Was This Burnout, Overload, or Just Exhaustion?

I started writing this website for a pretty simple reason: I enjoy the work, and I wanted to help people similar to me. That was it. I wasn’t thinking about followers, numbers, or building some giant audience. Helping a single soul at a time was the target. If one person reads something here and thinks, Oh. That’s what I’ve been feeling, then this website has done what I wanted it to do.

Then a friend saw what I was working on and told me, “You have something here.” And then came the perfectly reasonable suggestion: “You should open a TikTok.” It made sense. People are on TikTok. Short videos reach people. If the point is to help people, logically, I should probably go where the people are. There was only one small problem: I really, really did not want to make TikToks. But I trusted my friend, and the suggestion made sense, so I pushed through anyway. I spent half the day trying to figure out how to make one video that would actually be useful.

By 3 p.m., I wanted to throw up. Four hours. I had recorded some audio and made one slide-style video. Yes. One video.

And this is where my brain did the thing. It did not think, “Huh. Maybe video just isn’t your medium.” No. Obviously, the reasonable conclusion was that I was terrible at this. The video was bad. It had taken me forever. People do this every day. People make ten of these. People monetize this. Why had it taken me four hours to make one? Intellectually, I knew those comparisons were not fair. But they were still the thoughts going through my head as I felt myself becoming smaller and smaller in my own eyes.

I wasn’t just tired anymore. I had entered that horrible loop where being tired becomes evidence that you’re incapable. And because the task looked simple, I couldn’t even give myself permission to be tired from it.

The Four Hours Weren’t Just Four Hours

There was another part bothering me: my son. Usually, I spend very routine-filled and engaging time with him. Any writing, posting, or editing I do happens when I’m not doing those things with him. I write when I’m half-awake at night or when I wake up ten minutes earlier than everyone else. I research and make visuals while I’m on the potty. And so on. You get the picture. My writing usually finds its way into the weird little unused corners of my day.

But this time, I had spent four daytime hours staring at a screen, trying to force myself through something I didn’t even enjoy. Meanwhile, my son had discovered the very convenient logic of: Mum is on a device, so I am allowed as well. Fair enough, honestly.

But now I wasn’t only thinking about how bad the video was. I was also thinking about the time I had missed with him, which gave my brain even more material: You wasted four hours. You made one bad video. You ignored your normal routine. Other people can do this easily. Why can’t you? The loop kept feeding itself. And the strange thing was that I still couldn’t understand why I felt so completely wiped out.

The Price of a Task Isn’t Universal

I needed my husband to come home and point out the obvious. He reminded me of Kabbo’s Energy Theory. The idea is simple: you wake up with a limited amount of energy, and everything you do costs some of it. But I think I sometimes make the mistake of assuming that the task itself determines the price.

It doesn’t. My relationship with the task changes the price. Something that costs another person one Kabbo token might cost me five. Or something that looks like one task from the outside might actually contain five separate points of effort for my brain. That does not mean the task magically became five times more difficult. It does not mean I am five times less capable. It simply costs me more. The disinterest matters. The discomfort matters. Having to force myself to stay with something my brain desperately wants to leave matters. Having to figure out an unfamiliar medium matters. All those little points of friction add up.

So while I was sitting there thinking, It’s ONE VIDEO. Why am I like this? my energy account was apparently responding: You have insufficient funds. And still, I kept swiping the card.

Was This Burnout, Overload, or Just Exhaustion?

I want to be careful here because I don’t actually know what label I would put on that afternoon. Was it burnout? Probably not autistic burnout in the bigger, longer-term sense people usually mean when they use that term. Was it overload? An energy crash? Was I simply completely drained from doing something that required far more effort than I had realized?

Maybe. But that is also kind of the point. I didn’t know. I only knew that something supposedly simple had flattened me. Because I didn’t understand why, my brain filled in the blank with: You must just be bad at this.

That can be especially confusing when you’re autistic—or when you’re undiagnosed and do not yet have a framework for understanding why certain things appear to cost you so much more than they cost everybody else. You look around and see other people doing the thing. They seem fine. So instead of questioning the energy cost, you question your capability. But these are not the same sentence: “This costs me a lot of energy.” “I am incapable of doing this.” I apparently need to write that down somewhere. Possibly on my forehead.

The rest of my day made it fairly obvious that I had spent more than I had available. I lay on the floor. I watched Haunted Hotel. I spent time lying beside my son while he carried on with his usual shenanigans. That was basically the level of functioning available: Floor. Cartoon. Child nearby. Existing.

I slept for half the night, woke up to pee at around 2:30 a.m., and only then felt like I had returned to roughly the state I had been in that morning. Yes, there is something slightly ridiculous about having a personal revelation about energy management at 2:30 in the morning after getting up to pee. But here we are.

The Loop Scared Me More Than the Exhaustion

The exhaustion itself wasn’t even the worst part. It was how quickly I turned it against myself. Something drained me. I didn’t understand why. Instead of becoming curious about what had happened, I immediately began collecting evidence for the prosecution: See? You’re slow. See? You can’t do basic things. See? Other people manage this. See? You’re not as capable as you thought. Once that loop begins, every new thought somehow becomes supporting evidence.

I don’t think I’m alone in doing this, especially if you have spent a long time not understanding your own needs. If you don’t know that your brain might be spending five energy tokens where somebody else spends one, then five-token exhaustion after a “one-token task” makes absolutely no sense. So you look for another explanation. Unfortunately, Maybe I’m just useless is always sitting there, ready and available.

Maybe the Answer Isn’t Always “Try Harder”

I realized something embarrassingly simple from all of this: I don’t actually have to make TikToks. That’s it. That is the revelation. My friend didn’t pressure me. They saw something I was enjoying, thought it could reach more people, and gave me a perfectly reasonable suggestion. I turned that suggestion into a requirement.

Somewhere between You could try TikTok and opening the app, my brain quietly changed it into: If you are serious about helping people, you should be able to do this. Then: If everyone else can do this, you should be able to do this. And finally: If you can’t do this easily, there must be something wrong with you.

Nobody else put me in that box. I climbed into it myself and then became upset that the box was uncomfortable—which, now that I write it out, seems less than ideal. I don’t think the lesson is never do anything you dislike. Life would become fairly complicated. Sometimes we have to do boring things. Sometimes difficult things are worth learning. Sometimes discomfort is part of growing.

But there is a difference between challenging yourself and repeatedly forcing yourself into a shape that doesn’t fit—then punishing yourself when maintaining that shape exhausts you. That is what I want to become better at noticing.

If something “simple” is costing me an absurd amount of energy, perhaps my first question does not need to be What is wrong with me? Maybe it can be: What is making this so expensive for me? Is it unfamiliar or sensory? Is there too much switching involved? Am I uninterested? Am I trying to work in a way that fights how my brain naturally works? Am I already tired? Do I actually want to do this?

And the slightly terrifying final question: Do I even need to? Sometimes, the answer might simply be no. So no, I don’t think I’m going to force myself to become a TikTok person right now. Maybe one day I’ll find a way of making videos that works for me. Maybe I won’t.

But I already know something that does work. Apparently, I will happily wake up at 2:30 in the morning, go pee, come back, and start writing an article about why making one video destroyed me. This? This I can do.

Perhaps the point isn’t to find whatever everybody else is doing and teach myself to tolerate it. Perhaps it is to notice the things that allow me to do meaningful work without constantly fighting myself. And if you’re reading this because you have had one of those days—when something ridiculously “easy” drained you and you immediately started wondering whether you were lazy, incapable, dramatic, or somehow worse at being a person than everyone else—maybe don’t use the exhaustion as evidence against yourself just yet.

Get curious about the cost first. You might not be failing at a simple task. It might simply not be a simple task for you. Apparently, that is something I needed my husband, four miserable hours, one mediocre video, half a night’s sleep, and a 2:30 a.m. pee to figure out. Hopefully, it saves at least one of you the trouble.