Capacity Is Not Capability: Recognising Autistic Burnout in Women

Bec Cameron: If anything you heard today sounded like you, that's worth paying attention to. You're not broken, you're not exaggerating. You're not a hypochondriac, you just might be a woman the system was never built to see. And I wanna leave you with something bigger than self-care, because I don't actually think self-care is an issue here. I think this is a political issue. We live inside systems that profit from us never stopping. Patriarchy and capitalism both run on women who keep going. who absorb the unpaid labor, who hold the family together, who answer emails at ten PM, who push through the burnout and call it resilience. These systems thrive on us not taking the time to look after ourselves. They have taught us that our worth is our output, but they've been very careful around what output counts. Because the productivity that does get rewarded is only ever the kind that produces a capitalist outcome. The rest of it, the resting, the healing, the mothering, the regulating of your own nervous system, so you can survive another week. None of that Hey friends and welcome back to Disgustingly Easy, the podcast for the long game. And I'm coming to you now today, 60 days post-move. The downsize, the tree change, the closer to family, idyllic country living, the community, right? it might be hard to explain why two weeks ago I got so dehydrated I started having dizzy spells. I forgot to eat. shows up on the ledger. So we're trained to treat it as indulgent, as lazy, as something to feel guilty about. And I want to name it for what it is. It's a construct. Productivity in the way we've been sold is a construct designed to keep you depleted and compliant. here's my actual pitch. If you want to be revolutionary, then ⁓ Take the time off, take your leave, take all hundred days of your sick pay if you have it. Quiet, quit. And I say that knowing exactly who I'm talking to because My cognition I'm noticing is slower, light, and sound is louder than it normally is. My temper is short, and I can feel this heavy full-body resistance to every single thing on my list, including the things I actually like doing. And I know what this is. I'm heading into burnout again. And the reason I'm recording this episode today, instead of most of the neurodivergent women listening to this have set a baseline of exceptionalism so high that they have completely lost sight of what normal effort looks like. You could work half as hard as you currently do and you would still be meeting, possibly exceeding your neurotypical peers. Definitely exceeding expectations. Half. So pulling back isn't falling behind. It's just how we stop the bleeding. Rest is not the reward you get after you've earned it. Rest is the thing that they don't want you to take, so take it. waiting until I'm on the other side of it so I can speak to it neatly and past tense is because I think the version this conversation that actually helps someone is potentially the one I'm sitting in, not performing recovery or turning it into a teachable moment, not telling you what I did to fix it, just naming it in real time out loud. So that's what today is. I want to walk you back through ⁓ The burnout episodes I've had across my life. There's six of them that I can think of, give or take, and I want to talk about what I didn't have the language for at the time. Because every single one of those episodes I now understand to have been autistic burnout. And I didn't know that for almost 20 years. And if any of what I'm describing sounds like you, I want you to pay close attention to that feeling and stay with me till the end. So why I'm recording this now. The thing That is the radical act. Take care of yourself, as a treat, as resistance. And remember, when nothing is certain, anything is possible. You've got this, and I've got you. That made me want to record this beyond the dizzy spells or beyond the fact that I can hear the fridge from three rooms away right now is something a little bit more uncomfortable. ⁓ I can still show up. And it's something that I've been speaking about with Audi HD coach and InstaBestie, Megan Burks. If you haven't seen her work, you should check her out. And that is that capacity and capability are not the same thing. In short, intermittent bursts, can absolutely project the image of someone who is ⁓ fine. Like right now, I can do a Zoom call, I can post a smiling Instagram story, I can have a normal conversation at Kinder Pickup. And you would not be able to tell from the outside that anything is going on. The mask hardens in those moments and genuinely feels almost immovable. Even if I wanted to drop it, my nervous system will rarely allow. And the worry that lives underneath that for me, and I know it lives underneath for so many of you, is that people will think I'm putting on an act when I say I don't feel good, that I'm faking it, that I'm exaggerating, that I'm a hypochondriac. So here's the reframe I want to start with, because everything else in this episode is downstream of that. I have to allow for the fact that some people will think that. I still know what I need to do. I have to understand that my capacity and my capability are mismatched and probably always will be. And there is a grief in knowing what I'm capable of ⁓ my current capacity will allow. All of these things can exist at the same time. So how do we understand or address what autistic burnout actually is? Before I take you through this episode, I want to give us a shared language. So autistic burnout is not just I had a big week and I'm tired. It's the cumulative cost over months, sometimes years, of masking sensory load, interreceptive issues that don't tell you if you're hungry or thirsty or overwhelmed until it's far too late. And life conditions or social conditions that were never designed for your nervous system. And eventually the bill is due, executive functioning collapses, sensory tolerance goes through the floor, emotional regulation goes out the window, and the basics of eating, drinking, brushing your teeth, replying to a message, anything that requires task initiation or transition becomes genuinely difficult. And the reason so many women miss it, the reason I missed it for two whole decades is that the diagnostic picture of autism was built on boys. Externalized, easily noticed, and this is the key, outwardly disruptive. Women's presentation is internalized and we are socialized not to disrupt no matter what. Good girls are quiet girls, and when we seek out nervous system regulation as a response to burnout, we default to what makes us good girls, places in which we receive praise, in which we're accepted, in which we feel safe, and our burnout presents in a way that gets labeled things like depression, anxiety. OCD, perfectionism, stress, hormones, hypochondria, anything but the actual thing. So let me walk you through mine and if any of this rings true for you, I want you to listen for yourself in these episodes. Episode one. The first one I can identify happened in year 11. I had worked my entire school year to prove that I am smart. The smart version of me was accepted. She was impressive. She got praise and compliments and awards that meant that there was meaning and connection in everything I achieved. That was the project. I was the project. But in year 11, at some point I just stopped. I stopped doing assignments, I stopped doing homework, I started sleeping in class with a book propped up in front of my face. Teachers were perplexed, my parents were perplexed, I was somewhat perplexed because everyone, including myself, wanted to know what happened to the girl who used to really care about her work. at home, in private, where no one could see, I was having frequent meltdowns. The only way I can think to describe it is like I felt like so there was so much pressure building up within me that I was going to explode. I thought I had depression, maybe, but there was nothing I had ever felt really sad about. I just had no other word for what was happening to me. What I didn't know at the time was there was a name for what I was doing. It's called the valve release. You hold it all together at school or you hold it all together at work or in public. You maintain the socially acceptable version of yourself. And then the second you're in a safe environment, the suppressed stress comes pouring out almost uncontrollably as a meltdown, as irritability, as shutdown, as demand avoidance. Nobody outside the home sees it, so nobody outside the home knows it or understands it or at times even believes it. The footnote on that episode is that in year twelve I just switched it back on. I studied six hours a day before exams, I ended up with a really high HSC mark or ATAR. My English teacher famously said to me, and this lion lives rent-free in my head, that if you were a racehorse, we'd be testing you for drugs. So from the outside, I'd recovered. And whilst I moved on, I really had no idea what had just Episode two, college and my undergrad year. So the second one is a little bit harder to talk about. I spent 12 months in a live in college in Sydney in 2008. This college was a part of Sydney Uni, and to me it was sensory hell. It was loud, it was relentless, it was a party every night. There were bodies everywhere, bumping, grinding, never not touching each other, and it was full posh private school boys who felt entitled to your body, your attention, your time, your energy. And I'm not going to dwell on that environment, but I'm just going to name it for what it was. After I moved out ⁓ and I restricting my food. Partly in response to the stress of my studies back when. The most stressful thing in my life was the second year of an undergrad arts degree, but also as a means to feel back in control. And as I did this, my executive functioning started to disappear. Exams came in my second year, and as my functioning slowly declined, I became less able to show up. Again, I was a high-achieving student. I cared deeply about my studies, and I would walk into an exam and then be unable to even write my name on the paper. And I would sit there. dissociate and the time would run out. Other exams I didn't even get there. I would lie in bed and watch the clock and I would realize the exam had started and I would just keep lying there, watching the time tick away, completely unable to move my body or get up. Task initiation, whether writing on my exams or getting out of bed was not something I felt like I had access to anymore. And I remember wondering if it was going to be like this forever. The internal symptoms that I had experienced as a high school student came out, but I still had no language for them. When I had meltdowns, my thoughts would turn the volume up until they were screaming in my head and I couldn't turn the volume back down. I was counting compulsively. I thought I had OCD. Songs would start playing in my head and I couldn't make them stop. And now I have a name for that. It's called internalized echo lalia. And I didn't know that at the time. I just thought my brain was broken. So please hear this, because this is the part that lots of women get stuck on. I was smart, I was motivated, and I cared. And my nervous system still took me out anyway because the conditions in which I was existing were beyond my nervous system's capacity. This is not a discipline problem. This has nothing to do with what I was capable of. This is burnout. Episode three. The third one came when I was a social worker. So my sister-in-law had died 24 months earlier, and I was still carrying that grief like a huge weight in my chest every single day. I was 18 months into my first ever social work job in child protection, a role that honestly would break a seasoned worker, let alone a rookie. And slowly, predictably, my functioning started to wane again. This is circa 2014, 2015. The cumulative effect of vicarious trauma a completely inappropriate workload for a first-year out social work grad, I remember knowing that what I was doing was unsustainable, but watching everyone around me keep on keeping on. So I told myself I had to do that too. In that job, I was nearly physically assaulted on multiple occasions, told to do home visits alone to houses where I knew there was significant substance abuse, I was routinely undermined, and there were implications that I couldn't hack it. Which I now see as a means to reverse psychology me into working harder or taking on more responsibility. I was often put in a position to work to the level of a much senior worker and praised for my capability. But then whenever I spoke about my needs, I was treated as though I was too green to understand how things worked. In the space of two weeks, I was once again nearly assaulted on a home visit and had a near miss in my car. cracked and decided one Monday that I couldn't go to work that day. When I attended my GP for a medical certificate for the day, she took one look at me and wrote me one for the month. I hadn't intended to take it, but I took four weeks of stress leave. The meltdowns came back, the dissociation came back. At one point, I put a pile of tea towels on a lit gas stove and had no memory of doing it. My life felt like it required this incredibly tight control to keep it all together. And any little cracks, any little surprises, anything unexpected, and the whole thing came tumbling down. This was the first burnout where I tried to actively repair myself. I started meditating, I started yoga. I first looked into personal development and I did everything I could to try and mend what was broken. And what I want to name now, with the benefit of hindsight, is that I was trying to fix a thing that I hadn't accurately named. And that's why nothing necessarily stuck or the changes felt superficial. All of those tools were useful, none of them were right because I was running burnout protocols on a nervous system that really just needed me to understand. That I was Episode four was in seventeen. So around twenty seventeen and this happened after my sexual assault. I'm not gonna go through this one in detail because ⁓ don't think I need to, but what I'll say is that the pattern repeated and what I now understand to be And what I now understand is that the trauma laid on top of an unrecognized neurotype compounds the burnout pattern in ways that the medical system and modern psychology, in my opinion, is almost never set up to see. Episode five was in 2024. So this is where the language finally started arriving for me. And I want to spend a minute here because the how of that is really important. The load that year was enormous. We were finishing a renovation, we were selling our house, we were moving with a two-year-old. My husband and I were both navigating our own neurodivergent journeys, ⁓ and then the symptoms came in. I ended up in hospital, mental health panic attacks. And do you know what I was actually told? To look up some breathing apps on my phone then hand it a script for Valium. That was the intervention. Soon after that, I had an episode of heart palpitations and I went to a cardiology clinic in Melbourne. They told me to not be so stressed, ⁓ to drink less coffee without actually asking me how much coffee I drink. And then they seemed genuinely surprised when they checked my blood pressure and it was normal. I went home, ⁓ opened Reddit. I typed into my symptoms there I found women like me, neurodivergent women, who had already mapped out the whole thing. What I was actually experiencing with the heart palpitations was a difference in interoception. The way I perceive my internal sensations, hunger, thirst, heart rate, breathing, anxiety is not the same as a neurotypical person's. My sensory sensitivities turn up in burnout. And that's why the world has started feeling so loud. Not even my external world, but also my internal world. Everything that I had been describing to doctors and cardiologists, every symptom they'd told me was in my head had a clean. well-documented explanation that they did not have any information or access to, and yet Reddit did. And I'll tell you what that cost me. I actually stopped breastfeeding my son overnight because I started taking Valium, because I was lying at night wondering if I was dying, all of which could have been resolved and eventually was, but by a Google search and information that no professional or medical professional had been able to give me. And I wanna slip one more concept in here because it's relevant to the gap as to why this keeps happening. I did my due diligence, and every single one of those appointments was preceded by extensive research, by mental rehearsal and scripting. I replayed conversations in my head, I rehearsed how I was going to describe the symptoms, I anticipated what the clinicians would say, and I pre-drafted my response. However, none of that made a lick of difference when it came to the level of care I was receiving because they did not have a neuro-affirming basis. Autistic women do this constantly, and we do it more in burnout. One of the side effects is that because we present so well in our appointments, we are articulate, we are composed, we are together. And so everyone thinks that really, underneath it all, we're fine. And we're not fine, we're just very well rehearsed. And that brings me to episode six, which is right now, May 2026, 60 days post-move. And like I said, the dehydration crept up on me till I was dizzy, cognition is slower, light and sound are louder. Resistance is heavy, temper is short, parenting feels And lose so much presence of mind around the basics. Water, food, sleep, vitamins, movement, the things that keep my body running. And so I'm putting something on record for myself and anyone who needs it. Big changes are a burnout trigger. And that's good to know going forward. That's the difference between this one and the others, I guess, is that I have the language for it now and it doesn't make the burnout smaller. It doesn't make it easier. It does make it potentially more workable. I'm not waiting for a person in a white coat to tell me what's wrong. I already know what's wrong and I already know what I need. Now, if we step back for a second, I want to name three things because if you've heard yourself in any of what I've described, these are the things that I want you to walk away with today. One, you can look fine and be in crisis at the same time. For almost two decades, I thought my overwhelm response was a panic attack. when I moved in with my now husband, he was so confused because I'd report having panic attacks. But from the outside, I looked like I was sitting quietly, sometimes angrily, staring off into space. We mask highly. the world was loud. It was whooshing. My thoughts were screaming at a volume. I could not turn the volume down. I completely incapacitated. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. That is why. That is an autistic woman's meltdown often looks like. And it's also across the spectrum of autistic burnout. Medical systems do not see it because it doesn't look like the textbook. Two, internalized symptoms get missed by everyone, including ourselves. Internalized echolalia, mental rehearsals and scripting, interoceptive differences, sensory sensitivities that turn up, valve release meltdowns that only happen in the safety of your home, so no one ever witnesses them, and masking harder than normal in everyday social settings. Every single one of these is well documented for autistic women. of them. were ever offered to me in a clinical setting and I had to find out all of this myself. Three, and this is so much more common than you think, This is so much common than you think. I want to speak directly to the women listening now. I've hear versions of this story constantly. Constantly. And so many of you realize that what you're experiencing is autistic burnout. You think it's behavioral. You think it's something to do with your systems or your strategies. But this is because the misogyny of the medical system and the overrepresentation of male presentations of autism in research, in pop culture, and even in the autism community has trained us to look for the wrong thing. So let me say this as clearly as I can. It's not you. You're not broken. You're just undiagnosed. What I want from this episode is not a prescription. It's an invitation. Speak up about what's happening to you. Investigate it. Google it. Search it on Reddit. You're allowed to go down rabbit holes when it's regarding your own care, your own health, and your own treatment, especially when the current medical system has no understanding or reference points in relation to your care. Give yourself permission to stop performing fine and give yourself permission to allow that some people will think you're putting it on, some people will be triggered by your needs or even your self-advocacy. That doesn't mean you stop. Because here's the thing, once you have the language, you stop trying to fix the wrong problem, you stop doing more yoga and start realizing that you actually need to reduce stimulation and reduce input. You start pushing harder at the thing that's already overdrawn. And in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I am taking June and possibly July off social media. This episode is me modelling the thing. So the long game is open from now until the end of May. And just a reminder: we have our free workshop for neurodivergent mothers who want to stop white-knuckling their health and fitness. That's happening on Thursday. It's called Easy on Purpose, and you can register via the link in my bio. Once May is over, the long game is going to close until the end of July and reopens in August. So the long game itself keeps running the entire time because it's a special interest of mine. So it doesn't drain me in the same way social media does. That, by the way, is a beautiful lived example of the difference between a drain and a refuel for an autistic nervous system. So if you're on my mailing list during the social media break, you'll get notified when I release two new courses for the long game. These will be available via one-off purchase if TLG isn't accessible for you right now, but you're still interested in learning from me. The first course is Pre-game foundations. This is an identity-based fitness behavior course, The Work Beneath the Workout. So we uncover the patterns behind everything you've ever done with your body and why you've not been able to stay consistent in the past. And this course builds your new fitness identity from the ground up and steps out exactly what you need to do to get it off the ground. The second course is called Precision Phase, and it is an evergreen course that steps you through a 12-week fat loss deficit. We set up your nutritional strategy and I support you the whole way through. With a video every week. Both courses are very neuroaffirming, very trauma informed, and I'm saying that because that's why they exist. If you want to chat about which one fits you ⁓ get on board before the social media break, you can DM me the word ready and we can work it out together.