prescription pads. But I knew. Even in the 1990s. I had my ADHD diagnosis — but I didn’t yet know I was autistic. What I did know was that the word ‘depressed’ was wrong. I sat in a doctor’s office and said: “I am not depressed. I am burnt out. I cannot do this.” Nobody really understood. The concept of autistic burnout as a specific, neurological experience did not yet exist in clinical awareness. Autistic burnout is a complete and utter collapse due to overwhelm. It is exhaustion that goes beyond tired — and I know tired. I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I am very familiar with physical exhaustion. But autistic burnout is different. For me it is primarily mental, even as it pulls the body down with it. It is what happens when an autistic brain has been running at full capacity for too long, masking too hard, managing too much, absorbing too much of the world — and finally runs completely out of fuel. Why Neurodivergent Women Wait Decades for Diagnosis At sixty-one years old, I finally heard the words that reframed my entire life.
"You're autistic. There's absolutely no doubt." For one week, I experienced the most profound euphoria I have ever known. I don't have to try anymore. I don't have to fix myself. It's just me. Then came the grief - wave after wave of it. "If only I'd known before." I had already been diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-one, which had been a relief in itself. But the autism diagnosis thirty years later filled in the missing pieces in a way nothing else ever had. It explained everything. And it raised the question that so many late-diagnosed women ask themselves: why did it take so long? The answer, I've come to understand, has everything to do with being a woman.  AuDHD and Auditory Overload
I'm in my sixties, and I can hear like a twenty-year-old. My children used to get annoyed because I could hear their whispered conversations from one end of the house to the other. Sounds like a useful thing to have. BUT My AuDHD wiring means I can't filter sensory input the way neurotypical brains do. Where others can tune out background noise and focus on a single conversation, my brain pays attention to everything at once - every conversation, every scraping fork, every footstep, every hum of fluorescent lights. All of it. Simultaneously. At full volume. Restaurant Overwhelm Imagine that you are sitting in a restaurant trying to have a conversation with someone across the table. A typical brain can focus on that person and let everything else fade into pleasant ambient noise. My brain doesn't work that way.  How My Neurocomplex Mind Accesses Hidden Channels
For most of my early life, I couldn't explain how I knew things. I just knew. And when I tried to explain my knowing to others, I was met with skepticism, dismissal, or worse—the suggestion that something was wrong with me. I didn't understand that what felt like a liability could actually be an extraordinary gift, and that my neurocomplex mind was wired to access information through channels most people never experience. It wasn't until my ADHD diagnosis in the early 1990s that I began to have an inkling as to what was actually happening. And even then it took decades to figure it all out. My autism diagnosis in 2025 was the final piece of the puzzle. But understanding my AuDHD is still only part of the story—I also had to recognise the additional neurological differences that came with it: intuition, empathic abilities, altered consciousness states, and more. I call this combination my "neurocomplex" mind—not just neurodivergent, but a complex layering of AuDHD plus these other abilities that are so often intertwined with it.  It may surprise you to know - as it does many people, that my seemingly free-flowing creative mind needs predictability and structure to function.
Every morning I have the same routine - get up at around sunrise, get dressed, take the Hector the Studio Dog for a walk. Then feed him. I'll have my breakfast, which is always the same: a cup of tea, three grapes sliced, one or two of each type of berry that's in season, and four spoons of Greek yogurt. And it will stay the same for years, until I decide to change it. Oh - with the occasional fast morning when I have a cup of green tea instead but that is still built in to my routine. My husband has usually left for work by this time - around 4:30am during harvest. While I eat breakfast with Hector, I watch a lifestyle or renovation programme on TV. Then I brush my teeth and wash my face. Make the bed. Put on makeup (which I've done since high school). Then I do emails and I clean the kitchen. Sunday is the exception. I have to skip the bed-making because my husband gets up after me and then we head out to breakfast at 6am. Once I've completed my morning sequence, then it depends on the day. But the order of days has its own pattern too.  Why my six page CV feels emotionally hollowI stand in my home, looking at twenty certificates mounted on my wall. Qualifications, awards, distinctions. A 99% average in child psychology. Creative artist of the year. Business awards. My CV runs over six pages.
I feel nothing. They're pieces of paper now. I didn't put them up to celebrate myself - I put them up to remind me what I've achieved in life and so that other people could see what I'd done without me having to tell them. Another form of hiding in plain sight. I've seen others on social media celebrating their wins, their achievements. When I try, it feels performative, presumptuous - like I'm showing off. So I post occasionally, brief and humble: "So proud and grateful to have won this award." And I'll even agree to newspaper articles and interviews. It's a compromise. Public enough to be seen, but modest enough not to trigger the danger signals that have lived in my nervous system for decades. I used to think this was just me. That I was ungrateful, or broken somehow. But then I realised - my son does exactly the same thing - so I researched.  Aged 13 with my cat Snippy Of all the traits that come with being neurodivergent, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is one of the hardest for me to deal with. It's taken me years to understand what it is, and even longer to learn how to manage it. I only discovered that RSD was "an actual thing" recently - and suddenly, so much more of my life made sense.
What is RSD? RSD isn't something you're born with - it develops over time, particularly in children with ADHD. Here's a statistic that stopped me in my tracks: ADHD/AuDHD children receive an estimated 20,000 more criticisms than neurotypical children by the time they reach high school age. Twenty. Thousand. More!!  Aged 7 at Pompeii in 1970 The Weight of Hours: My Lifelong Battle with Time
I was six years old when my grandmother died, and someone told me that people usually live to about 70. I remember lying in bed that night, doing the math—64 years left—and feeling an overwhelming sense of panic. It wasn't enough. How could 64 years possibly be enough time to figure out why I was here? What my purpose was. Most children that age are worried about losing teeth or learning to ride bikes. I was lying awake at night, gripped by existential dread, convinced I would run out of time before I'd even started.  Have you ever had the experience of knowing exactly what you want to say, but the moment you pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard, pick up a paint brush, or even open your mouth to speak, your thoughts scatter like startled birds and disappear? You're not alone, and it's not incompetence or lack of intelligence. For many of us with dysgraphia and or AuDHD, this "download problem" is a daily reality that goes far beyond messy handwriting and failure at school.
What Is the Download Problem? I call it the download problem because it feels to me, like trying to transfer files with a broken connection. The information is all there in the mind—complete, detailed, vivid—but when I attempt to write it down, the transfer fails. It's as if the act of writing, speaking, or otherwise expressing creatively, causes interference that scrambles the signal between my thoughts and my ability to 'download' them. This isn't like writer's or artists block in the traditional sense. That type of block suggests you don't know what to write or paint or say. With the download problem, I know exactly what I want to say, or paint, or dance, but the pathway from brain to hand, mouth or body, seems to short-circuit the moment I try to access it. |
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