A Little Of Nothing

Tag: burnout

  • The Cost of Looking Fine

    The Cost of Looking Fine

    That’s fine as in adequate, not fine as in exceptional. I doubt I’ve ever looked exceptional. 😀

    Picture the scene. An average day in the office.

    I get up, shower, shave, get dressed, catch a bus, catch a train, then walk to the office from the station at the other end. I then have eight hours, give or take, of Teams chats, impromptu meetings, office banter and general work-focused social interaction, all under the unyielding glare of overly bright LED lighting, office noise and the continual hum of the aircon.

    I’ve dealt with issues, servers going down, urgent requests that really should have been given to me several hours earlier rather than five minutes before they were needed, and generally finished the day without anyone needing to rescue me from under the desk, where I’d built myself a rudimentary cardboard fort out of discarded laptop boxes.

    All in all, a successful day.

    I’ve gone home, repeating the journey in reverse, walked in the front door and my wife has greeted me and asked how my day was.

    “Fine, fine!” I reply.

    I mean, yeah, I guess so. I survived without any meltdowns or burnouts. I didn’t attempt to disembowel a colleague using a staple extractor, nor did I attempt to end it all by forcibly inserting myself into the printer paper feed tray and pressing Print.

    But was it fine? Really?

    In retrospect, I probably spent my entire day’s budget of mental energy/capacity/spoons (whatever you want to call it), and quite a bit of tomorrow’s as well. I’m already in deficit, and I have to repeat the process tomorrow and the day after as well.

    Crikey!

    Just because something SEEMS fine, it doesn’t necessarily mean it IS fine.

    A computer can still run, and be seen to be running and fulfilling its required tasks, when it’s at 98% memory capacity, the CPU is thrashing around in the high 90s and it’s getting hot enough to cook an egg.

    It’s still “working”, right? So where’s the problem?

    Sure, it’s working, but at what cost?

    It’s not maintainable running at that sort of level. One unexpected hiccup and you’re personally experiencing the human equivalent of a blue screen of death as you crash spectacularly.

    The odd thing is, this isn’t necessarily just a neurodiversity issue. We can all experience this to some degree.

    We See Outputs Rather Than Costs

    Generally speaking, someone attends a party, so we assume parties are fine for them. Someone delivers a confident and eloquent presentation, so naturally we assume public speaking isn’t a problem. Someone makes eye contact, so obviously eye contact isn’t uncomfortable.

    Hey, if you can work in a noisy office for eight hours straight, then you obviously have no capability issues, right?

    Sure, someone may be able to do a thing…

    But at what cost?

    An introvert can be excellent socially. A person frightened of flying can get on an aeroplane. Someone with chronic pain can smile. A shy person can give a speech. Someone grieving can make everybody else laugh.

    Human beings are extraordinarily good at doing difficult things while looking remarkably ordinary.

    I’ve previously discussed this in Isolation Vs Exposure, where I boiled it down to an idea that, in essence, states:

    “Difficult things cost me energy, therefore I should eliminate every difficult thing.”

    But in that previous discussion, I also said that this has its own costs and is ultimately self-defeating. Sure, you avoid things that give you stress, but you’re no longer exposed to them, so may find yourself less able to deal with them when they invariably crop up.

    I paraphrase. Go read the other essay. 😀

    Perhaps the goal isn’t to make life cost nothing. It’s to understand the price before deciding whether something is worth buying.

    On consideration, some expensive things are worth it after all!

    (Leaning into the other definition of fine here.)

    Comic Con might be exhausting and still worth doing. A museum day might tire me out and still be wonderful. Seeing friends can consume social energy and still leave me glad I went.

    Yet, conversely, an office meeting might consume the same energy while providing almost nothing in return.

    So there are really two questions:

    Can I do this?

    and

    What does doing this cost me?

    They’re not remotely the same question.

    And perhaps there’s a third:

    Was it worth the cost?

    And what happens when you factor in all the additional masking taxes?

    Consider the following Pete-brand, slightly techie analogy.

    Two smartphones. Both similar in appearance and functionality. Both performing the same long, arduous task.

    One phone finishes the task on 87% battery. The other is down to 14%, running hot enough to act as a hand warmer, and the user has had to disable Bluetooth and NFC just to stop it crashing completely or getting hot enough to trigger a small lithium explosion.

    From the outside observer’s viewpoint, both phones did the task asked of them and therefore both phones are equally capable of doing that task, or a similar one, again in the future.

    The appearance of coping is not the same as coping.

    How Are You? Fine Thanks!

    Again, as discussed previously in Small Talk Is TCP Handshaking for Humans, sometimes “Fine, thanks” is just that.

    Fine.

    Sometimes “fine” means that the Earth has split asunder and a vast dimensional portal to a Lovecraftian hellish dimension has opened within the chasm and is threatening to swallow you and all you hold dear into its dark domain…

    …but the kettle is still working, so you make a brew and try to get through things as best you can.

    I’ve noticed an underlying theme, or leitmotif, in my essays here. I’ve written about appearances of normality, masking and fitting in, followed by essays about burnout, an inability to write and, most recently, my thoughts on isolation versus exposure.

    There seems to be a question running through all of them:

    What is actually happening inside a person when the outside world thinks it already knows?

    Stammering. Masking. Solitude. Sensory experience. Autism. ADHD. Adulthood. Pretending to be someone else.

    Even dealing with my congenital anosmia involved writing an article about hiding who I really am.

    Perhaps that’s the problem with looking fine.

    Eventually, people start believing you.

    And, occasionally, so do you.

    Until one day the internal fans are screaming, the battery is at 3%, several important background processes appear to have stopped responding and somebody cheerfully asks:

    “How are you?”

    “Fine, thanks.”

    Because, technically speaking, nothing has actually caught fire yet.

  • A Little Of Nothing. Emphasis on the Nothing.

    A Little Of Nothing. Emphasis on the Nothing.

    Burnout is a funny word for something that feels so completely unfunny when you’re in it.

    At the moment, even putting pen to paper, or more accurately fingers to keyboard, feels harder than it should. Creativity has wandered off somewhere, motivation seems to have gone with it, and most things feel more like chores than choices. The mood is low, joy is proving annoyingly difficult to locate, and there isn’t much spare energy left for turning any of that into something clever, witty, or worth reading.

    So that’s why things are a little quiet here right now. I could probably force myself to write something, but I’m not sure that would help. For the moment, I’m trying to accept that sometimes there just isn’t much in the tank. Hopefully that changes. Until then, this is about as much as I’ve got.

  • The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    One of the more irritating things about autistic burnout is that it rarely arrives with the theatrical flourish I imagine. There is no dramatic collapse, no warning klaxon, and no helpful message from my brain politely informing me that I’m running critically low on mental resources and should pull over at the next convenient lay-by for a recharge. That would be far too convenient. Instead, burnout usually sneaks up on me.

    It’s less like falling off a cliff and more like gradually walking into the sea. I don’t notice the water reaching my ankles because I’m too busy concentrating on the horizon. Then the water is up to my waist and I’m still too busy focusing on my destination. Before I realise it, I’m out of my depth, floundering slightly, unable to feel the bottom, and wondering which direction the shore lies.

    My day involves a surprising amount of invisible effort. There’s the social masking, the “stage voice” I wrote about in my stammering article, filtering background noise, monitoring facial expressions, trying to remember whether I’ve made enough eye contact to appear interested without accidentally crossing into “slightly unsettling”, keeping track of conversations, and trying not to infodump about slide rules, cravats or my nihilistic theory of human existence. None of those things are particularly difficult in isolation, but together they’re like dozens of little computer programs quietly running in the background. Each one consumes a little memory, a little processing power, and a little battery until, eventually, I simply run out of something to give.

    I’ve started thinking about burnout less like stress and more like a battery. Most people notice when their phone reaches five per cent. My autistic battery has the remarkable ability to leap directly from sixty per cent to, “Why am I irrationally irritated because somebody stacked the dishwasher incorrectly?” Looking back, the warning signs are actually fairly obvious. The world seems louder than usual, conversations start feeling like hard work, and even simple questions such as “What do you fancy for dinner?” suddenly require the computational resources of a AI server farm. Eventually I reach the point where I no longer want to see or speak to anyone, not because I dislike people or because I’m depressed, but because my brain has quietly put a little sign on the door saying, “Capacity reached. Please call again tomorrow.”

    This is perhaps the biggest misconception about burnout. It isn’t laziness, a lack of motivation, or “not trying hard enough”. If anything, it usually arrives because I’ve been trying too hard for too long. I often picture it as carrying a rucksack while somebody quietly drops another pebble into it every day. One pebble isn’t a problem. Neither are ten, or fifty. The trouble is that one day I realise I’m carrying several thousand of the things and I’ve become so accustomed to the weight that I’ve forgotten life wasn’t always supposed to feel this heavy. That’s what burnout feels like to me. It isn’t one dramatic event. It’s the cumulative effect of hundreds of tiny demands, each insignificant on its own, quietly adding up until my brain eventually decides it’s had enough.

    The frustrating thing is that I already know what helps. The solutions are spectacularly uninteresting. More sleep. Less noise. Fewer demands. Time with people I trust. A walk somewhere green. Music. Noise-cancelling headphones. A mug of coffee. None of this is revolutionary, and none of it would sell many self-help books, but it works. The difficult part isn’t discovering the solution. The difficult part is giving myself permission to stop before my brain makes that decision on my behalf.

    At fifty-something I’ve become slightly better at recognising the warning signs. Not because I’ve become particularly wise, but because I’ve ignored them often enough to recognise the consequences. These days, if the world suddenly seems louder than usual, if every conversation feels like hard work, and if the thought of another Teams meeting fills me with existential dread, I know it probably isn’t the world that’s changed. It’s me. That’s usually my cue to slow down before my brain pulls the emergency brake and does it for me.

    Sadly, I do not always pull the emergency cord in time, and sometimes I get so overloaded that I am barely capable of leaving the house. The most banal tasks become Herculean, and routine things I do every day suddenly take on a distinctly Sisyphean quality until it all becomes, well, too much. I have been in that stage fairly recently. Instead I ignored the warnings, went on against my brain’s better judgement, and then promptly fell over. Naturally, I paid the price and am now trying to pick up the pieces. At least I noticed it fairly early in the burnout process and had not sunk too deeply into the depressive mire that can accompany it. I am still close enough to the edge to grab a low-hanging branch and haul myself back out. Muddied, exhausted but still in one piece.

    Perhaps the biggest lesson burnout has taught me is that being autistic or having ADHD isn’t just about the things other people notice. It’s also about the invisible effort that nobody sees. The conversations that looked effortless. The office that seemed manageable. The shopping trip that appeared uneventful. The social gathering everyone assumed I enjoyed. Sometimes my greatest achievement on any given day is convincing everyone else that I’m coping effortlessly. Burnout is often the bill arriving several weeks later.

    I’ve finally stopped thinking of myself as a machine that ought to run continuously. Batteries aren’t defective because they eventually need recharging, and neither am I. Every time I’ve ignored the warning signs and tried to keep going, my brain has eventually overruled me anyway. These days I try to recognise when my own battery is running low and quietly plug myself back into the charger before the screen goes completely black.

    Even if, occasionally, I don’t manage. At least I tried.