For most of my life, I’ve been convinced that I was pretty lazy. Nobody said that to me. I could just look around me and see that I wasn’t keeping up with anyone else. That conclusion came with a boatload of guilt. Why did everyone else seem to have no problem doing things that I found overwhelming to the point of near paralysis? Why couldn’t I get my act together? Why was I constantly exhausted? What was wrong with me?
Other times, I’d get so focused on what I was doing that I’d plug away at it for hours without realizing that any time had passed. In school, I always churned out term papers before most of my fellow students had even gotten started on their research. From their perspective, I was a dynamo. But they usually didn’t get to witness the subsequent burnout.
When I sleep, I sleep a lot. When I say I need a nap, it’s not just for the heck of it. It’s practically a matter of life or death. Do not stand between me and a nap. It wouldn’t be pretty.
When I’m awake during one of these burnouts, I’m often draped like a starfish on whatever piece of furniture has the most appeal at that moment. It is like the air is as thick as chocolate pudding and it takes an unbelievable amount of energy to even blink my eyes. I don’t even think I could move if someone yelled fire.
But believe me, a lot is still going on beneath the surface. Usually, I’m beating myself up for not being able to get out of the recliner/bed/hammock that I seem to be glued to. It’s hard to explain it to someone who hasn’t experienced this, but imagine you’ve gained 600 pounds in the blink of an eye. Your thinner self is still in there, struggling to get out, but it’s weighed down by too much ballast to properly function.
I can’t stress this enough: autistic inertia is not a personal choice. It’s not laziness. It’s not, “Well, I could do that thing, but I’d rather eat bonbons.”
It’s real. It’s life-altering. It’s awful. It may look like all I need to do is get off my butt and get moving. But, seriously, I can’t. It’s like my brain and my nervous system are off-gassing. (You know how there’s a smell when you first paint a wall? That’s off-gassing.) I have to off-gas all of the over-stimulation, stress, and any period of super high productivity that I’ve just had.
Another thing that throws off my productivity is a transition. I have to take some time to transition from one thing to another. Otherwise I’m completely rattled and ineffective. When things are thrown at me and I don’t get a chance to absorb the change, I can lose a whole day to the stress of it. I’ve never been one of those people who can finish a task and then rub my hands and say, “Alrighty then! Next!”
I would be embarrassed to tell you the number of times I’ve found myself sitting in my car, doing the 100 mile stare while feeling utterly incapable of going into the house or the next store. (I know this drives my dogs nuts. “Yay, you’re home! Now, why aren’t you coming inside?” I bet more than half of the nose prints on our front window are due to my car moments.) I must look awfully strange, sitting there, like a frozen computer that needs to be rebooted in order to make any further progress.
A car doesn’t have to be involved for a transition to be necessary. I need one any time I go from one place to the next, or complete one task and need to start another. Even going from awake to asleep requires a transition. Quite often I can’t seem to let myself lie in the one position that allows me to fall asleep until I’ve ground every single thought in my head into a fine powder.
Now that I’ve finally gotten an autism diagnosis, I realize that this inertia and uneven productivity is not some character flaw of mine. It’s not a quirk. It’s not selfishness or an obnoxious feeling of entitlement. It’s the autism. A good portion of the 81 million people in the world who are also on the spectrum share these same struggles. That’s a lot of inertia, indeed.
If you thought, by reading this, you’d get a solution to this problem, I apologize. The truth is that I’ve got nothin’. I strongly suspect that I’ll be on this roller coaster until I draw my last breath.
The good news is that I’m learning coping strategies, at least. I’m trying to cut myself a bit of slack. This inertia will happen to me. I may as well expect it and not feel guilty about it. I’m also trying to schedule rest periods between tasks when it’s possible. We have taken to including chill out days when we’re running from pillar to post on vacation. It makes a huge difference, especially with regard to my mood and ability to tolerate things.
I’m also starting to suspect that I’ve been unconsciously adjusting my life to these highs and lows all along. For example, I now believe that I got going right away on those term papers in school because the little voice in my head was whispering, “You better do this now, while you can, because a burnout might be coming soon.”
Inertia, burnout, call it what you will, but being able to name something gives you more power over it. That has made a huge difference to me. It’s okay that I can’t run with the big dogs. I’m still in the race. But it isn’t a competition, so maybe the race is more of a fun run. But I hate running, so… anyway.
The ultimate form of recycling: Buy my book, read it, and then donate it to your local public library or your neighborhood little free library! http://amzn.to/2mlPVh5
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