The Real Lived Experience

Performance artist and Associate Magical Women artist, Gemma Abbott writes about the real lived experience of being neurodivergent in burn out.

I don’t often regret being unmedicated… but the last few months have been a gradual slide of functional decay into the past two weeks which have been pretty awful to be honest.

I am burnt out. Again.

I’m not putting this out there to alarm folks and please don’t worry. I’m okay. Now I understand why I get to feeling like this… it’s a lot easier to figure out how to look after myself. And that is just what I’m doing, I am getting better.

But it’s really important to be honest about this stuff sometimes and maybe, just maybe, it might help someone else.

So what has this struggle looked like? Well, my ADHD has really taken over.

To the outside world things probably (hopefully) don’t seem a great deal different. Maybe I’ve been a little late to things, seemed a little rushed, been a bit distracted. But the mask I have been used to wearing is strong enough that it covers a whole bunch of stuff so other folks don’t have to deal with it.

But behind closed doors it’s a bit of a mess. I’m behind on the housework and have hardly touched my beloved garden this year. I am crochety and having trouble finding the energy to figure out when/what to eat or to actually make meals.

I lose time hyperfocussing on the “wrong” things like learning Welsh or mentally listing how to pack up everything in the house that isn’t even on the market yet. I get exhausted trying to wrangle this hyperfocus into doing the work I feel like I should be doing and end up staring blankly at the screen of my laptop, just refreshing my emails desperately waiting for one to drop into the inbox that might give me a kick up the arse to get going.

I yearn for my own space and then feel resentful and profoundly lonely when I actually get it. I wake up feeling buzzed and by 10 am I’ll be emotionally gutted and really down. I spend frustrated hours looking for things that are already in my hands or my pockets.

And it has leaked out more than I would like. This week alone I have turned up 3 minutes late to a project interview that was only 5 minutes walk from my house (after obsessively looking for something that was, you guessed it, already in my pocket). I went over time on my presentation (because I usually use my computer clock to keep time but I was using it to share slides…and I was too excited to talk about the place I was in to remember to set up my phone as a back-up timer). The autistic part of my brain hates being late or going over time so it starts fighting back.

I have felt like I have lacked clarity in every conversation I have had about my work, or about pretty much anything this week. I have overshared and infodumped* to people I don’t know well at all. I’ve messaged people on social media thinking I was texting and vice versa. And my spelling has become atrocious!

And every scrap of every interaction I will then pick over in the finest detail, or dream about (if I make it to sleep). I walk away from things punishing myself about everything I should have said or how I could have articulated myself differently, how I could have done more work to be better understood. It is exhausting.

The shame of the mask slipping in public can be a hard thing to cope with. And when, as a self-proclaimed disability advocate you own up to that shame…well it gets even harder to leave the house.

And part of this is the embodied knowledge that the world is not built to accommodate minds like mine. Even in spaces and situations that claim to be accessible, I am aware that my unmasked traits are often read as unprofessionalism and unreliability. And when I try to evidence that I deliver excellent quality work, if and when I am trusted with it, this either gets read as inexperienced desperation or arrogance.

And while I try to be open about where I am at with my Neurodivergence, to proudly state it’s existence in each and every room I enter…I don’t always know how to acknowledge the negative or difficult things it may have me bringing into the room, or what exactly I need to operate on egalitarian terms in neurotypically imagined/ingrained situations. I’ve definitely not nailed asking for those things yet. But hopefully I’ll get there one day soon. And hopefully, if we keep trying to improve things, keep reaching out with honest experiential stories, keep at least trying to ask for the things we need… one day soon the world will catch up.

*this isn’t what is happening here… firstly, we’re all friends here. And secondly, this is a post where I am getting some things down for the sake of clarity and awareness. We’ll get nowhere by keeping our mouths shut.

So really this little bit of writing is a small act of activism. Thanks for reading.