Why should I not feel bad about this?

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Tell me why I should not feel jealous of those on the lower end of the spectrum who can disguise there Autism much better than me?

The only time you should look into someone else's bowl, is to make sure there is something in it.

It is better to focus on what you have, rather than what you do not have.

There are plenty of people out there who have less than you do.

Gratitude will help bring you peace.

I think jealousy and envy are perfectly normal feelings, so IMO there's no reason why you shouldn't feel bad. What you do about it is another matter entirely.

This question makes you sound confused about how the Spectrum is understood. I think you mean higher end not lower end. You feel whatever you feel. Feelings don't have to be good or bad, they don't necessarily have to have value judgments attached to them, they just are what they are. You can feel whatever you want. But don't let what you feel paralyze you and dictate how you live your life and what you, as an individual, are able to do with your life. It's okay to feel anything and everything and sometimes our feelings do interfere with our daily lives. But you don't want to let your feelings keep you from living your life. You don't want to obsess on them to the point that you become exclusively ruled by them.

But to be quite honest with you, being able to disguise or hide one's Autism is not always a good thing. The effects of that can be absolutely catastrophic and people can be very hurt by being able to do that. So it's good to know the complete reality in that. You might not be as jealous if you really understood what can happen to people who are able to hide or disguise their Autism.

Since it is most likely not going to improve your life quality you simply have no reason to.

I often feel jealous when other Aspies say they have a group of (neurotypical) friends, because I can't see me ever hanging out with a group of neurotypical friends, and I'm only mild Asperger's, with learned social skills and high self-awareness - AND can read body language from instinct and can be very tactful when need be. Those social skills are not rationally learnt, but seem built into my brain.

Why is being to hide a bad thing at times then?

Because you tend to do it a lot and it makes other people. and sometimes we even do this to ourselves, put expectations on you that you can't sustain. You end up trying to sustain them and over time you end up having huge episodes of Autism Burnout which can be catastrophic. When they are severe enough and they happen often, they can cause permanent damage.

What's autism burnout exactley?

Autism Burnout happens when your brain can no longer sustain the enormous amount of energy that it takes to keep up the NT appearance act. I have included an account of a recent big burnout I had last year. This one was so bad that the account I wrote does not do it justice. I only learned that these episodes were burnouts because I had to find out what was happening to me because if I had not been able to find out and reverse it, it would have just gotten worse and worse and eventually I could have had permanent damage and in extreme cases people can actually die indirectly from it.

This particular burnout was triggered by a couple of events that pushed me over the edge. When you are constantly playing the Need to Appear Like an NT Game, you are constantly living in a state of brain drain because of the amount of effort it takes to keep up that charade. So when your brain has had enough, it will go over the edge and stop being able to function properly even for us. We don't function properly to begin with but this is much worse. Sometimes it will just happen and sometimes events will trigger it. But you have to be careful. One of the articles I read when I was researching this, I don't remember where it is, it was almost a year ago, talked about how when you have Autism Burnout frequently and severely like I had it that time, you can get to where you are not able to regain the basic skills you lose at the same level that you once had them. It can actually cause damage that can give you permanent negative repercussions. And if you get bad enough, like if you don't realize what is happening and take the steps to recover, and have no one to help you, you could potentially starve to death or have an accident because you are so out of it. Or like what happened to me when I was not able to go to the bathroom, your body could just stop functioning in a way that could cause you to have organ damage.

Here is the account that I wrote about my experience.

...when I was in it, I did not realize what was happening to me and out of desperation I tried looking online to see if I could find an explanation for my symptoms and that is how I learned about what was happening. And in the process I found a really good Autistic friend who has been teaching me a lot about myself.

But anyway, this huge burnout started from an accumulation of stresses. I had a really big stressful situation in early summer and that one really set me back. And it takes me a very long time sometimes to recover from some of these stresses especially when they are emotionally charged. But as I was trying to recover from that, I had other stresses pile on. These were smaller but very stressful none the less. A lot of them were from communication issues, some in my marriage and others with people other than my husband. Then I had a big communication misunderstanding with my brother and whenever I have a huge misunderstanding with him or with my husband, I really get knocked down. I am very sensitive to being out of synch with either one of those guys. Then during all that, I had a couple of tense conversations with my mother and then my car broke down and I was without a car for over a week and at one point I thought I was going to lose the car.

When my car broke down, and I had to go without it for so long, it made me realize how many of my routines are actually dependent on my being able to get around in my car. Being without it for so long, routines that I did not even know I had were all of a sudden broken and all the stresses I was trying to deal with just became a thousand times harder. And all the while as I was going through this, I was still trying to maintain the role of trying to be a house wife and a socially acceptable person who can somewhat pass for a slightly odd NT. And at the time I had absolutely no idea just how much toll keeping up the passable for NT facade was taking out of me.

And as is very common for me, I did not really see this massive burnout coming. I have a hard time gauging my feelings. My husband says it best. He says that my gauges are broken so I am like a ticking time bomb and we never know when I am going to blow up next. It makes me a hard person to live with and I do feel bad about that but the problem is that sometimes I am just as caught off guard with my body's responses as everyone else is because just like they don't see it coming, often times neither do I. I don't have the ability to always know when my limits are approaching and I don't always know what I am feeling when I am feeling it. It is usually only well after the fact that I can review what happened as if I were watching a movie about myself and then analyze that mental movie and figure out then what I was feeling and what was happening. And every now and then the analysis helps prevent future blowups but I still get very blind-sighted very often because I don't always have the ability to transfer once concept to a different situations. My husband was wondering why I kept cross threading things. First it was the pedals on my bike, very costly mistake, then it was the hatch on my kayak and the list goes on. He was wondering why the mistake on my bike had not taught me the lesson for everything else. Well I will never cross thread bike pedals again, hopefully, but for some reason, my brain can't always take the lesson I learned in one specific situation and apply to another that is completely different.

But I kind of got blind-sighted by this burnout. The first thing I noticed is that I was not able to pay the bills. I am the one who does all the bills for our household. Usually I have a little trouble getting started but eventually my mind clicks in and I get them done. The ones that are crucial to get done on time always get done on time. The ones that are not so crucial sometimes get paid late depending on how much money we have and on how well or not well my executive functioning is going. I tend to put my energy more on the mortgage and credit cards and car insurance because I know those can't be late. But if I only have one or two energy spoons for those, the utilities might have to wait.

But what I noticed that day is that no matter what I tried I just could not pay the bills. I could not log receipts into the ledger, there was just something going on in my mind that made me unable to do it. It felt like a literal pressure that was blocking my ability to think and figure anything out. I would look at a bill and hold it in my hand. I knew it was a bill and I knew which bill it was but it was like it was not making any sense to me. I could read the words on the page but it was like they meant nothing. I knew they were words and I knew how to read them but it felt like there was a huge disconnect between my intellectually knowing what they were and my ability to make any kind of sense of them. And it wasn't like they did not make logical or grammatical sense. I have heard some Autistic people describe their perceptive processing as if they were looking at everything through a textured glass wall. This is how it felt for me. It was as if I was underwater.

You know what it feels like to dive to the bottom of a deep pool and not have quite the amount of air that you thought you had? You start to make your way back to the surface and you can see the light above the water but you are freaking out because you don't think that you will make it to the top and at that point your brain tricks you and makes you think, "I know there is oxygen in the water, I can just take a breath of that" and you really believe you can breathe the water? Well it kind of felt like that. It felt like I was looking at this paper from the bottom of the pool and the paper was above the surface of the water. Kind of like trying to read it through textured glass. I could see and read the words, but there was no connection with them happening in my brain. So no matter what I did there was nothing I could do to pay the bills. So it's not exactly like textured glass where the object you are looking at would be physically distorted, it's more like you can see the object clearly and you know what it is and that it's there but it's like there is a strange disconnect where it does not feel like it's really what it is. It's hard to explain. it's kind of like your brain is not fully registering what is in front of you. It's kind of like you are stoned or medicated and you can't really fully understand what is plain in front of your face. I have never been stoned but I have had medication that has had that effect on me.

And I tried and tried for days. And after every attempt I made, even if it was just for a few minutes, I had to take a nap and sometimes that nap lasted hours. Eventually I managed to get the important bills paid. It took days and I could only do one at a time but I knew that no matter what I had to get the mortgage and credit cards in. I called the companies and explained to them that I could not do any chit chat, I could not have them talk to me about any special offers that I qualified for. I told them that I was sick and that they needed to just walk me through the process of getting the bills paid and be done. They were all extremely understanding and helpful and after HUGE amounts of effort and many naps, I got the most important bills paid.

But that took so much out of me. I had no idea how much energy I was losing in all this. And as I was going through this I was still struggling with trying to cope with the events that had brought me to this point.

The next thing I noticed was how much more sensitive I was to every kind of sensory input. Normally my biggest sensory sensitivity is with sound. I am not only Autistic but I also have Misophonia, and if you are not familiar with that, it is an auditory disorder where the body has extreme negative reactions to certain specific sounds. These reactions are rage based and can be so extreme that I can never own a firearm. But my sensitivities to sensory input were becoming so incredibly severe that it was becoming dangerous. The sensitivities to sound had become so heightened that I was melting down every couple of hours. And my other senses had become much more sensitive as well. I had to keep all the lights off except for my Himalayan salt lamp on my night table. I can dim that and the soft orange glow was much more soothing than regular light.

Sunlight was great though, I love natural light but artificial light can really get to me when I am sensitive. I am also sensitive to movement, especially movement by people. For example, my husband moves his hands a lot when he talks and sometimes my brain can't keep up and process the movements as quickly as they are happening and that can lead me to meltdown. And if his hands are close to my face it's much, much worse. I often look away when he is talking to me so that I can try to concentrate on hearing what he is actually saying. But at this point I had a super heightened awareness to movement from anything at all. Also my sensitivity to touch was really heightened and if anyone touched me in a light way, as opposed to strong, solid pressure, it was too much and way too uncomfortable. And then the worst part was that I had a lot of trouble eating. Eating had become almost impossible. I lost about 12 pounds during this burnout.

It got so bad that I not only had no desire to eat, but I really could not figure out how to eat. Even if I tried to eat, it was just such a chore and everything had that slight rubbery texture that food gets when I am emotionally overwhelmed and drained. And of course I was super sensitive to the textures of food and it was just overwhelming for me to have to deal with them. I have a real problem if I am eating something and I take a bite and feel a texture that is not supposed to be there like if you are eating a vegetable that was not washed properly and you bit down on a bit of dirt. When I was a kid that was something that would make me meltdown. Now I don't melt down badly for that but it's still pretty bad. And the energy it took to to go to the kitchen and put food together and figure out how to do do that was so enormous, it wasn't even worth trying to make the effort. The problem is that you need to eat to have energy to get through this but when you are so overwhelmed that you don't have the ability to figure out how to make something to eat and if you do manage to make something you then don't have the ability to actually eat it, it gets hard.

Then I had to go to the bathroom. That was one of the weirdest and scariest parts of this. I made it to the bathroom and onto the toilet. After that I had absolutely no idea what to do next. My body could not remember how to release. It took awhile for me to just sit there and eventually I figured it out. But that was scary. I was thinking that I was losing my mind and if this kept up I would probably end up dying.
I also noticed that I was having enormous trouble speaking and even hearing people speak. Verbal interactions were just monumentally overwhelming and had become physically painful. And the energy it took to have them was actually very debilitating. The telephone became one of my worst nightmares. I just could not tolerate any kind of verbal conversation. I could manage a little written conversation and I could manage reading a little bit. But verbal conversation had become completely unbearable. There were, however, two exceptions to this.

The first is that I could have some verbal conversation with my oldest brother. I think that the reason for this is that he and I have a very unique and special relationship. With my particular Autism, I have what I like to refer to as an adult/child split personality. Part of my personality, the intellectual part, functions at a regular age appropriate level. The rest of me, the emotional side and parts of my mental capacity, function at a much younger age range. These parts tend to linger around the ages of 4 to 12. And for some reason, my oldest brother is the person that the youngest parts of me connects with. He is really great with me when I am functioning at those ages. When I am in my most relaxed and natural authentic self or when I am going through emotional stress or trauma, my brain will automatically revert to those very young age functioning levels. And because he is the person with whom that part of me really connects, he was the only one that could talk to me during this time.

The other exception was the Autistic friend I met when I was doing the research about this desperately trying to find out what was happening to me. Because we were talking specifically about this issue, I was able to have the verbal conversations with him. And it was interesting because with my brother my speech was very infantile and very labored and barely audible. It was broken and grammatically all over the place, it was full of stutters, and I could just barely get words out. With my friend, it was extremely intellectual and much more eloquent but still not up to par. And it was slower than normal. I fumbled a little bit but not as much as when I could just relax and not worry about how my speech was coming out when talking to my brother. With my brother, our verbal interactions were very soothing to me because he understood how traumatic and difficult this experience was for me and he spoke to me very softly and gently and reassuringly like a parent soothing a young child. When I spoke to my friend, as with when I had to research what was happening to me, my brain would dig deep and pull up whatever little energy it could to have a somewhat coherent conversation because I had to figure out what was happening or I knew I would not survive this. So just out of my over developed survival instinct, I was able to talk to him and do what I needed to do to figure this out. But after these conversations and research bouts I would have to take more naps. But with anyone else, and about anything else, verbal conversations were completely out of the question. I would also cry a lot for what seemed like no reason even though I always know there is a reason if I don't know what it is. I know that my brain kept bringing up the emotional content of the stresses trying to process them in bits and pieces. I process emotional things that way, very inconsistently in small bits over long periods of time. And I rocked a lot more than usual too which is one of my favorite stims.

I was also having difficulty moving like from one room to another. It was hard because I was bumping into walls and missing steps on the stairs and stubbing my toes and all that. I had trouble walking from one physical space to another. I would see things like objects in the rooms and I knew what they were but it was like my brain was not really registering what they actually were. I mean I knew what they were but it was like it feels when looking at an object through textured glass. It's there but it does not feel like it's really there. It's kind of like it's real but it's not.

So after a couple of days I decided to walk to Dunkin Donuts because there is one two blocks from my house and I like their bagels. I LOVE being outside. I love the sunshine and one of my favorite things is hiking in the park. I had not been out of the house for a few days so I was glad to step out and get some sun. Sunlight does wonders for me and sometimes when I am depressed and really having a hard time, just stepping outside really helps me tremendously. So I went outside and the moment I got out in the sun I started to feel encouraged. But as I walked to Dunkin Donuts, cars drove by and a couple of people walked by. Normally I would be okay with this and as long as the cars were not playing their stereos I would have no problem. And normally when people walk past me I usually smile and say hello or nod and have no problem at all. I might even stop and converse freely with strangers every now and then. I am one of those Aspies who is like a five year old and who does not know when it is not appropriate to just start a random conversation or jump into one with a complete stranger.

But this day was different. Every time someone walked by or every time a car drove by it was like a huge tidal wave of sheer terror had engulfed me. Every sound in the street and every movement of anything was deathly terrifying. I felt like I was in a state of absolute panic and like anxiety had a death grip on me. But I managed to get to Dunkin Donuts and get my bagel and come home. The next day I went again because I had to eat again but this time I went much earlier before there was any real activity in the street. As I walked over this time I was able to look at flowers and grasses and the few trees that are growing near the sidewalks and that made a huge difference. I also got out early enough to just catch the tail end of the sunrise and a large flock of geese that flew over our parking lot. That was amazing. I got back home before people started driving around and I think that made a huge difference. But anytime I can contact with nature that really helps my neurology. Even if it's just a flower growing in the crack of the sidewalk it really helps.

It was after the bathroom incident and the sheer death terror walk to Dunkin Donuts that I knew that something was desperately wrong and that if I did not find out what was happening right away I did no think I was going to make it. What scared me most was the thought that I would end up in a mental hospital drugged up with psychotropic poison. Instinctively I knew that this had to do with Autism and if I got committed to a hospital they would treat it as a mental illness and that would be the end of me. And it's amazing how your brain can kick in when it needs to survive. I was able to get home and research these symptoms. I could not research anything else, I did not have the mind or ability to. I could not do anything else, my brain would not function in a way that would allow me to do anything else at all. I don't even know if I took a shower the whole time. I did brush my teeth though. That is a survival instinct for me. I could be dying and would have to manage to brush my teeth.

But all I could physically or mentally do was find out what was wrong. I would get on my laptop and try to find stuff and it was like hyperfocusing on a special interest. Then I would have to try to sleep and rest. And good sleep is so impossible for me to begin with and during this time, with my over hyped up hyper sensitive hearing and my textile sensitivity hyped up where the bed sheets and pj's were bothering me and had even become painful, trying to rest was so hard, so much more than usual. But I all I could do was research and rest.

I found a few articles and videos about Autism Burnout and I knew right away that this was what I was going through. I also found a Autistic blogger who had his phone number on his blog and I called him and we became great friends and have remained great friends. He helped me understand what was happening and helped me understand how I could get through it. Basically I needed to cut as much stimuli as possible coming in and just let my body and mind rest and do as little as possible until I had a chance to let my brain recover. It took awhile but eventually I did get through it. Just finding out and knowing what it was was a HUGE help in getting through it. Once I understood what it was, I knew that it would not land me in the hospital or kill me if I took the steps to let my body come out of it. And I just had to literally cut out as much external stimuli as possible, I ordered a large pizza and pasta from Domino's so that I could have five days worth of food ready for whenever I could manage to eat it and I just rested as much as I could.

In all this I also realized that as a child and younger adult I was living in a perpetual state of what I refer to as "Autistic Pre -Burnout." It's kind of like that state I was in right before I went over the edge. The difference was that when I was a kid and a younger adult. I did not have my own home nor was I married. So I could just retreat to my room and lock myself in it and just try to sleep for days at a time and not be concerned about much of anything. The moments that I had to interact with others, I would put on my NT act as much as possible and then when I got home I would just go lock myself in my room. So I had just enough recovery to continue the act and then crash again when I crashed but the stresses were not as high as they are now so I only went over the edge a few times. And then I would just not get out of bed and my parents just thought I had some sickness like a virus or something and they would let me rest. Now my responsibilities are greater and more constant so I did not know that I needed the amount recovery time and sensory stimuli and social control that now I know that I need.