Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
Oof, I feel that. My wife actually ragequit our couples' counseling a few times in, and both that experience and subsequent work has reminded me that I'm not the problem. That said, I'm codependent autistically loyal and stubborn as hell so we've persisted, though during our second separation, I actually started letting go and moving on, though perhaps not so coincidentally, my wife ultimately reconsidered. In the meantime, I'm trying to build my own identity up outside of my job and my marriage so that I have enough of my own life to be balanced, with or without her.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
I mean, I work in the mental health field, and I'll just say that when it comes to the therapeutic types, I've seen some real doozies myself, so when it comes to the part about finding a good therapist, that's a hard agree. I probably should have said that the quote in question was specifically about going to couples' counseling. And for bonus points, my wife is a therapist and that hasn't prevented or ameliorated deep fissures in our marriage, either, and when we went to couples' counseling, she honestly expected that it was going to be all about me and got resistant as soon as the therapist started looking at her side of the street. Turns out we're all subject to the funhouse mirror effect when looking at ourselves through the prism of our own minds, regardless of how objective we try to be.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
6d ago
The quote that sticks in my mind is this one: if both partners in the relationship want it to work, then nothing can stop them. If they don't, then nothing can save them.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7d ago
MyAbandonware.org has the game available for download, though there are a host of issues actually running it in modern Windows. This thread at Civ Fanatics explains how to iron out the problems and achieve a playable game.
Have fun trying to conquer that one last Civ in the endgame!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Still playing, and enjoying, Cyberpunk 2077, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
In my case, I went VLC with my mother about nine years ago. I, too, felt a lot of anger and guilt over that decision, but I know that my decision was best for me. She made her feelings of unhappiness clear to me, promptly turned to my other brothers for support, and we rarely spoke outside of family gatherings afterwards. I have come to accept that my relationship with her could only ever be complicated and so, too, would my feelings towards her only ever be complicated.
I have to wonder what percentage of people with Down's Syndrome would be worried that putting too much stuff on an island would tip it over?
Edit: rephrased.
I listened to @cjet79 and @urquan and went ahead and started playing Cyberpunk 2077. It's been a compelling enough game that my own tinkering has taken a backseat (and subsequently, the initial "productive" interests that drove my tinkering desires have been rendered unnecessary, so future fun will be strictly for my own nefarious purposes) and now most of my free time has been devoted to playing it. I've finished the first act and
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
I swear I answered this yesterday, but it appears my post never made it. Anyway, it's The Minority Council: Matthew Swift Book 4 by Kate Griffin. For those interested, I greatly enjoyed Cured and would recommend it to any fan.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Ghost Story is, thus far, my favorite Dresden Files novel. Together with Changes, they're a hell of a one-two punch!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Aww hell, I was mixed up, the book I was thinking about was Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist--sorry about that! I'm actually not familiar with the Neapolitan series.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Ooh, I've thought about checking that one out, but I keep telling myself to read at least the really interesting parts of my backlog first.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
The government is also looking to borrow to keep programmes going, instead of socking away the surplus for a rainy day as had originally been the plan, as well as the usual budget over-runs (the health service is a constant black hole of sucking up money and running out and needing more):
In other news, Captain Renault is shocked-shocked!-to find that gambling is going on in here!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Wow, thanks! Talk about ask and ye shall receive!
ETA: link says the post is deleted, suspect that a mod needs to approve it, cough cough. Pretty please?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
UPDATE: I've been advised that the good folks over at rDrama are brigading the survey, so I've closed it. I'll have to see if there's any way to exclude the troll responses from my analysis.
Rats. I was looking forward to the results and the ensuing discussion, too!
Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook a relatively obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration, but if you can accept that the story's good fun.
I was not a particular fan of that book, and you've amply described the reasons why, though I'll add that I'm not generally a fan of using present tense for fiction, either. There are special circumstances where it's just fine to do so, of course, but for me, it didn't work in Recursion and ended up being One More Thing that annoyed me about the novel.
Cured: the Tale of Two Imaginary Boys by Laurence Tolhurst.
Side note: I thought that Alanson said that he was wrapping up his Convergence series, but evidently not.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
Haha, of course, that makes much more sense in retrospect than the idea that you were talking about Tom Ford the fashion guy!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
I've been more than a little surprised that no-one here in This Fine Establishment has done a post noting the parallels between Ford and Trump, but of course, it's always possible that it was already done and I just wasn't around for it at the time.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Good question! With my usual caveat that my bar for decent reads is not very high, the answer for the past couple of years, at least, has been way too much LitRPG, though urban fantasy (when done right) is a perennial favorite, as is old-school sci-fi and fantasy in general. If you're looking for a specific genre, I can talk more specifically about what I've been reading in those departments, but without knowing any more detail, recent reads that I've enjoyed would be the Unbound series by Nicoli Gonnella (LitRPG), the Noobtown series by Ryan Rimmel (humor/LitRPG), The Assembly series by Steve McHugh (Urban Fantasy/Vampires), the Book of the Dead series by RinoZ (LitRPG/necromancer), absolutely everything by Nathan Lowell (all Slice-of-Life/Setting Things Right, mostly merchant marines in space), the He Who Fights With Monsters series by Shirtaloon (LitRPG), The Hollows series by Kim Harrison (Urban Fantasy), and of course, my only must-read author, The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, which is also urban fantasy.
I'm glad you undeleted your post! In exploring my own issues with severe burnout, I stumbled upon some good information about autistic burnout myself, and I believe the criteria for autistic burnout is significant exhaustion and increased social withdrawal along with either reduction in functioning, increased executive challenges, and reduced capacity to mask/camouflage. I had all five of those symptoms in spades, and it sounds like you meet the criteria as well. I'm a lot better than I was when I was at my worst but my executive functioning still isn't what it was before, and my ability to mask/camouflage is still reduced as well. So yeah, you're not alone in experiencing this. In fact, when you talk about swinging back and forth between being more normie and being more radical socio-culturally-politically, that sounds a lot to me like reduced masking.
FWIW, and because you asked, my life is significantly different now than it was before burnout really set its teeth into me, and that's kind of the Thing. The answer to the question of, "what do you do to hold onto things," for me, is as simple as it is difficult: I literally can't hold onto All The Things anymore, and though I think that's more from burnout proper as opposed to autistic burnout specifically, the two were closely intertwined and interrelated in my case. In Showstopper!, the book about Dave Cutler and the development of Windows NT at Microsoft, there was a coder named Walt Moore who was so burned out that he spent the bulk of his time at work developing and playing pai gow poker simulations instead of doing his actual work. I identify a lot with his story, having been barely functional myself for about two and a half years, starting around October of 2021, and the long hard road back from burnout has involved a ton of learning how to really take care of myself, which in turn meant admitting my needs to myself and prioritizing giving myself the time and space to meet those needs instead of just doing without and soldiering on. At the beginning of my digging out, I was not even aware that I qualified for the spectrum, just that I was not normal, and strongly identified with being a geek/nerd and had cultivated an unconscious habit of developing assimilation behaviors, the go-along, get-along normifying stuff, at least to the extent that I didn't get myself duct taped to the flagpole. It turns out that assimilation habits/behaviors take the most out of those of us on the spectrum and are the least adaptive of our coping strategies in the long run. These in particular are things that I've had to re-examine and re-work in my life, as well as the masking/camouflaging behaviors, simply because they take too much out of me and they leave me too drained. Likewise, I've had to adopt a lot of behaviors like walking outside and journaling that help me to process my emotions because not only is that a Thing wrt ASD, but I took the possibly-traditional route of stuffing them into a closet and identifying with my executive brain instead of actually taking the time to deal with them until I hit my absolute limit and crashed and burned. My family connections have changed dramatically, my marriage may well be beyond salvageable, and being given a more focused position at work that allows me to see my progress much more clearly has, along with a growing team of fellow spectrum folk in our IT department, has been a saving grace that has kept me employed, but I could have easily lost or left my job as well. I say all this in the hopes that I've made the gravity of my own situation clear, and to hopefully encourage you to keep listening to what your instincts and intuition are telling you that you need, and to keep doing things for yourself that truly help you and sustain you in life, instead of merely surviving to face another day. That seems to be the only real antidote to burnout in the long run.
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