Hello,
I’m Shirl, I’ve been diagnosed with autism for nearly 10 years and the older I’m getting the more challenging I’m finding things. Life can be so stressful and it affects my autism in different ways, the stress is the biggest offender and I’m trying to find different ways to manage that.
One thing I’m noticing more and more is how autism isn’t the same all the time. Not for me anyway. It’s different every day, some days are more manageable than others. One thing that is a constant pain for me is fatigue. I get this fatigue every day that leaves me hanging by lunch time and then the rest of the day is a struggle against the fatigue until I can get home to my bed and rest.
Despite being diagnosed nearly 10 years ago my knowledge on autism is terrible so lately I’ve been doing more reading and research on it to try and help myself and that’s how I discovered about burnout, something that’s more than likely been terrorising my day to day life for years.
My stress and fatigue have gotten worse recently and I think that’s down to me helping out at a school where I do autistic talks with the children, basically answering their questions about ASD and helping some of the special needs children. It’s something I love doing and every Wednesday afternoon I have been doing this for nearly 6 months, but now it’s starting to take its toll and I feel terrible.
It’s like 99% I’m feeling generally unwell but it never gets better, always worse around and after Wednesday. Added stress that my mum is ill with an immune disease.
This last Wednesday was the worst yet to endure and since I still haven’t felt better. The fatigue is clinging on and pushing me down, and that’s now leading me to question whether I can keep doing the autism talks at the school.
I don’t want to give this up, I don’t have a proper 9-5 job and never have been able to handle that, and I worry about giving it up because the children really seem to enjoy the talks but I know this isn’t doing me any good physically. I’m torn on what to do regarding this.
Please help.
