Breaking my "mood swings" / autistic burnout cycle / need for social isolation

[lylas]

I've heard the term "autistic burnout" a few times but always dismissed it as being some unhelpfully vague buzzword. I recently took the time to actually look it up and read about it and realized it sounds like a very apt description for something I regularly experience... this is a lesson not to be so cynical of everything people tell me about mental health. Anyway, if this is what I am suffering from, I'd like to know how to prevent it from happening. My life seems to come in cycles of high energy, productivity, control, clarity of mind, followed by crashing and becoming depressed and unable to do the most basic tasks for a period of weeks to months. People often suggest I might have bipolar, but autistic burnout (often misunderstood as depression) fits more accurately. The things I push myself to do when I have clarity and control are what I live for, mostly creative work (I say work, I don't get paid to do it... yet :). I have ADHD and various barriers that mean I have to expend all the energy in every cell of my body every second I'm not asleep when I'm in these productive phases; its well worth it because I get to come away from it having made something, but the constant crashing messes things up and its hard to pick up where I left off when my entire mental context has changed so much that I don't really care or relate to what I was doing before burnout. So I'm trying to workout what to do about this. The fact that I almost never finish any projects I start is probably my greatest regret in life, moreso than all my social issues, loneliness, sense of identity etc. I think I could live through anything if I knew I was creating things and getting them out into the world.

So yeah if anyone has any advice on how to balance life so that productivity is the norm and being depressed and sedentary is an outlier I'd love to hear it. What I'm thinking so far is that I need to reduce the amount of "autistic stressors", things that grind down my tolerance for life and functioning. I live in a very old house where lots of things don't work properly or are very inconvenient, I am hoping to move out in the near future which I hope will help a lot. Socializing massively drains me too and I often seem to be at my best when I'm totally withdrawn from others, but it also makes me terribly lonely so this is very hard to balance. Sometimes I treat myself to a period of a month or more of total social isolation and it does me a lot of good (I think this would be very harmful for most people, I'm not recommending it), but life doesn't really allow for me to live like that most of the time and I have a lot of very needy friends I care about a huge amount who will get upset if I don't check my messages for a few days, let alone if I got in the habit of being by myself 5 days a week or something. And I don't really like the way my social skills have degraded so much over the years, it really sucks when I meet someone I really like and can't connect with them at all. I mean, I'd like to be able to find collaborators for projects and I fantasize about romance a lot and I'm not going to be equipped to get any of that if I become completely out of touch with talking to people.

Apologies if this is very incoherent and disorganized...

 

[elvvsie]

I wish I had some advice for you. Just wanted you to know someone else here feels the same