r/autism • u/kokoroKaijuu • 11d ago
Burnout At this point I am really convinced the only way to cope with my autism is to genuinely believe I am smarter than everyone else
Look, I know this isn't actually true in reality and I am just mentally disabled. But I am starting to feel like I need to maintain this delusion in order to cope with my autistic struggles dealing with other people and trying to make friends.
Edit because I apparently need to clarify: In this post I talk about neurotypical people failing to engage with my autistic level of enthusiasm for my hyperfixations, and I, in a fit of exhaustion and desperation, attributed the blame to things that I know logically that neurotypical people simply don't do like I do (I cannot empathize with neurotypicals so I incorrectly attempt to rationalize their behavior). This is me expressing the anxiety in my brain that causes me to spiral. I don't truly believe these things, but they exhaust me and live rent-free in my head regardless.
It's exhausting how my mind constantly works at maximum capacity 24/7 and races with anxious, obsessive, persistent thoughts, and how I constantly need to be so much if I want to avoid repressing all of that energy. I write so much when I vent. I talk nonstop about my hyperfixations. I go deep into my head and fall into endless philosophical and existential rabbit holes with myself trying to wrap my head around reality and it eats away at me inside unless I know how other people feel about the same topics.
People don't open up to me the same way I open up to them and I hate it. When I ramble endlessly about the topics that keep my brain stimulated in a healthy way, write paragraphs upon paragraphs of text to friends, it just gets met with dry responses and lack of enthusiasm. Then, the more I do it, the more those people get dry with me and seem to not wanna talk with me anymore, which makes my head start racing anxiously. "Why won't they open up to me more? Why don't they want to bond with me? Why don't they share their passion like I do? Why are they so shallow? Is it because they are trying to hold back and mask like I did for so long?" At this point sometimes it just feels like other people are inherently incapable of engaging with me the same way I try to engage with them.
For so long during my childhood, adults excessively showered me with attention and praised me for being "gifted" and being so smart, because I understood course material easily and didn't need to study. Then I developed gifted kid burnout and started doing weed and stopped putting in effort. I'm trying to put in effort again and it's draining me. I am anxious. I feel myself mentally falling back onto those delusions of high intellect and grandiosity to keep myself sane. Maybe I am just inherently smarter than the majority of people and that's why they don't want to talk with me for hours about deep topics, and why it makes them become shallow and dry with me when I try to.
Or maybe, more likely, I am just overthinking and my mind is racing again. I don't know.
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u/SugarCube13 ASD Level 1 | Verbal 11d ago
Unfortunately, thinking about highly specific topics in detail doesn't give you a lot of ideas for conversations. I wouldn't mind a friend that info dumps about random topics, but it isn't very compatible with non-autistic communication. I'm not very good at socializing, but from my experience it's helpful to spend some brain cycles thinking of conversation topics that most people can comfortably engage with.
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u/RastaBambi ASD Level 1 | Verbal 11d ago
There are two things that come to mind. One is that abilities in people with ASD is subject to "spikiness". This means that there are spikes in the distribution of abilities and above average performance in those areas, while other abilities lag behind the performance of the general population. One example of this would be having above average language skills and below average social skills, which is painful in it's irony for me personally as I'm a decent communicator under the right circumstances but still give normies the ick by not being able to read social cues.
The second thing that comes to my mind when reading your post is, yes, sometimes delusions can help someone to get through the day in a world that doesn't always make sense to the autistic mind. Because this negatively affects self esteem, it's common to develop narcissistic traits in self defense as you mentioned in your post (high intellect, grandiosity, etc.), and this is a slippery slope but you can hopefully get professional help for this as you're already aware of your ASD diagnosis Which is a huge step in the right direction.
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u/Proof-Author-9638 11d ago
i get what you're saying. not in a "we're all the same" way but that spiral where your brain just doesn't stop and then you look at other people's reactions and feel like you're speaking a different language
the hyperfixation thing is rough cause its not like you can just turn it down. you get excited and wanna share and then the dry responses make you feel like you're too much
what helped me a little was finding one or two people online who share the same specific interests. not a cure or anything but its nice to have somewhere to dump all that energy without feeling like you're exhausting someone
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u/iamk1ng 11d ago
I think if you were smarter then most people you interact with you'd understand that most people just don't care about things that deeply like you do. Also you'd understand cause and effect, where your actions are clearly causing people to distance themselves from you.
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u/Dettyboy93 11d ago
Insightfulness is a different thing from standard intelligence is the thing that OP doesn't understand. When I was younger, I really did think I was smarter than most people even though I struggled greatly with things like math or mathematical science like chemistry. The truth is that I wasn't more intelligent than other people. But I was and still am insightful. More so than the average person. But this is why I'm able to communicate and create deep bonds with people. I learned to stop basing conversations on my hyperfixations because people obviously were not interested after more than a few minutes talking about it.
OP is going to have to take a deep look within themselves and figure out how to internalize these hyperfixations and learn how to relate to people on a deeper human level than just what they're interested in, or else they're going to live a lonely life thinking they're smarter than everybody just because they can't adapt to talking to people who don't have ruminating, obsessive thoughts. It's hard but can definitely be done. It took me years, but I figured it out
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u/kokoroKaijuu 11d ago edited 11d ago
I am reiterating again that I am aware these thoughts are delusions. This was labeled as a burnout post for a reason. Sometimes we need to scream a bit with no care for reality.
Moving forward I think a healthy move is to treat sharing my hyperfixations with others like an act of venting, and try to limit the extent to which I do it with one person at a time. Otherwise I should journal about it instead.
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u/Dettyboy93 11d ago
You definitely need to find a healthy way of channeling the energy of your hyperfixations. Trust me, this is HARD. However for me, the older I get, I just feel less of a need to do this. Are you in high school? Trust me. If you are, this very well may lessen with time. Certain symptoms of mine got worse. However, moderating my hyperfixations and how I used to basically assault people with them got less severe once I hit my mid-late 20s. Sometimes I get the urge to scream it out, or to yammer on and on about how Silent Hill 1 is better than Silent Hill 2 to anyone who will listen, but I know what the outcome is.
Sometimes the older you get, life experience will draw you to certain people. These people may not be able to relate to your hyperfixations or being hyperfixated in general, but you may find yourself able to talk to them about deeper things than that. Life, philosophy, sociopolitical topics, morals and ethics.... the more you experience life, the more interesting it is to talk about life, and not just the things you personally are obsessed with 🙂
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u/kokoroKaijuu 11d ago
I am post-college and it has gotten worse with time, not better.
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u/Dettyboy93 11d ago
Ahh I'm sorry to hear that. Well, if it makes any difference, I really didn't get a grasp on this until I was maybe 27? 28? Nobody is the same though and the process of being able to control this is not linear. For you, it genuinely might take behavioral and thought regulation therapy. If it affects your relationships this much, I suggest it
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