I was thirty-four when a friend said, completely casually, 'Yeah, I went to the grocery store, then the post office, then I met someone for coffee. Normal Saturday.' I stared at her. Three things? In one day? Without needing a nap, a dark room, and eighteen hours to recover? Without the post-grocery crash where you can't form sentences and your skin hurts and you lie on the floor for an hour wondering if this is just what life feels like and how everyone else manages it? That was when I started to suspect that maybe the way I experienced the world wasn't universal. That maybe everyone else wasn't white-knuckling through the same exhaustion and just better at hiding it.
I'd always assumed everyone felt this way. That the bone-deep fatigue after socializing was just introversion (introversion doesn't make you non-verbal, it turns out; that's a different thing). That the fog after a busy day was just being tired. That the meltdowns I'd been having since childhood — crying jags I couldn't explain, rages that seemed to come from nowhere, shutdowns where I literally couldn't speak — were just me being dramatic, or hormonal, or 'too sensitive.' I'd built my entire sense of self around the assumption that I was bad at being a person. That other people had figured out some secret I'd missed. They hadn't. They just had different brains — brains that filtered sensory input automatically, brains that didn't burn through an entire day's energy in a single grocery run. The problem was never effort. The problem was that nobody had told me I was running different hardware.
I was diagnosed autistic at thirty-six. The neuropsychologist read forty-seven pages of my life history — every memory I could document, every pattern I'd noticed once I started looking — and confirmed what I'd been researching for eighteen months. The report was long. The assessor said, gently, 'You've been working very hard your whole life, haven't you?' I cried. Not relief — I'd already done that, sitting in my car after that Saturday conversation, letting myself wonder for the first time. This was something else. Grief and validation tangled together so tightly I couldn't separate them. A professional with a diagnostic manual was telling me I wasn't lazy or dramatic or bad at being a person. I was autistic. I'd always been autistic. The marathon I'd been running wasn't a marathon most people run. And the shoes I'd been given were the wrong size. I'd been blaming myself for the blisters.
What I wish someone had told me at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-four in the grocery store parking lot: the things that exhaust you are not character flaws. The grocery store, the post office, the coffee — those are genuine cognitive loads for a brain that processes sensory input without the automatic filter most brains have. You're not weak. You're working harder than most people will ever understand just to do what looks like a normal Saturday. And you're allowed to rest after one errand. You're allowed to need a dark room. You're allowed to arrange your life around what your brain actually needs instead of what the world pretends is normal. The world's definition of normal was never designed for your hardware. It's not your job to run software that overheats your processor. It's your job to find the settings that work.
— Marin
About the Author
Marin is a late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD adult who burned out at 34 after a career built on the assumption that everyone felt this tired all the time. They live in Oregon with a rescue cat named Bug. They now schedule exactly one errand per day and consider it a successful day. Two is pushing it.
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