The Hollowing

There is a certain kind of exhaustion that feels like someone has taken an ice cream scooper and hollowed you out of everything that made you, you. No optimising, efforting, or reframing can dig you out of that exhaustion. There’s regular burnout, and then there is neurodivergent burnout.

Those are two different experiences that share the same name. Regular burnout can be addressed by short-term resting and breaking from work. Neurodivergent burnout has complex layers of physical health, shame, trauma, capacity, hormones, executive functioning, and sensory needs to wade through and detangle.

Then there is the experience of being a woman or genderqueer in some way (hey I’m non-binary, I see you) while also being neurodivergent (while not knowing you were neurodivergent until adulthood because you were SO good at masking) which equals at least your first couple decades of life being told all the ways in which you are “wrong” or don’t fit your environments.

Let’s dial in to the experience. You wake up with a pit of dread, resistant to start the day, and the self-gaslighting program kicks in: “Stop being so lazy,” you tell yourself, unaware that you are echoing the voice of Mrs. Henderson from the 6th grade, when you would be given a writing assignment and you would just stare at the piece of paper, immobilised by your thoughts. “So much wasted potential” she would say as she shook her head and clicked her tongue with a deep sigh. Meanwhile you were silently drowning in decision paralysis and executive dysfunction and didn’t know it because you had “so much potential.” In school you learned that the only thing that mattered was the academic performance that could be measured and seen.

Now everyone else’s evidence counts but your own – your background hum of exhaustion, the pain lingering in your back that you keep mental gymnastic-ing your way out of naming chronic pain, and the cognitive problems you call “brain fog” but if you were actually honest, your brain is the equivalent of San Francisco in July, with a dense fog perpetually present except for a few hours in the afternoon if you are lucky…and even then, when it burns off it reveals your exhausted cognitive processes underneath.

But it doesn’t count as evidence that the systems you are living in are broken, no – that counts as evidence that you are broken.

At least that’s how you’ve been trained to think.

When Capability Becomes the Cost for Existing

When you use capability to measure your worth, burnout becomes an identity crisis. But when you are swimming in the waters, you don’t see that’s what is happening. You are just feeling the pressure of survival and the urgency of doing whatever you need to do to keep your job. In this framework, you learn to see burnout as a personal failure, a flaw in your character, a deficit in your humanness. You blame yourself for burning out. “look at what everyone else is doing. I’m so far behind. Why can’t I be normal?” In a society that constantly asks you to leverage your capability to override your capacity, burnout is inevitable.

Burnout is structural in cause, and personal in impact. You aren’t the one carrying the deficit – it’s actually the structure of a society that relies upon underpaid workers to sustain an investment class (billionaires and multi-millionaires). Burnout is not a personal deficit or flaw – it’s a receipt of the life force you’ve paid to perform at your workplace or school.

Underneath it all is the Prove-it Reflex.

The belief that if you just optimise hard enough and push through long enough, you will finally earn the right to feel okay. Because you have proven your worthiness to take up space. Someone who “has it together.” Someone who is “respectable.”

You’ve earned your Right to be human.

So you keep tearing yourself apart and rebuilding. Over and over and over again, wondering why nothing holds. You keep returning to the same story you’ve been unknowingly telling yourself since Mrs. Henderson’s class: “I’m not enough, I’m not worthy. I’m not applying myself. Why am I like this? I’m never going to get a degree. I'm never going to be successful.”

You override your capacity – that moment when you say “I can do it,” and your body says “hell no, this will cost me too much.” Repeated capacity override results in a capacity debt – when you keep borrowing from tomorrow’s body to meet today’s demands.

The Prove-it Reflex is the belief, and the Capacity Debt Cycle is what the belief does to your body over time.

When the debt comes due, it’s in the form of burnout.

Meritocracy Was Always a Lie

Institutionalised Rejection of Difference

We live in a society that was built from a place of dominance and control, block by block. Each system – legal, education, financial – is one of those blocks. Those systems need you productive, manageable, small, and quiet. Telling someone that their worth lives in their material output is the most effective way to accomplish this.

Meritocracy is one of the ideologies that was used to install this belief (productivity = worth and value as a human) in you. Work hard and you get rewarded for your ability and efforts.

You believe that and you are very easy to control.

For a brief part of US History, maybe this “work hard and get rewarded” belief was true for the majority of people; and then the government pulled the rug out from underneath everyone’s feet. But the ones who had already benefitted were no longer standing on the rug – they had already “earned” a higher place, and so their perspective became “people don’t work hard enough,” – missing that the entire structural landscape had changed because they were up too high to see it.

The long-lasting impact of this, was that generations of people grew up believing they needed to prove their worth. Schools reinforce this belief through a grading system that uses achievement and productivity. You receive messaging that you are more worthy to take up space when you are a straight-A student, than when you are a straight-Cs and Ds student.

It’s easy to see how central control and dominance are, to the survival of these systems and our very society as we know it. Audre Lorde said it best:

"Institutionalised rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate."

Fragmentation is an Invitation

I’m not going to tell you some trite ChatGPT quip like “you’re not broken, you’ve adapted.” Because it’s time we face our fragmentation as a people, especially those of us who are white- bodied.

So. You are broken.

But here's where a lot of people lose the thread. It's your interpretation of why you are broken that is wrong (it's not you). What makes you broken is a society and culture that has been siphoning your life force since birth. You were taught propaganda and it was called education. You were taught this is “just the way things are” as if it dominance and control was a natural way for humans to exist, instead of an imposed system of coercion so that an investment class could thrive. You were taught that emotionally abusive relationships were normal.

These “cognitive distortions” we therapists talk about? They were internalised from the environment you live in. The systems you were raised in and interacted with every day.

Cognitive distortions are simply internalised

colonial distortions.

You grew up in a society that told you “get a job or don’t survive.” Black and white thinking. You grew up in a society that told you “if you don’t have a successful life [whatever that is] that’s your fault.” Personalisation. You grew up in a society that told you women were too emotional for leadership roles. Overgeneralisation. You grew up in a society that told you (without saying it directly) Autistic and ADHD neurotypes are too loud, too disruptive, too anti-social, too rigid. Mental Filtering. If your therapist talks about cognitive distortions without connecting them to your environment, you might want to look for a new therapist.

You weren't born with these beliefs. You didn't invent them. You inherited them.

Like a tea bag infusing a cup of hot water. And your sensitivity, your big feelings, your different way of moving through the world, those aren't what's wrong with you. The water's great. It's that tea bag that's shitty. But these systems are going to do everything to convince you that the water is terrible. (You're the water.) This is how systems and structures combined with cultural pressure teach you to self-gaslight and make yourself as small as possible.

Before you collapse into despair – take heart: you are a stand in the web of life and what you do affects the web. You have power, agency, and influence, and therapy is one vehicle for coming into greater awareness of something you may believe doesn’t exist. Sometimes you need someone else to hold that belief for you while you grow into it.

The work of putting the pieces back together has many different names, and has been done many different times. Dra. Gloria Anzaldúa said it best when she wrote that we need an epistemology of the imagination to put the pieces back together in Luz en lo Oscuro / Light in the dark. Her healing and transformation philosophy is one of many that influences the way I work with people and guide them. A part of her philosophy is the Coyolxauhqui Imperative – the process of putting the pieces back together in a new way – healing and achieving integration. It is a cyclical process of deconstruction and reconstruction, as this society is constantly working to fragment us in unconscious ways.

Choosing the Cost of Liberation

You don’t need to figure out the “right biohack” or “nervous system regulation.” You need a perception shift. Because right now you can only see the reality of what is, not what could be; and you need to stop using productivity and achievement as proof that you deserve to exist.

For those of us who have gone through transformation and healing processes, who work with the energy of healing, we understand that the wound can be a portal to deeper understanding and embodiment of ourselves. Colonisation has wounded us all in radically different and personal ways, but as Anzaldúa writes,

“we can connect through the wound that's alienated us from others. When the wound forms a cicatrix, the scar can become a bridge linking people split apart. What happened may not have been in our individual control, but how we react to it and what we do about it is."

We have the power to re-write reality. We did not choose this reality, we were born into it, and this reality is one of many different possibilities. How do we re-write reality? By re-negotiating the way we decide to live our lives, even when it’s hard at first. We decide to choose the cost of liberation instead of the cost of survival under a system of coercion. As Anzaldúa writes,

“We revise reality by altering our consensual agreements about what is real, what is just and fair. We can trans-shape reality by changing our perspectives and perceptions. By choosing a different future, we bring it into being.”

Each one of us can choose differently and then we can choose differently together, through coalitions and community. This process is a synergistic collaboration between personal and collective healing.

You were handed a reality you didn't choose. What you do with that is the only thing that was ever actually yours.

If you are ready to stop paying the life force tax and start the work of putting the pieces back together in a way that is actually you-shaped, I work with people 1:1. You can find out more here.