One Year of Burnout Later -

Behind the curtain of my life this year, let's get caught up.

I’m seated at a counter height table of my favorite local coffee shop for getting things done at. They don’t necessarily have the best coffee in town. But they do have the best co-working vibe. I haven’t bought anything yet and I’ll be honest, I’m a little distracted by the guilt of that, but I fear if I stop typing my brain will decide that we don’t need to try and finish because this story has been tricky to try to tell and there’d be more dopamine in a doomscroll.

A little over a year ago I was able to understand the mental health struggle I found myself in as “Autistic Burnout” (or “Neurocomplex Burnout”) which was surprising to me because - I was not aware that I was *not* neurotypical.

As one does, I consulted Dr. Internet. Well… more accurately I consulted Dr, TikTok. Which was truly useful because in the stories others were courageously sharing, I saw my own nuanced combination of struggles and it led me down a new path of discovery I hadn’t anticipated for myself, giving me answers and a roadmap to find my way out.

Now, roughly a year later, I am an entirely different person. And also, I am very much the same. The end of the essay! Ha! Kidding. Although, I mean… it could be I guess.

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I’ve been sitting down at this laptop almost every day trying to figure out how to use this Substack in the way my intuition is pulling me toward. And feeling like “How can I ever get them all caught up? So much has happened!”

Let’s get the big stuff out of the way quickly, shall we? I crashed out harder than I ever have last January. It was beyond a typical career or creative burnout. I was familiar with those. This was more like it was in my marrow. In February I got the confirmation that I am Neurocomplex and could be described as experiencing Level 1 Autism (previously called Asperger's Syndrome.) I wrote about it here soon after. There’s a lot of nuance here I would love to get into and am happy to if we are talking 1:1 about theories my therapist has on this and what I’ve learned myself over the last year about trauma and brain development and tendencies/needs that look a lot like autistic ones but I don’t have time right now. We’ve already got a lot to cover.

- Unmasking Autism by Devon Price PHD

This revelation about the state of the way my brain works threw me for a loop. I didn’t expect to feel grief or sadness about it but it washed over me like tsunami for weeks. Then the mountain of figuring out what to do now loomed ahead of me last spring. As a “late-diagnosed” human, I’d lived my life up until now without this knowledge or any accommodations to help my system navigate a world built for neurotypical minds. And while I had accomplished a lot doing things that way, I was also crashed out in an intense autistic burnout. The most surprising symptom being skill regression.

I couldn’t get myself to put my face on video. It’s so hard to explain because I didn’t lose the ability to hold a phone in front of my face and talk at it. But I also kind of did. I just couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t make myself market myself. Which, and you may have already connected these dots, was a problem for a self-employed person.

I’ll skip over the details but by summer I’d exited the wellness company I’d been brought into and had stopped almost everything, throwing our life into a chaos it hadn’t ever experienced because as long as I’d been an adult, I’d been hustling.

As I began the arduous process of learning about myself through this new lens, “unmasking”, and figuring out how to advocate for my needs and give myself accommodations, I unearthed a whole new level of people pleaser-ness inside myself, finding it very difficult to ask for what I needed.

During this time, we were on a similar journey of diagnosis with my youngest child who is adopted and has complex needs because of that. And I was having to step up as her advocate to family, friends, her teachers, and the world. Learning through trial and error what would work for her nervous system and discovering how much she needed to borrow mine. (If we are together, she is almost guaranteed to be touching me.)

It was an all consuming and emotionally exhausting season. As I pulled back layer after layer on her behalf, we were connected with an incredible organization called The Florida Center. That’s a whole hilarious story in itself that I’ll probably share on a future podcast episode. But the punchline is that I didn’t realize the organization exclusively diagnosed FASD (I thought they diagnosed autism and adhd as well) until I was on the phone with our advocate and she asked me point blank about it and I was like “Wait what?” But it was the most divine misunderstanding because it led us to realizing that our daughter had been impacted that way after pouring over the medical records we could scrounge up from before our adoption and it felt like we finally found the missing puzzle piece to helping her thrive!

It was the process of learning what accommodations she needed and learning how to advocate for her that I started to realize how deserving I was of the same mama bear energy and started to mother myself in a similar way. Learning how to let people down, how to set boundaries for myself, learning how to manage expectations and talk about my needs, fighting feeling like a fraud because I don’t “look” autistic, and working through the sheer TERROR of living in a more “unmasked” way.

“Masking” is the term used to explain how neurocomplex individuals will alter their body language, behavior, communication, and sacrifice their own needs to better blend into neurotypical environments.

Months of practice of this slowly helped me feel more at ease being myself. And the compound effect of that was coming out of the intensity of burnout. The negative was that as I stopped masking, I started to feel myself falling out of favor with certain people or certain types of people. And I felt like I didn’t recognize myself. I’d gotten so used to seeing my own mask that I felt like an imposter being myself. It was very disorienting and is still a work in progress but it’s gotten a lot better. It’s part of why I’m still not making reels or showing my face in video on social media much. I feel weird when I see my unmasked self reflected there and I haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that feels good yet.

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While my husband and I have been exploring consensual non monogamy since 2020, I decided to focus on experiencing connection outside of romantic or sexual encounters. Not feeling like myself in my style or skin made me unsure how to show up in those interactions and attempting to do it unmasked felt as confusing as if you dropped me on an alien planet and asked me to interact with them. I also realized I struggle to detect when people are lying to me because I miss social cues and that puts me (and has put me) in potentially dangerous dating situations. I just didn’t feel like dealing with it with everything else going on, you know? And honestly, I didn’t know how to express myself that way without the character I’d created. Without *that* version of Becka. She’s great, but I didn’t feel like putting on her costume.

I still kind of don’t. But it’s okay because the incredible byproduct of turning my attention away from that was that I focused on cultivating my plutonic relationships and noticing love in its various and expansive forms. It was poetic and incredible and stretching and by my 40th birthday last December I felt for the first time since I left the church in 2008 that I had a small circle of close enough friends to invite over for a birthday party and cacao ceremony. I wanted everyone to gift me their vulnerable presence and while I was so afraid of asking this of them (in fact I nearly cancelled the party twice for fear no one would be willing to make themselves a little uncomfortable for me even though that’s what I’d been doing for everyone for years by masking) I ended up in a circle on my dining room floor on the winter solstice surrounded by my inner circle friends, everyone crying and expressing their love and respect and appreciation for each other and it was everything I could have ever wanted. It healed something in my heart that I didn’t realize was still broken from when I was kicked out of my religious community.

Sometimes it’s all about the internal work, sometimes it’s a little external. For my birthday, I invested in skincare, my husband bought me a session with a personal stylist to help me figure out how to express myself, and I started my 40th year feeling seen, so full of love and gratitude that I could have exploded, and excited for whatever was going to be the next act of my life.

A little bit before my birthday, we had two really bad hurricanes come through Florida. One of which destroyed my childhood home in Tampa. The home my dad was still living in. I can’t share all of this story yet except to tell you that it is the basis of the memoir I’m writing because the reclamation story happening in all of this is so unexpected that if I don’t write it all down I’ll surely convince myself that I imagined it. In a very stressful, terrifying, and upending two week timespan I had to find him a new home and move him here to the city where I live. This is the first time we’ve lived in the same city since I was 18 and I was so afraid of how that would go for my cPTSD.

I cannot wait to share the story of this. But I can’t tell you now because it’s still actively unfolding. I’m playing around with a working title of “Haunted” for the memoir and it’s going to be a story of childhood trauma, religious trauma, neuro-divergent trauma, and generational healing. If you know any editors or writing reps who I might be a good fit for please tell me their names. The whole getting a book deal thing is very overwhelming to me. But I also think self publishing sounds overwhelming. I’m open to however the book is supposed to come through I just need some help.

Oh! I almost forgot. My husband shattered his collarbone around the same time I was taking care of everything with my dad (who, to be clear, I had been basically no contact with for a decade till then). And then I lost one of my biggest streams of income right after Christmas. And after the election and since I’ve had a fairly visceral reaction to all men and had a really hard time figuring out how to… be… in…. this? Are there any other ex-evangelicals feeling a bit like you finally escaped this big scary thing and now it’s peering back in at you through your window at night? It’s such an unsettling feeling watching christian nationalists in the highest seats of power when you worked so hard to untangle your being from the programming of that cult.

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So those are the big bullet points from the last year. Mixed into that was a really hard self confidence loss, a rough romantic relationship year (and self worth year), standing up for myself in small ways that felt wildly confronting, deciding to stop coloring my hair and let the gray grow out, feeling soooooo old and like I’d lost all appeal (physically and just like… as a woman in the world and especially online) because of it, a maiden to mother archetype shift that was terrifying and also really grounding and also I’m still trying to get my bearings (who is she?!), going through some very big ego and self image deaths, working through a ton of internalized ableism and capitalism (what is my value if I’m not seen as successful/working/achieving/aspirational?), trying a few different versions of using RRT in business, realizing I will probably need to homeschool our youngest and that means not being able to work full time when we really need me to contribute financially, building my in person community and relationships, losing and rediscovering hope a bunch of times, finding the edges of my capacity, accommodating myself, opening my heart, fidgeting (read: stimming) openly, not planning any big goals, pouring into my relationships with my kids and feeling for the first time like time was moving too fast, cultivating devotion to my inner world (writing, meditation, etc), healing a few major past traumas that were still being carried in my body with RRT, experiencing one of my mentors being involved in allegations of sexual abuse, chopping off all my hair, feeling really insecure about the ways my body is aging, feeling really apathetic about feeling insecure about aging…

It’s not over. It’s spiralic. I’ve joked with more than one person in my inner circle on more than one occasion about how on paper our life has never been this unsettled but how inside of it, I am the happiest and most content I’ve ever been as an adult.

I hope that by getting all of this out in the open my writer’s block finally dissipates and you feel a little less like you’re in the dark on where I’m at. As I share more and dive into topics I’m exploring now that I wasn’t in the past, I want it to feel rooted and make sense. I’ve always shared my journey online, it’s a form of verbal processing for me, and I also believe stories heal and expand and connect and set us free.

If you made it this far, you’re a real one. I know posts like this aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I really enjoy reading these types of updates from creators/artists/online personalities I enjoy so if you’re like me, I hope this made you feel like you got to peek behind the glass. I’d love to hear if you’ve gone through any of these things this last year too. It always seems that I attract people at similar stages or who are secretly going through similar expansions and when I finally talk about it they reach out and tell me in hushed responses “OMG ME TOO”. I can’t wait to see who you are this time.

If you have questions or want to comment, I’ve made an anonymous question box you can submit them here or you can leave a comment or reply via email.

Still feels weird sharing photos and videos of myself but here we go. Look at her being brave.

xo, B