This resonated so deeply with me. I had a 20+ year career in tech where I was able to sustain a huge output despite all the masking and background processing, but it was because of passion and alignment. Once I saw firsthand that the alignment I thought existed was actually just smoke and mirrors, I completely broke. Couldnt speak, get out of bed, or function. It was the misalignment and also the moral injury that I’d poured my life force into a company I suddenly knew was evil. That was 3 years ago and I’m still recovering.
This is one of the most useful things I have read here. Your wheel alignment metaphor is going right into daily use. As is your way of talking about thresholds.
All of this is exactly me, and then some. You are so smart to use the interior anchor as a form of auto-tuning. You are right that people like us will know exactly what that thing is and what this means.
I am sixty one, and have just been diagnosed with AuDHD after, well, many decades of struggle.
I am so grateful to you for this, and for your generosity.
this feels like i could have written it in another life. now i just have to navigate the tightrope between my passion and what will let me survive capitalism
My rants have always been about people being treated like they don't know what they're doing. I have always, always believed that people often understand things more than they realize, and it's up to us to give them the opportunities and options to learn and grow in the ways that work for them. Not surprising, then, that I've focused in education for my careers.
I love this so much because it shows the specificity of the internal compass. You weren't nebulously or randomly drawn toward education, you were drawn towards education in your careers because of this belief that people deserve the opportunities and options to learn in ways that are accessible to them.
I burned out from wrong work just because of my stupid belief that if I don't work, I don't count. Focusing on my rants is a good idea, I wish I could record it and then play it back. I actually haven't ranted in a while, I've been numbed out for a minute. Thanks for your perspective!
I appreciate you sharing this. People who work with autistic children know how important their passions are, but I don't think people recognize the significance for adults.
This is interesting. It makes me think about how I (and many ND Americans) had a much tougher time in school when we didn't have agency over what we could study. The younger we are, the more schools require us to learn things we don't care about, are terrible at, or actively disagree with. Not even including the social pressure of that period, that could be a huge energy drain, all day every day. That many things are often out of alignment with our values or nervous systems, but we are taught to ignore them.
My rant has always been about why systems of care don’t actually care. Why the intake form asks what hurts instead of what you love. Why the healing industry sells individual transformation while the conditions that create the wound go unaddressed.
I’m autistic and OCD and spent twenty years building a somatic methodology called Emotional Body Mapping because I couldn’t stop returning to that specific problem. The compass you’re describing is exactly what I followed, even when it made no economic sense, even when nobody had a category for what I was building.
The part about background programs running constantly in misaligned work… I felt that in my body reading it. The ulcer I’m currently healing from is probably a direct consequence of finally having to reckon with where my own misalignment has been quietly draining energy.
Thank you for writing this so carefully. The rant is a compass is something I’ll be sitting with for a while.
What I loved most was your refusal to reduce the story anywhere along the way — not the rant into generic “justice sensitivity,” not burnout into a simple energy-budget problem, and not purpose into a neat little inspirational bow. You kept the whole thread connected, and because of that, it actually holds.
The part that hit hardest for me was your naming of misalignment as a physiological cost — and then the other side of that same coin: when an autistic person finds work that genuinely resonates with the thing their whole system has been pointing toward all along, that depth of response is not just a burden to manage. It can become part of what makes the work so alive, so sustained, and so exact.
I’ve been releasing work lately from a very adjacent place — around what gets distorted when we reduce people to visible outcomes instead of reading the conditions producing them — and this felt like such a strong sibling signal. Thank you for writing it without sanding off the part that made it true.
This resonates deeply. I used to work for a not for profit doing clinical trials and I didn't feel totally aligned but I enjoyed the work and felt like I was contributing for science. The day they went "for profit" my mental health quickly spiralled and I never really enjoyed being there again.
I have systems that revolve around money and I frequently rant about how people are let down by the health care system because of their gender, diversity or other factors. My current job can feel aligned or misaligned depending on how I see our patients experiencing their healthcare. It's still exhausting and I think maybe not the end role for me because I can't choose who I see or what the doctor will recommend after I have worked hard to ensure they aren't shamed out. But it's better than working for a company just in it for the cash.
Brilliant. Just three days ago I had a conversation with my 46-year old son who has a lifetime of trouble keeping a job. He has an IQ over 130, is one of the most caring people I know, and he sometimes works 60 hours a week. And then he doesn't work (at a paying job) for months. He said, "It's not that I don't want to work. I do. It's just that I want to do what I want to do." He is not autistic, but he is neurodivergent. He is comfortable with where he is. His wife is ever-helpful. I'm the one who needed this. This was brilliant. Thank you.
Yea some of us have a high need for autonomy, self direction and intrinsic motivation… systems like capitalism make accessing things like that very difficult
Oh, that hits hard! I was diagnosed nine years ago and still spent years trying to figure things out before my health took a dive. Your essay makes so much sense!
I hate that your health had to take such a hit before things started making sense, but I’m really glad the essay resonated with you! So many (too many) of us spend years trying to “push through” without realizing the cost. Your experience is exactly why I wanted to write about this.
My primary rant is physical pleasure and the way the body and its preferences are pathologized as a barrier to/distraction from spiritual development/self-realization/etc. I've been steeped in kink since before I should've been and it dovetails with it.
I’ve often reflected on why I seemed to burn out so much earlier than many neurotypical people around me. My husband, for example, didn’t experience what I would call a true chronic burnout until his late 40s, after a heart attack. Mine was already happening in my late 20s, and by 30 it was a complete wipeout. Chronic illness, Crohn’s disease, autoimmune issues, musculoskeletal problems leading to major spinal fusion surgery, miscarriages, nervous system dysregulation, one thing after another.
And no, I’m not saying autism “caused” those medical issues directly or that environments intentionally harmed me. But looking back, I can see how much prolonged misalignment was eroding me underneath it all. Constantly trying to agree with things I didn’t truly agree with. Constantly masking to maintain relationships, social acceptance, professionalism, functionality. Existing in environments that were overstimulating while trying to convince myself I could tolerate them because everyone else seemed to.
That level of sustained sensory, emotional, cognitive, and relational exhaustion accumulates. And because I didn’t understand what was happening, I coped badly for years: smoking, binge drinking, binge eating, pushing through, collapsing, repeating the cycle. Fight, flight, freeze, all-or-nothing living.
What resonates deeply in your piece is the idea that neurotypical people absolutely experience burnout too. The difference is often the threshold, the duration, and the cumulative load on the nervous system. I think many autistic people hit that wall earlier because we are often carrying invisible levels of strain long before anyone notices externally, including ourselves.
For years I felt intense shame around it because I genuinely believed something was fundamentally wrong with me when other people appeared able to sustain adulthood, work, relationships, and social expectations more consistently. But I did sustain it, until I couldn’t anymore.
Ironically, recovery only really began when redundancy removed me from the environment that was continually dysregulating me, and when I consciously made my personal and professional world smaller, quieter, and more aligned.
So yes, this distinction around “threshold” makes complete sense to me.
This comment is going to stay with me for a long time.
What you’ve described is exactly the thing I was trying to name in that piece, and you’ve articulated it with a clarity and an honesty that I think a lot of people are going to need to read. The shame around not being able to sustain what everyone else seemed to sustain is so real, and so rarely talked about. From the outside, many of us did sustain it (until we catastrophically didn’t).
The coping piece especially is so poignant. The smoking, the drinking, the pushing through and collapsing. I myself used to smoke two packs a day from high school until my early 20s. It makes complete sense in retrospect, and it’s heartbreaking that so many of us had to figure that out the hard way and alone.
And the recovery beginning with the environment getting smaller and quieter is the most profound form of self-knowledge. Recognizing what was dysregulating you and choosing alignment over performance is genuinely incredible.
Thank you for trusting this space with all of this. This is exactly why I write. 💜
This resonated so deeply with me. I had a 20+ year career in tech where I was able to sustain a huge output despite all the masking and background processing, but it was because of passion and alignment. Once I saw firsthand that the alignment I thought existed was actually just smoke and mirrors, I completely broke. Couldnt speak, get out of bed, or function. It was the misalignment and also the moral injury that I’d poured my life force into a company I suddenly knew was evil. That was 3 years ago and I’m still recovering.
https://overturned.substack.com/p/too-pretty-to-be-autistic?r=8vl6x&utm_medium=ios
This is one of the most useful things I have read here. Your wheel alignment metaphor is going right into daily use. As is your way of talking about thresholds.
All of this is exactly me, and then some. You are so smart to use the interior anchor as a form of auto-tuning. You are right that people like us will know exactly what that thing is and what this means.
I am sixty one, and have just been diagnosed with AuDHD after, well, many decades of struggle.
I am so grateful to you for this, and for your generosity.
this feels like i could have written it in another life. now i just have to navigate the tightrope between my passion and what will let me survive capitalism
Story. of. my life.
Loving this idea that your rant is your purpose. Something to ponder…
My rants have always been about people being treated like they don't know what they're doing. I have always, always believed that people often understand things more than they realize, and it's up to us to give them the opportunities and options to learn and grow in the ways that work for them. Not surprising, then, that I've focused in education for my careers.
I love this so much because it shows the specificity of the internal compass. You weren't nebulously or randomly drawn toward education, you were drawn towards education in your careers because of this belief that people deserve the opportunities and options to learn in ways that are accessible to them.
Yes precisely! I always ended up working with the people who learned and grew differently!
I burned out from wrong work just because of my stupid belief that if I don't work, I don't count. Focusing on my rants is a good idea, I wish I could record it and then play it back. I actually haven't ranted in a while, I've been numbed out for a minute. Thanks for your perspective!
I appreciate you sharing this. People who work with autistic children know how important their passions are, but I don't think people recognize the significance for adults.
This is interesting. It makes me think about how I (and many ND Americans) had a much tougher time in school when we didn't have agency over what we could study. The younger we are, the more schools require us to learn things we don't care about, are terrible at, or actively disagree with. Not even including the social pressure of that period, that could be a huge energy drain, all day every day. That many things are often out of alignment with our values or nervous systems, but we are taught to ignore them.
My rant has always been about why systems of care don’t actually care. Why the intake form asks what hurts instead of what you love. Why the healing industry sells individual transformation while the conditions that create the wound go unaddressed.
I’m autistic and OCD and spent twenty years building a somatic methodology called Emotional Body Mapping because I couldn’t stop returning to that specific problem. The compass you’re describing is exactly what I followed, even when it made no economic sense, even when nobody had a category for what I was building.
The part about background programs running constantly in misaligned work… I felt that in my body reading it. The ulcer I’m currently healing from is probably a direct consequence of finally having to reckon with where my own misalignment has been quietly draining energy.
Thank you for writing this so carefully. The rant is a compass is something I’ll be sitting with for a while.
Instantly subscribed. This is beautiful work.
What I loved most was your refusal to reduce the story anywhere along the way — not the rant into generic “justice sensitivity,” not burnout into a simple energy-budget problem, and not purpose into a neat little inspirational bow. You kept the whole thread connected, and because of that, it actually holds.
The part that hit hardest for me was your naming of misalignment as a physiological cost — and then the other side of that same coin: when an autistic person finds work that genuinely resonates with the thing their whole system has been pointing toward all along, that depth of response is not just a burden to manage. It can become part of what makes the work so alive, so sustained, and so exact.
I’ve been releasing work lately from a very adjacent place — around what gets distorted when we reduce people to visible outcomes instead of reading the conditions producing them — and this felt like such a strong sibling signal. Thank you for writing it without sanding off the part that made it true.
This resonates deeply. I used to work for a not for profit doing clinical trials and I didn't feel totally aligned but I enjoyed the work and felt like I was contributing for science. The day they went "for profit" my mental health quickly spiralled and I never really enjoyed being there again.
I have systems that revolve around money and I frequently rant about how people are let down by the health care system because of their gender, diversity or other factors. My current job can feel aligned or misaligned depending on how I see our patients experiencing their healthcare. It's still exhausting and I think maybe not the end role for me because I can't choose who I see or what the doctor will recommend after I have worked hard to ensure they aren't shamed out. But it's better than working for a company just in it for the cash.
Brilliant. Just three days ago I had a conversation with my 46-year old son who has a lifetime of trouble keeping a job. He has an IQ over 130, is one of the most caring people I know, and he sometimes works 60 hours a week. And then he doesn't work (at a paying job) for months. He said, "It's not that I don't want to work. I do. It's just that I want to do what I want to do." He is not autistic, but he is neurodivergent. He is comfortable with where he is. His wife is ever-helpful. I'm the one who needed this. This was brilliant. Thank you.
Yea some of us have a high need for autonomy, self direction and intrinsic motivation… systems like capitalism make accessing things like that very difficult
Oh, that hits hard! I was diagnosed nine years ago and still spent years trying to figure things out before my health took a dive. Your essay makes so much sense!
I hate that your health had to take such a hit before things started making sense, but I’m really glad the essay resonated with you! So many (too many) of us spend years trying to “push through” without realizing the cost. Your experience is exactly why I wanted to write about this.
My primary rant is physical pleasure and the way the body and its preferences are pathologized as a barrier to/distraction from spiritual development/self-realization/etc. I've been steeped in kink since before I should've been and it dovetails with it.
I thoroughly agree with this.
I’ve often reflected on why I seemed to burn out so much earlier than many neurotypical people around me. My husband, for example, didn’t experience what I would call a true chronic burnout until his late 40s, after a heart attack. Mine was already happening in my late 20s, and by 30 it was a complete wipeout. Chronic illness, Crohn’s disease, autoimmune issues, musculoskeletal problems leading to major spinal fusion surgery, miscarriages, nervous system dysregulation, one thing after another.
And no, I’m not saying autism “caused” those medical issues directly or that environments intentionally harmed me. But looking back, I can see how much prolonged misalignment was eroding me underneath it all. Constantly trying to agree with things I didn’t truly agree with. Constantly masking to maintain relationships, social acceptance, professionalism, functionality. Existing in environments that were overstimulating while trying to convince myself I could tolerate them because everyone else seemed to.
That level of sustained sensory, emotional, cognitive, and relational exhaustion accumulates. And because I didn’t understand what was happening, I coped badly for years: smoking, binge drinking, binge eating, pushing through, collapsing, repeating the cycle. Fight, flight, freeze, all-or-nothing living.
What resonates deeply in your piece is the idea that neurotypical people absolutely experience burnout too. The difference is often the threshold, the duration, and the cumulative load on the nervous system. I think many autistic people hit that wall earlier because we are often carrying invisible levels of strain long before anyone notices externally, including ourselves.
For years I felt intense shame around it because I genuinely believed something was fundamentally wrong with me when other people appeared able to sustain adulthood, work, relationships, and social expectations more consistently. But I did sustain it, until I couldn’t anymore.
Ironically, recovery only really began when redundancy removed me from the environment that was continually dysregulating me, and when I consciously made my personal and professional world smaller, quieter, and more aligned.
So yes, this distinction around “threshold” makes complete sense to me.
This comment is going to stay with me for a long time.
What you’ve described is exactly the thing I was trying to name in that piece, and you’ve articulated it with a clarity and an honesty that I think a lot of people are going to need to read. The shame around not being able to sustain what everyone else seemed to sustain is so real, and so rarely talked about. From the outside, many of us did sustain it (until we catastrophically didn’t).
The coping piece especially is so poignant. The smoking, the drinking, the pushing through and collapsing. I myself used to smoke two packs a day from high school until my early 20s. It makes complete sense in retrospect, and it’s heartbreaking that so many of us had to figure that out the hard way and alone.
And the recovery beginning with the environment getting smaller and quieter is the most profound form of self-knowledge. Recognizing what was dysregulating you and choosing alignment over performance is genuinely incredible.
Thank you for trusting this space with all of this. This is exactly why I write. 💜