Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello everyone, I'm Kim Neely and welcome to the Trauma Informed slp. I just have a little bit of an announcement to do here today about some of the sound changes you might notice on this particular episode. Because what I am now doing is I am videoing these episodes and putting them up on my YouTube channel with video that includes screen grabs of the articles that I reference and things of that nature.
[00:00:27] And then what I've been doing for the past few episodes has been doing the video first, editing the editing through the video completely and then re editing the audio to make it sound more in line with what you expect of my podcast, make it kind of more cohesive with past episodes. But I'm starting to hit a bit of a motivation lag with that. This particular episode came out on the on the YouTube channel a while ago and I've just been avoiding re editing it over and over and over again. So I have decided today to just post the raw audio, basically the edited video version essentially, but in audio form. So you might hear me say like on this video you might hear that and you might hear some sound effects stuff that I added from my Final Cut Pro program and whatnot. But what I'm hoping is that it's still accessible and hopefully somewhat easy to follow.
[00:01:28] You might find that I've included more filler words like ums and us because when I'm editing video it's not always practical to take all those things out because you just end up looking incredibly jumpy, essentially. So it might be a little different. If this is really distracting or if you prefer the more streamlined, specially edited audio versions, please do let me know. I have an email in my show notes below. You can email me if you what your preferences are. You can also feel free to go to my YouTube channel and message me through there. You can also find me on Instagram. Message me there. Feel free to just let me know if you really prefer the special audio, like making it more cohesive with the previous episodes in the podcast. And I can definitely continue to do that. I just thought for the sake of my little ADHD avoidance of this, I might as well just put it out there and see what happens and see how people respond to it. So hopefully it's still tolerable. Hopefully you can still get a lot of good information from it and hopefully the new sound and the fact that I'm referencing a video isn't too distracting for folks. If you do wish to watch the video version of it, feel free. I'll put a link below below to the direct episode that is the video version of this and otherwise my link tree is in the show notes. Feel free to click on that. That'll get send you to all my social links and my website and everything. And in general, I just want to thank you all so much for listening and I'm just so grateful that honestly even just one person is listening. I think it's wonderful. But you know, my whole goal here is to be able to provide a lot of good trauma informed educational material for people out and neurodivergent affirming material for people out there that is free and accessible. So with all that said, I hope you enjoy this episode on neurodivergent Burnout.
[00:03:37] Hey, we're promoting safety and empowerment over here.
[00:03:41] My apologies to all New Yorkers and fans of Midnight Cowboy.
[00:03:47] Hello and welcome to the Trauma Informed slp. I am Kim Neely, a licensed speech language pathologist in the United States. We're also known as speech language therapist if you're in the UK and Australia. I'm neurodivergent, I'm queer, and I've had a lifelong hyper fixation with trying to understand people like a lot of other A and such out there. And I have a more recent hyper fixation on trauma informed care because it really helped me to clarify things about that were very confusing about just humans in general. So yeah, on this channel slash the podcast, if you're listening on that, I examine just human connection and communication through this trauma informed lens so that we can develop more understanding and compassion for each other and maybe, maybe, just maybe start to heal from all this, all the pain and stuff that we inherit just by like existing, you know. And on this episode today, this is my final episode in my Burnout series. Finally. Thank goodness. This is like, I want to say this is like the fourth or fifth time I've record this dang thing because oh my gosh, you guys, I did it once and went on way too many tangents, which is definitely a thing that happens. And so then instead of trying to edit, sometimes it's better just to re record. Then I also got a new camera which hopefully is going okay, but I ended up recording it without the right microphone synced for the software. So that was fun and I don't know, it's just been a whole thing. So finally getting to it. Woohoo. Final episode of the Burnout series. Because I do feel like neurodivergent burnout, autistic burnout, ADHD burnout, all other neurodivergence out there, mental Health, whatever personality disorder folks, people with any of these kind of differences do experience a great deal of burnout in our society. And honestly, just people in general obviously are experiencing a lot of burnout, but I feel like I would be remiss in not talking about it. So if you haven't seen my other episodes, I will link them below to like the whole playlist. This one will probably reference the first and second episodes the most in terms of things I've already talked about. So effectively what I'm going to do on this episode is connect a lot of the research literature that I went over in the first and second episodes to neurodivergent burnout. I have an article that I'll reference a little that I'll link below for autistic burnout, specifically for some researchers that are trying to define it in that sense. But I'm going to basically make parallels between the professional world and what the literature shown creates. Burnout. What burnout might be confounding factors to burnout, like things we call burnout that maybe aren't burnout. Hint, hint, trauma, you know, I know, surprise. We'll talk a little bit about that stuff too and how that kind of feeds in to what we know of as burnout when we talk about it. And I'll also include some of my own personal experiences in terms of just microaggressions and such, especially as a non apparent neurodivergent. And I'm using non apparent and apparent. Similar to disabilities. Some people say visible versus invisible, but not everybody has sight. And also not all disabilities are visible but still can be very apparent. Like if someone is a non speaker, for example, or if their speech is very different in the sense that of their muscles not coordinating and their speech is not very clear. That's a pretty apparent aspect, right? So I call myself non apparent, which means I face different types of societal stigma and adversity than more apparent neurodivergence. And people with apparent disabilities, they have a different experience with societal stigma. Hopefully you'll find this helpful and informative and let's just go ahead and get on straight on into it.
[00:07:41] So first off, let's go ahead and define burnout for neurodivergence. Now personally, just as with job burnout or professional burnout, I do think when we talk about autistic burnout or ADHD burnout, we're talking about an umbrella term that actually encompasses a lot of different experiences. I think the first is just the sheer amount of energy, be it physical energy. If you have Mobility stuff going on or mental energy that it takes to exist in a society that's just not built for us, right. And does not really want to accommodate us most of the time. So essentially thinking under the social model of disability and thinking of that aspect, right, that results in more burnout, especially as we get older, for sure. And then the second thing being, as I've already sort of let you know in the intro to this, the trauma aspect of facing societal stigma, implicit bias, and just the types of discrimination that are experienced by neurodivergence all the time.
[00:08:50] When we went through the professional burnout, what we actually found, especially from that Cislec et al meta analysis, is that professional burnout really mainly is exhaustion. That's the one agreed upon factor, is just the exhaustion of it all. Right?
[00:09:05] Now I did find a really great article by and I don't know if I'm going to pronounce their names right, but Mantellas, Richdale and Disanayaki Desanayaki desaniaki. I don't know, 2022. I'll link it below this article. They included essentially this conceptual model of autistic burnout. Okay. C A M A B. What would that be? Comb K. Should we pronounce that acronym and call it K? Mab? I highly doubt they do, but it is kind of fun. Makes me think of Queen MAB actually. So in months A Less et al. They define autistic burnout as long term mental, physical and emotional exhaustion that builds over time, often recurring after stressful life events or transitions.
[00:09:49] Not super unlike the Cislec et al. Determination that exhaustion is the main piece for professional burnout. Right, so we're kind of in the same ballpark here. They go on to say that the common features of autistic burnout include impaired cognitive function, the loss of previously acquired skills like self care or speech, social and sensory withdrawal, and a marked increase in observable autistic traits. Which makes sense. The more exhausted you are, the less you're probably able to mask if you are given the option to mask. Because masking takes a lot of energy and effort, right? And if you're exhausted, you don't have that energy nor that effort. And this is voiceover Kim just popping in here really quickly to say that for more apparent neurodivergence, the ones who are not given the option to mask, it still makes sense. They get incredibly burnt out because like anyone with more apparent disabilities, they are also using a ton of energy to do daily activities which would make using strategies for self regulation very Difficult because strategies require energy. And if you're out of energy, you can't really use your strategies very well, you know what I mean? Okay, back to this conceptual model of autistic burnout. And they had this really great diagram. I'll probably put it up on the screen here, that includes these different aspects of it. So you have like the person personal demands, like masking sensory things, things like that you have the mental strain, like they might have anxiety or depression or some kind of social stress, job stress, all kinds of school stress, who knows that goes into the mental strain. There's your personal resources. So like your ability to stem, to calm yourself down like me with my little cute little new octopus guy. And I can never orient special interests, self awareness for your needs, right? And like, if you have social support, like if you have access to like a saf safe community or a safe group of friends or something where you can kind of vent and be yourself about things and then talking also about well being, which is like overall quality of life, your satisfaction, the kind of community you're a part of, right? And then all these other social, environmental and demographic factors like societal stigma and discrimination and the intersectionality of like gender and age and race and all of those things that also go into it. So in this conceptual model of autistic burnout, I want to say khmab, just because it's fun, all this stuff intersects and all the stuff relates to leading to this exhaustion essentially that is burnout. It does make a lot of sense because obviously, you know, everybody has their different intrinsic, you know, energy level that they have to go out throughout their day, right? And if you have all these different things intersecting that you have to deal with, depending on, you know, one thing might be more exhausting than another, like the intersectionality, the bias and the discrimination might be more problematic maybe in your workplace for a while. So that leads to burnout from that versus other points in life. Maybe it's more of school stress that's the bigger issue or whatever, or maybe social stress or friends or whatever, right? So these things all intersect and relate, but one might be a bigger contributor to the burnout at different points in life, which makes a lot of sense, right?
[00:13:08] If I want to relate this more to the first video I did, if you go back to those six work domains from the Maslach and Leader 2016, remember the work domains that really contribute a lot to the exhaustion piece professionally for people. It's workload, fairness, autonomy and control, community values and reward. I feel like this particular model of Autistic burnout also applies a fair amount to this. It's like a slightly different way of looking at it. And it makes sense if you're thinking of individuals instead of like professionals as a group, which is sort of what Muslim and leader were looking at. But it makes a lot of sense. Right. Obviously the workload is really high for neurodivergence just in general, trying to kind of of constantly use strategies to help make up for our weaknesses or working on masking, working on fitting in. Like it's just. That's a lot of energy. Right. I think also what goes under the workload is like that fairness of like you can request accommodations but it doesn't mean you're getting it because it might just be seen as you just want an easy way out or you're getting away with not working, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Maybe not having autonomy to be able to like work in the best environment that we want to work in. Right. Then that we could work in. Like it would be a very easy accommodation to meet. But a lot of employers don't necessarily want to meet it. Right. Like maybe you don't work well in a noisy open office and you need a more closed, quiet space. And you know, a lot of offices these days probably won't offer that to you. Right. If you do work in an office, you know, there is that feeling of just having a whole lot less autonomy and control, especially when you're young and like in school and just not always being allowed to do the things you need to do to help yourself. Right. Like you might even be told not to stem. Like right now I kind of want to rock back and forth, but it's a video. I'm going to try not to because it gets a little distracting. Even when I'm editing myself, I can distract myself with that. But people might not let you do the fidgeting or the stimming and stuff. And it might be something you really need in order to maintain control and not have a meltdown, but it gets taken away from you anyway. Right. And I think community wise, either it's hard to access it, like for a parent neurodivergence, it's hard to access because there's usually a lot of social isolation. They might be in more of the self contained classrooms as kids, they're less visible out in the workplace. Right. Or if you are given the option to mask, if you are non apparent neurodivergent and you're given that option to mask, you might just be denied community. Right. Like you initially get accepted and you're so great and we love you and you kind of feel slightly love bombed in a way and then they reject you once the mask starts to slip or once you stop to fulfill the actual role they want you to fulfill for them for their life or their friend group or whatever. Right. That whole main character syndrome thing, you know, that definitely happens a lot to a lot of non apparent autistics and ADHDers. Values I think is an interesting one because I genuinely do think that neurodivergent values, especially autistic and ADHD values are super different than a lot of what we've been taught to value. Right. A lot of us value value a lot of honesty, direct communication.
[00:16:22] We value info dumping with our safe people as a way of bonding and feeling connected to others. We like to hyper fixate on our special interest for enjoyment, for relaxation. Like I'll sit around and just do like puzzle, video game type stuff stuff all night while listening to podcast is a relaxation, right. Which is like a different way of relaxing kind of, you know, I'm not really turning my brain off, I'm just turning off certain parts of my brain and using the other parts that I like, you know, that are, that are relaxing to use different sensory needs. Right. Like there was a whole thing I thought I forget where I found it and I guess I'll try to find it. It was like a one of those like I think it was a tick tock video or maybe an Instagram reel or something where somebody did a, A like a sketch of like what it's like when other when different autistics hang out together and it's like they're going to have a get together, want to come. And then there's this whole like okay, but I can't really eat gluten and if it's too loud in there I don't think I'll be able to stay very long. Well that's cool, you don't have to stay very long. But also you could be welcome to, you know, wear your earplugs and they will have a separate room you can go to to be. You're right. Like it's like this whole like planning around these different sensory needs for the party and was like a really heartwarming video and I really liked it. But that is something that I think especially adult unmasked autistics and neurodivergence people who are finding more community among other neurodivergence especially ones that are sort of dismantling their own Ableism and able to unmask a little bit more are very accommodating toward other people, right? It becomes that whole thing of, like, how can we not collaborate? What's the word?
[00:17:56] Compromise. There we go. How can we compromise on our sensory needs and still ensure it's a positive experience for everybody, Right? Like, it's something that a lot of people consider in those spaces that aren't often considered in the wider society, Right? And what's kind of funny about the reward part, like, obviously, you know, that was Masloca Leader saying, like, employees need to feel like there's rewards that's more than just like a paycheck, right? They have to feel like they did a good job. They have to feel like they're, you know, they're being noticed somehow. Basically, some kind of reward is a good thing. And when I was thinking of how that might relate to, like, ADHD slash autistic burnout and neurodivergent pronoun general, the only thing I could think of is that meme where it's like, wait, you guys. You get rewards? Because that is a big piece of. I think part of the exhaustion and part of the need for masking and stuff is that we don't often get positive feedback about what we're doing and who we are, unless it's feedback about, like, how well we're masking. Like, we get feedback on things that we can't keep up with, right? So, I mean, that's part of the thing. It's like what we get rewarded on are things that we will inevitably fail at, right? Like, at some point, the masking will fail. At some point, all the strategies to prioritize and plan and the. The little ways we trick ourselves into, like, initiating tasks we don't want to do and stuff. At some point, these things. Things fail us because that's like, the fundamental part of just who we are, but that's all we get rewarded for. So then it's like we're just rewarded for things that we can't keep up. And so then when we don't keep them up, we don't get rewards. You know, you don't get told you're doing a good job. You get told other things, which is what we'll get into with the whole microaggression type stuff in a little bit, right? But basically, dealing with all of this stuff all the time, 100% of the time, day in and day out, leads to this exhaustion, this depletion of our energy, which is essentially why we're Going to fail anyway when it comes to like strategies and stuff, right? Every single strategy you use takes some level of mental energy. All the planning you do throughout your day takes energy. All the, like, I'm trying to access this strength in order to cover up my weakness, in order to accommodate the weakness. That takes strategies. Speaking up for yourself, accommodating, advocating for accommodations. That takes energy. Masking definitely takes a ton of energy. It's like it just takes, it just takes a lot. It takes a lot to get through the day, right? And for a lot of, especially for a lot of neurodivergence growing up, the house isn't necessarily safe space either. Like, we don't get away from being different, right? We don't always get away from like, I mean, unless, unless you're in the kind of home where the parents are also neurodivergent and like the whole home environment has been sort of like they're really great, awesome parents who are super self aware and they're really great at teaching their kids and like giving them safety and stuff. That's great, right? But on the whole, especially people of my generation, especially late diagnosed people in my generation, it's like the house wasn't necessarily a safe place either because, you know, you still were falling short of expectations no matter where you were. You're still falling short of everybody's expectations all the time, right? So then it's hard to, hard to replenish your own energy, hard to take the time to actually like rest and relax, right? You kind of feel like you always have to be on guard and have to be like thinking about how to be right. And this kind of gets at this spoon theory, which was something coined by Christine Misarandino. I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce it. Miscerandino in 2003, which it's basically like in my second episode, I believe, where I talked about conservation of resources for businesses. It's basically that. But like for individual humans. Okay. And it was a theory she used to describe like a physical disability. Okay. I think it was some sort of like, it was one of those like autonomic immune type things where you have flare ups kind of, I think, I believe was the type of deal she was dealing with. Hi Athena. Hi baby. I know you. So cute. Use a good girl. More dog, more petting. So that's what the arm is doing now. So essentially with spoon theory it means, you know, look, you only have so many, so much physical and mental energy to use in any given day, right? Which is the number of spoons you have. That's how many, how many spoons you got. You only got so many, right? So you have to plan for how you're going to use your spoons every single day, right? And if unexpected things come up, you've got to use a spoon for that. So then you might have less spoons for the next day. Because if you exceed your number of spoons for that day, you're just going to be that much more tired the next day. Right. And that kind of gets at a way of thinking about how much effort and how much energy do you have to put in your day. And if the more you exceed your energy stores, the more likely you're going to be completely exhausted afterwards. Because the thing we don't often think about, especially as humans, is that even like mental energy and physical energy is actually a physical thing. Like the molecules in your body that generate the energy you use the ATP for your cells. Right. Like all this stuff, this is, is, these are real physical things. I mean they, they're, they're tiny, tiny, tiny, but they're still real, you know, and you only have so much of it. And our body has a lot of ways of pushing past our ideal energy level. It has a lot of ways like the cortisol, hormones and stuff like that. It can kind of shift itself into the mode of like, well, we better, we can get really, we can be a persistent predator, right. We can keep on going. We can be, we can have a lot of stamina with it. Us, our bodies are really good at that. But at some point it's going to break down. At some point you're going to crash, you're not going to have access to that energy all the time. And there is a cost to it. Right. And we know that when it comes to studies of chronic stress and inflammation and all this stuff like high cortisol levels, spending way too much time in survival mode, fight flight, freeze type modes, you know, this kind of chronic stress conditions are really detrimental to our body over time. Time. And it makes sense because our body needs to rest and rejuvenate the actual physical little molecules and such that we use for our energy and, and cells need repair and. Right. We have to have some kind of rest and rejuvenation for that. It's very important. And yeah, our body will push itself past that if we say it needs to, unfortunately. Right.
[00:24:27] So a lot of people have come up with other ways of thinking about the spoon theory. I found a really cute one on Tumblr which it was my autistic POV on Tumblr said it's like the Duracell bunny scale, right? Which I kind of liked cuz it was more like a little comparative, like how much energy do I have today versus how much do I need to do a certain thing type of deal, right? Like I only have this much left in the battery, but I need a full battery for that thing. So like I'm not be able to, gonna be able to get that whole task done. For example, maybe I can just start it and use part of it, but like I have to have a completely restored, charged up, fully charged up battery. And I kind of like how they put it because then they also included rest in that, right? It's like you're recharging your cell phone battery basically, right? Like you gotta plug the battery back in, it's gotta be charged. You can't, you can't just keep going past when you're out of charge. Once you're out of charge, you're out of charge kind of a thing. So I wanted to point that out here too, because that's, I like that, that like comparative scale idea of like you have this much energy right now, but this is how much you need and then like how much effort it's actually gonna take, right? Part of, I think what really causes us to push past the point of healthy energy expenditure, right, where we're actually giving ourselves time to recharge our body, our battery, and actually like taking the time to rest and rejuvenate and recuperate is that we also have this traumatic stress that comes from just existing in a society where we're exposed to a lot of implicit bias and stigma and discrimination throughout our lives. Right? And I think that that's what leads us to feeling like we have to keep pushing way past in order to achieve a certain level of value in people's eyes or being deserving of respect. Right?
[00:26:11] So chronic stress response and trauma response are physiologically essentially the same thing. Okay. It's that disconnect between like, you have this survival system, you have this fight flight freeze. The sympathetic response that's way too hyperactive. And it's this sort of disconnect between that and your conscious awareness and memories of like, I actually am safe though, right? Like, but like that chronic activation of that survival system is what leads to that increased inflammation, the dysregulation, the alexithymia, which is the inability to recognize or label your own emotions or perhaps recognizing them in other people. That all comes out of this, right?
[00:26:55] So some people I'm sure out there would be like, where does all the trauma actually come from though? And it's like, well, listen, listen, listen. Pretty much every marginalized group in society has some level of just chronic trauma from just existing in society, okay? You get all this messaging around, like why you're not deserving of things or why you're not good enough. Right? Or why like people can kind of treat you like crap if they want to. Right. Essentially you can be a really great scapegoat for like having politicians point to that group and say, they're the problem, they're the whole issue right there. And like, we don't want those people around, right? Like that's all. None of that feels good, okay? It doesn't feel good to be pointed at and told you're not an acceptable form of humanity. And you know, you need to, you need to change that or get out. You know, it's like, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about this like internalized ableism thing. And I'm really just going to talk about it from my own perspective here, from my own experience.
[00:27:56] The disclaimer with that, of course, is that this is not equivalent to everyone's experience. I have my own intersectionalities with this. Other people might not. I don't know what it would be like to be an individual experiencing these things outside of myself. But I do know my experiences parallel a lot of the same reports from other particularly late diagnosed neurodivergence. And by late diagnosed it means that kind of by definition we were likely not apparent as kids. Okay, let's talk about the exhaustion first. All right? I don't honestly remember when that actually started where, where, when I actually started to feel super exhausted in my life and just super tired.
[00:28:37] But I do have this like kind of core memory Which. Okay, like 45. Okay. I'm 45 years old. Okay. And I grew up watching the Never Ending Story. Okay. It used to come out like once it got syndicated, it came out on like TBS and TNT and stuff, like kind of late 80sish type time, right? So I was probably like older elementary school, like nine years old. Eight. Nine years old or so. Watching that movie a lot at home. Okay. And there is a part in the Neverending Story after the Swans of Sadness, you know, that thing that like traumatized an entire generation because it was just like, it was one of the most real depictions of like losing someone to depression that you could ever have. But then like kind of heavy for a Kid to internalize. Like, it was tough, man, it was tough. But anyway, Atrey, who gets rescued by Artax the. Not Artax, sorry, Artax was the horse shoot. He gets rescued by Falkor the luck dragon, right from the Swanson Sadness. And then you like, it kind of goes to, I think Bastion, the kid in our world narrating the whole story or whatever. And then it goes back to Atreyu and he's like resting. He's like asleep, kind of curled up in Falkor's like kind of near his arm. He's like kind of tucked in nice little warm probably lovely luck dragon bed basically. And I remember Bastion as the narrator, as the voiceover he says after days and days of unconsciousness. And I remember thinking, even as like maybe an 8 year old or so kid thinking, oh my God, that would be so amazing.
[00:30:04] It would be so cool to be able to just like sleep for days and days.
[00:30:10] So like, basically I was jealous at how well rested Atrey you probably felt like I was like, wow, he got left alone just to sleep and recover for days. That sounds awesome. Right now, obviously I'm a little kid. I didn't get the implications of like maybe it was like a coma or something, you know. But like, okay, that's definitely a sign that. But from pretty young I was pretty exhausted. Okay.
[00:30:35] And I remember saying and. And thinking, thinking it even more than I could say it but even like in like middle school time. So for Those outside the US that would be like preteen type ages like 11, 12, up to like 15ish or so. 14, 15ish. Middle school. Okay. I remember saying. And honestly thinking it even more than I said it, but saying like, I'm so tired, scared like all day long. Like impulsively a lot of my thoughts come out of my mouth. I'm like the opposite of a non speaker. Like I said, I'm a too much speaker I guess is the closest thing I could think of. I want something pithier than that. But I can't think of anything pithy. So like I would just be thinking it would be just. It would be like a sensory distraction for me. Right? Because when you're really tired, it's like your eyes are really dry, they're kind of scratchy, your body feels really sluggish. Like it just, it was, was. It was honestly more of a sensory distraction for me than anything. So I'd be like, I'm so tired. Like I hate feeling this tired, but I'm just so, so tired. No one else really seemed to be quite that tired. So I was always like, why am I so distracted and so bothered by how tired I feel that everybody else seems to be fine, ish, you know?
[00:31:47] And I remember, you know, Fast forward another 10 years in my 20s, I remember being like, like, genuinely amazed at how many. So many people just seem to kind of, like, suck up the exhaustion, you know, like, they could go home after work and, like, go to classes and do hobbies and, like, work out and stuff, you know, Because I assumed everybody was feeling the level of exhaustion that I was feeling because everybody's like, oh, we're all just tired. Like, just shut it. You know, it was kind of the message I got.
[00:32:19] So I was so, like, surprised and amazed and honestly, like, in awe. Awe of all these people who said they were just. They were so tired just like I was, but then they still had the energy to go out and do things. I was like, whoa. Like, I don't know how they're able to just push through this exhaustion because I'm like, I just want to sleep for days and days, like, Atreyu, you know, I want Falkor to take me away so I can rest for a long time, you know? What I now know, like, decades later after diagnosis and stuff, is that it's very likely they weren't actually as tired as me. I was likely more tired. I mean, I had trauma stuff going on to deal with. I had childhood stuff, trauma stuff from childhood to deal with. Especially as a young adult, I had a lot of dissociative moments where I would stare at myself in the mirror because I couldn't remember what I looked like. And I didn't feel like I was looking at my own face. So I just kind of stare until it felt like it was my face, if that makes any sense. For these, like, dissociative moments, I'm like, I guess I'll just stare and move it around until I realize, oh, that is my face, and I am in control of this face. This is me.
[00:33:25] So, like, I had lots of other stuff going on, and untreated anxiety and untreated depression and all of this stuff, and un. Unhealed trauma, right? So, like, in addition to the neurodivergency, I'm sure my exhaustion level was quite high, but the only language I had to say was just that I was just really tired. Like, I didn't know how else to verbalize it, you know? How else do you tell people that you kind of just want to disappear and sleep for a while, you know? It's like, don't disturb me for like three days and just let me be by myself for a really long time. It sounds amazing.
[00:33:55] This all gets at the idea that, honestly, probably the biggest microaggression I've ever heard is how lazy I am. You know, like, you're just really lazy. You're really entitled being late, having time Blindness means you're disrespectful and you're immature and selfish, right? Because you're not respecting other people's time. Even though. Though you don't intend to do it. You just. It just happens, right? The fact that, like, I tend to have. I have a floor drove. I still do as an adult. I have a floor drobe, right? Like all my clothes, the clean clothes go on a floor. Well, I have baskets. They have baskets on a floor now, so there's that. We've leveled up to baskets. But like, I don't put up clothes very often, you know, like fold them and hang them. No, that doesn't really happen. So you have like piles of clutter and stuff. And then that makes you, you, you know, gross and disgusting and lazy. I stay up late, I think I honestly have a bit of like a delayed circadian rhythm, honestly, because I've always been more of a night owl and I want to sleep in a lot more. And even if I'm getting up early, my, my, my time to get tired will still get pushed back and back and back, and then I'll just be even more exhausted, basically. If I have to get up early, I'll just get less and less sleep essentially, until I'm so tired that I have to go to bed early, basically. But that means you're lazy, right? That means you're not. You're not really a responsible adult if you're sleeping in, you know, which is, I don't think true, but that's the way it comes across a lot in our society. You know, my stream of consciousness, conversation style, what I call thought funnels, right? It means you're kind of crazy, you're kind of stupid. I used to do a lot of. And I just realized recently, last few years after the diagnosis, I realized how much had been suppressing this. But like, swaying back and forth like this, or if I'm in a swivel chair like this, I'll rock. I'll take the rotation if I'm doing that. But swaying back and forth is something I do a lot when I'm sitting and thinking or when I'm trying to focus to things. This is a Huge stem for me. And I do it all the time. And I remember, like, I do it without realizing I'm doing it and then I have to stop myself. And I remember a lot of people either stopping me with their hand, like putting their hand on my body to remind. Remind me to stop, or just being made fun of for being like, weird, you know, or stupid or distracting for doing it. So basically, yeah, I grew up with a lot of messages, a lot of messages around being respectful, disrespectful, selfish, lazy, gross, stupid, crazy. Oh, and also, yeah, and being really blunt too. Being like arrogant and rude or entitled if I was kind of more honest and I didn't know how to say things in a kinder way, I guess. And also taking what people say at face value and just trusting people when they say they like me and trusting people when they say they're my friends made me a really great target for like, teasing and bullying as well. Right? So, like, this all started pretty young. I mean, I remember being little at parties and feeling very isolated and, and different and feeling social rejection from like 4 year olds, you know, Like, I remember it pretty young. And by the time I was in middle school, I pretty much knew deep in my soul, I knew in the core of my being, I knew that if only I could apply myself or focus, listen to the teacher all the time, follow directions the first time without being told to again and not. And to stop talking as much as I did and stop talking so loud and maybe lose some weight too, that might be good. And maybe dress better, be a little more girly, do makeup, all that I needed to stop acting like a know it all as well, even though I was also stupid and I needed to stop acting immature despite some adults telling me I was an old soul. But somehow, if I could figure out how to do all of these things, this list of things that people, people told me I needed to do, I knew, I knew if I could just attain that I would be worthy of having friends and romantic partners and I could live up to my potential. I could be the Kim I should have always been, you know?
[00:38:07] And I constantly failed at that. And that did not feel good. It did not feel good to constantly fail at that. Right now. This also coincided with when I was in like, kind of my teen years. It was in the 90s. It was like this kind of really big boom in self help and self love and like, you know, Oprah was queen of everything at the time on TV and everything, right? And the whole message of, like, you have to Love yourself in order for other people to love you was out there. Which meant that if I couldn't love myself because I kept failing, it meant that I would never be loved. That was the message I got, right? I'm not deserving of love because I can't love myself. And I can't love myself because I can't fix all these things that people tell me I need to fix. Right?
[00:38:56] And that sucks. It sucks to have that stuff swirling around in your head for pretty young, Pretty young getting that message constantly. And like, it's not just neurodivergence. I mean, there's plenty of people who get all sorts of messages like that in their head and in their teenage years. That's where it gets all muddled and awful in there. And like, self confidence could be a huge issue and self esteem is a huge issue, right? But you know, that, that is where it, like, it makes sense to me that I was so tired. I was trying to literally appease everybody's like, critique of who I was. I was trying to take in literally all the criticisms and fix it. And I couldn't. That's just automatically setting someone up to fail, right? You can't tell. You can't look at a human being and say, change who you fundamentally are and expect them to be able to do it, right? And like the most real thing I've ever, like, the thing that hit me so hard and so real was that first how to train your dragon, you know, movie, which I loved, where it's like, you need to change.
[00:39:52] You just have to change this. And he's like, you just pointed to all of me. That's some, that's some, that's some neurodivergent realness right there with all of that. You get told you got to take responsibility. You have to take responsibility for all your shortcomings, right? And I still don't quite know what people totally mean by it because apparently, just saying, oh, you know, I didn't. My intention was not to be late and to insult you with that. I genuinely just lost track of time and I'm sorry I did it. And like, as an older person now, I can't promise I'll never do it again because, like, it's just, it's just something that I can't promise will never happen because, like, after 40 some odd years, I'm just accepted. Like, that's not going to be fixed permanently. It's, you know, it. I might be totally on time sometimes and late other times. I don't know. And I'll do my best. I will do my best. That's all I will say. Right? But like, that's not taking responsibility. Basically. If you can't promise it'll never happen, then it's not taking responsibility. Responsibility, right. And it's like I saw this online too where somebody was talking about.
[00:40:57] I don't, I remember it was autistic or ADHD or where they're talking about people saying like, take responsibility. And they'll like be like, why did you do that? And then like you explain your actual like internal thinking and your experience of the entire situation and they're like, I don't want any excuses. And then it's just like super confusing because it's like you asked me for why I did it and I told you. But I think it's part of that. Like, like what we say is not what they expected, right? They want to hear a validation for their perception of the situation, not for like what we actually experience. There's not a lot of curiosity for why we are the way we are. Right. The whole societal marginalization, stigma bias thing, right.
[00:41:39] I'm still working on deconstructing my internalized ableism. It's still hard. It's hard to find the balance of like, like not going down a shame spiral, but also still respecting other people's needs and like their needs for deadlines and time and all this stuff. It's, it's hard, it's hard to figure it out.
[00:41:57] So I don't have a whole lot of answers. But where I really started to deconstruct this stuff was Covid shutdown actually because it was so eye opening to me how much like it helped me with the relief I felt sensory wise that I could just be at home in my own spaces and control that a lot more I didn't need to mask all day long. And like I had so much energy to get stuff done because what I had realized is that like when we went back in person in school, what I started to realize is that the way I got to places on time my whole life, especially jobs and stuff, was to just verbally abuse myself constantly basically. So if I left my house, like I would wake up in a panic and, and like I would have this anxiety around leaving on time. That's the only way I could like get myself go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I had to go in like go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go mode, right? Like tap into that anxiety and really stress her out about it and really pressure yourself. And if I left the house like two minutes late or five minutes late or whatever. I would sit there the entire commute calling myself an effing idiot, how irresponsible I was, how stupid, how immature and just whip myself up into this huge friend frenzy of just like constant self berating and abuse and then constantly telling myself, I better not do this again tomorrow Kim, you better not do this again tomorrow. But like I always did do it at some point, whether it wasn't the next day, it would be the day after that, right? Like, like I couldn't stop it because it was just part of who I was. And when I stopped doing that, the time blindness got worse. And yes, I was more late, but like I could accommodate it, you know, for the type of job I was doing. It was accommodatable like how late I was. I would just stay later and do paperwork then. And it worked out fine. But it was like, how do I get to places on time without abusing myself?
[00:43:49] I still don't have a good answer for that because that was the technique I relied on so, so so much, right?
[00:44:00] So coming to understand some things about myself has definitely helped with the burnout, right? Like understanding the sensory cues I need in terms of overstimulation, knowing what helps to calm me down, knowing what kind of rest I need, why I need that kind of rest, thinking in terms of mental load, thinking that Duracell battery type thing of like how much energy I have versus how much I need to get the thing done, that does really help. But I still don't have a good answer for like neurodivergent burnout versus like life, burnout versus trauma. Like I still can't distinguish those things in myself, to be honest. And I don't have any easy answers or solutions which I think is true.
[00:44:47] I think there's really hardly any true solutions because once again, if you use strategies, those take energy too. So then you have to consider your strategies. If you have a burnout strategy to help it deal with it right then now you have, you're using more, you're using a strategy for your burnout, which means that's more energy. That's a spoon, right? That's, that's something you used.
[00:45:11] But I do think trying to deconstruct the internalized ableism and that self abuse seems to have lifted a huge weight off of, of me.
[00:45:20] So that's the best I have. Best advice is like starting to, to unpack all of these. What of these messages is the society telling me? It's, it's all from bias and stigma. And what of it is actually stuff that I can do something about safely for myself, like how do I protect my own mental health from it basically? So like beyond that kind of healing and mental health work with like the right professionals or maybe right safe people, safe friend groups.
[00:45:50] I don't have any good easy answers. And quite frankly, at this point in time, I don't think ableism is really going to go away anytime soon in society. I don't think the bias or discrimination is going to go anyway anytime soon. I think we're always going to be dealing with those things.
[00:46:05] So, you know, I. I don't know. I don't have any answers about that either really.
[00:46:12] So, you know, but finding safe people, finding people who I feel like I feel more trusting in people if I can advocate for my needs and my accommodations and they actually try to at least give it, you know, they tried to be respectful of that. That's nice. People who don't make a huge deal over me being a little bit late, I can't really be close friends with people who are going to make a big deal out of that because if they're going to contact constantly, feel like I'm disrespecting them with it, then that's not gonna be a good fit, quite frankly, you know, and it does take me a long time, it takes me a long time at this point in life to like feel like I can trust people as like friends. But I think that's common for adults. I think the more you go through burning, whether you're a nerd, average or not, the more like, the more relationships you've lose, you've lost in life, the harder it is to start to trust new ones, you know what I mean? I think that's kind of a common thing.
[00:47:07] This is all to say, I really do think that neurodivergent burnout and societal trauma from societal adversity that is based in ableism and stigma and bias.
[00:47:19] This is. These two things can't really be separated from each other when it comes to most people's experience, whether they're apparent or non apparent. And I think just the types of stigma and bias is different, but the impact is still the same. The negative mental health impact is still there. Right? And so I think that the more we can create safer spaces for each other and the more we can try to unpack that stuff for ourselves, maybe we can just find little pockets of like safety and comfort that allows us to start to heal and start to kind of recover from this constant exhaustion, you know, it's the best I've got is like the more we build more of a community and a culture around it, maybe the more we can come together a little more, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a good way to conclude this. That's my 2 billion sense on neurodivergent burnout. So let me know what you think. Like what, what if this really worked for you? Tell me about some of the stuff in the comments below. If any of it was helpful, let me know. Or just click that thumbs up button. If, if, if it's helpful, I'll see the likes. And it just, it does give me a little bit of extra motivation to keep going with this because yes, I need to get that motivation going a little bit better. Especially since I'm doing all the editing. It's always where I get the bottleneck for me, task wise is editing. Sometimes it feels like too much and then I avoid it. So I need to get a little better at that. Speaking of trying to do that without shaming myself, but getting better at it, you know, what works for me. And anyway, so let me know and if you want me to unpack any of this stuff a little further, I can in future episodes.
[00:48:58] But a lot of this also, when it comes to the Ableism stuff, will definitely be stuff that I revisit and probably stuff I repeat. Honestly, when I get into more of that Systemic Oppression series, I don't know how many episodes it'll be. I'm hoping not too many, but it is a more research heavy type of series. So it does take me a lot longer to script and, and to find the right resources and ensure that I have the evidence and all of that I trust essentially to talk about.
[00:49:28] So give me a little time on that. I'm also going to try to get better at making videos on shorter topics, easier topics, lighter things, like just slightly shorter, easier, not as heavy on the editing type of stuff because that will also help with getting more out here, getting more out in the world. So maybe, maybe, maybe I'll keep the YouTube, YouTube algorithm a little happier with me if I put out stuff a little more often.
[00:49:55] With all that said, I can't say I'll see you because it feels weird because I don't actually see you. But what I can say is that the people who like me usually are a little bit weird themselves and I want us to use our weirdness for good, for connection, connection and compassionate understanding of others and in the spirit of that, until next time, everybody just keep it weird. Bye.
