Reflections on Making this Burnout Course

Getting my thoughts together

Hi there. This is Heather with Autism Chrysalis, and I’d like to reflect for a moment on this burnout recovery course that I’m creating called Beyond Autistic Burnout. And this is going to be a free form post, I’ve not scripted this particularly. I have some thoughts about what I want to say, but it’s going to be a little bit more ramble-y than some of my other posts. So it is what it is.

As I’ve been making this, I’ve been working on it roughly for about a year and a half, and especially the last several months, I’ve been really, really diving into it and trying to get together all of my thoughts around burnout and create this system that’s been developing in me for several years, but really refine it, and really get to the core of what it is, and refining it enough that it can be presented to other people and actually make sense in their heads, not just in my head.

Understanding the resistance

So it’s one thing for me to talk about burnout in a general sense, even autistic burnout in a general sense, and to get some really specific, useful things to say about it. And that’s all coming from having far too much personal experience with being in what I call “the deep depths of burnout”, and all of the different stages coming out of it and recovering from it.

But when I’ve been really making the course materials, not just making notes about it (I’ve been making notes about it for ages, I’ve been putting down thoughts here and there, I’ve been kind of working out the system in my head, in a sort of general sense), but the last few months when I’ve been really making the materials itself, and especially in the last month or so that I’ve been making the slides for the first day’s workshop, it basically involves me having to go back to some of the worst times in my life, to really embody that (and that sucks), in order to not give your general pat answers to, “Oh yeah, you should just take some time off, take some bubble baths, get a babysitter.”

There’s a part of me that just wants to say, “screw you” to all of that advice, because, I mean, like I couldn’t figure that out? I need some time off? Do you really think that I didn’t figure that out yet?

But that’s never enough. It’s not really getting to the root of the issue. It’s not solving the burnout. And yes, when you can take some time off, that does help a little bit, but it’s not solving the issue. It’s just not piling on more. (And yet, sometimes it does pile on more, because when you take time off, there’s generally less income coming in, which creates financial stress, which just creates more stress and adds to the burnout in a different way than by working too much.)

Back in the burnout

So in order to solve for the equation, to figure out what actually works, I’ve had to put myself back into the place of when I was in the deep depths of burnout, when I was in that place where everything felt like too much, where every suggestion felt like “F you”, everything was just too hard, and everything took too many steps, like basic tasks were just overwhelming.

And then there’s that stage, that’s what I call the “deep depths”, but there’s also these other stages where it’s not maybe quite that bad, but it’s still just like, “come on”. Like, “I don’t have the energy for that. I dealt with other things today, I can’t do more.” And it just feels that there’s always too much to do, and you’re never gonna get caught up. You’re never gonna make any useful progress to it. Like, how do you do that? Or how do you get the motivation when you’re just like, “all I want to do is sleep for five years”.

Yeah, so going back to that place, that I haven’t been in a while, that’s been hard for me. And I know that I’m not actually in that mindset anymore, I’m not actually experiencing that anymore, and there’s this transition between my real life now, where I am able to do more, where I do have energy and motivation and I can work essentially full time – sort of.

Then vs. Now

And I’m also able to protect my rest. I’m able to say, “You know what, I’m pushing too much.” Or, “If I did this, it would be too much, so I’m not going to do that.” I’m not going to push here. I’m going to take time off. I’m going to take the evening off. I’m going to take the day off. I’m going to take half a day off. I’m going to go do this thing that is just for me, that is restorative. 

I’m going to do these things even while I’m working, even when I am putting in the effort. I’m doing it in ways that work differently. My mentality is different. How I’m thinking about things is different. How I’m approaching tasks is different. What I’m stressing about and what I’m not stressing about is different.

There’s a lot of things that I’m not stressing about anymore that I would have before, that would have been overwhelming to me, that just doesn’t matter as much anymore. Or it matters, but in a different way, like I’m thinking about things in a more relational way when I’m approaching people and when I’m talking with people. And sometimes I’ll slip back into old thoughts for a little while, but I’ll come back to it.

But what I want to say is that this transition – I’m living in this reality where I’m not in burnout, but I’m having to go back into those memories of burnout in order to create the course material – and the transitions between these have been kind of a bit of a whiplash and that’s where I’ve been getting a lot of resistance to it.

Like I feel like I need large amounts of protected space in order to be able to make the course materials. And the reality is that that’s hard to do sometimes, especially when there’s lots of other things going on. And so it’s been feeling hard, but I realized that thought of, “oh, I need large amounts of protected space”, that’s one of those burnout thoughts. That’s one of those feelings that I had when I was in the burnout, and in burnout that is real, but my actual reality now is that, “no, I don’t”.

And when I figured that out a couple of days ago, it was this sense of relief, of like, “Oh, that’s what’s been going on. That’s why it’s been hard for me to do this.” And I was able to give myself the grace of going, “Okay, I’m feeling and thinking some of the things that I used to think and feel that were true for me at the time, but they’re not true for me now.”

And, reminding myself of that, just these last few days I’ve gotten more done on the slides for the first day’s workshop than I have in the last month, because I recognized what’s happening, and I can give myself some grace around that.

And here’s the biggest part, that’s a prerequisite to what I’m about to describe, like you have to understand what’s going on, but then dealing with it in a different way. And this is one of the things that I’m going to be talking about early on in the course, is differentiating between “that was then, this is now”. Like, “I’m thinking those things, because that was true for me at that time, and my reality is different now. I don’t have to think that way. I don’t have to feel those things.” 

When the feelings come up, I acknowledge them, I remind myself, “This is why I’m feeling those things. And these are feelings that belong to a different time and a place.” And that pulls me into this present moment, and then I can feel the relief of “okay, this is my life now”.

Getting out

And this is exactly what I want to be teaching in this course. It can be different when you start getting more energy. When you start genuinely coming out of burnout, it’s not just “Okay, I have energy, and now I can go back and do all of those things, like my gigantic to-do list, and push in ways that I used to do.” No, that’s just going to get you back into another burnout.

And that’s what I used to do. That’s why I was in that cycle of burnout, where it was just one burnout after another, but it’s close to a decade since my last burnout, because this time I did it differently. It’s not just “get some energy, get a little motivation, then do stuff the same way again”. No, no, it’s doing things in a different way so that you don’t go into burnout again.

That’s what I really, really, really want to impart. That’s what I want to help you figure out, what’s your different way. And there’ll probably be some similarities to mine, but yours is going to be somewhat different. But the core of how you get there is the thing that I can teach.

Hope and reflection

So I guess what I’m trying to share here is two main things. One of them is hope that it can be different. And the second one, I guess, is more for me than for you, is just me reflecting for myself of why this has been hard, and why this has taken so long, and why I’ve had so much internal resistance to making it at the same time that I also really, really, really want to make this. 

This is the thing that comes up the most often with all of my clients. This is a thing that I coach people around the most often. Where I get the most questions around is this. It’s like, “How do you get out of autistic burnout? Like, how do you genuinely make it better?”

And I talk about a lot around autistic burnout, because I think that the ways that Autistics get into it, the reasons why we end up in it are different. But it’s not exclusive to autism. I think that there’s a lot of similarities with any neurodivergence or marginalized experience, or highly sensitive people. There’s a lot of overlap, especially if your sensory and social experiences of the world are a little bit out of what is the most common range.

Anyway, now I’m just rambling again.

I hope that something in this was useful for you, and if this strikes you as what you’ve been looking for, you’re welcome to join us in the course. You’ll be surrounded by other people that are going through the same types of things. It’s a group thing, in the sense that there’s multiple people doing it together, but it’s not group as in, like, “we’re going to go into breakout rooms, we’re going to find a partner, do team things”, eugh! None of that stuff.

But I hope there will be some sense of: I’m not in this alone. Other people are experiencing the same thing. I’m not the weird one out. No, we can all be weird together, lovingly weird.

And if you just don’t want to do the group thing, you can just watch the recordings and not have to participate actively with anyone. Even if you come live, you don’t have to participate.