But I’m not. I can’t.

Not for a lack of desire. It’s the invisible chain of executive steps. It’s sensory overwhelm. It’s the inability to navigate interpersonal ambiguity. Meal prep, for instance, requires knowing what is already in the fridge, deciding what to make, considering what everyone will actually eat, remembering others’ schedules and planned events, building the grocery list, sequencing the trip or ordering the groceries, putting it all away, focusing on the multi-step process of cooking while constantly interrupted, timing it all right, then recovering from the cognitive load of the whole thing.

For most of my life, my neurodivergence was the vehicle by which I drove harder and faster, until autistic burnout was what careened me off the cliff of my purported capacity. Raymaker and colleagues (2020) describe autistic burnout as pervasive, long-term exhaustion (mental, emotional, physical), loss of function (difficulty with executive functioning, communication, daily living, or previously manageable responsibilities), and reduced tolerance to stimulus (increased sensory overwhelm and lower capacity for cognitive/social demands).

Perhaps you relate because you’re also navigating this burnout, or maybe because you’ve reckoned with your limits some other way, due to chronic illness, disability, caregiving, job-loss, or grief. Maybe it’s perimenopause, adjusting to sobriety, or crawling through mental health issues.

And yet recovering is treated as a consumer choice made from abundance, when for many of us it must be attempted from depletion. Wellness culture promises we can buy or hack our way to a better us, but what about a relationship with limitation that doesn’t require us to overcome it? Attunement over optimization, or an ethic of accommodation and self-compassion rather than self-punishment.

Therapist and researcher Megan Anna Neff, who is herself autistic, teaches that autistic burnout recovery requires a genuine and sustained reduction in demands, not a new system for managing them. The instinct, one I have had a hundred times, is to rebuild the productivity structure, to install the right app or adopt the right routine that will finally make output feel manageable. How many times have I been “almost there” on a Notion system to finally make it all work? Dr. Neff explains that the optimization compulsion is itself a symptom, soothing in the moment but avoidant of the actual need. The actual need might be less. Not better management of too much. Actually less.

Unpredictably, writing is sometimes easy. Other times, I spend weeks wandering through the hours with an empty whiteboard for a mind, unable to locate the marker. Both of those are me. “But I might lose subscribers” is a worry somehow eased through acceptance. I might, and I’ll survive.

I’m doing what I can, as I’m able. The version of me that crushes a live, global news interview is not more real than the version that cannot answer the door. I’ve learned that while many will take the most visible version of us as the truest one, we are allowed to know otherwise.

If you haven’t experienced capacity loss yourself, it’s hard to understand that both versions can be real. People tend to anchor to whichever one they saw first, or whichever one they need you to be most. Our mountaintops become the new baseline–every moment that falls short of it feels like failure, evidence of something wrong or worse, deception.

Capitalism doesn’t run on compassion, we have to carve it out for ourselves. There are likely many people in your life who stand to benefit from believing it’s a lie. For me it’s the former employer I’m suing, my disability insurance, the man I’m divorcing. Maybe, for you, it’s the friends whose own self denial depends on yours, or the partner who’d rather you suffer than he step up.

“Their job is to invalidate you,” my therapist said once, “your job is to take care of yourself anyway.”

Variable capacity demands we stop treating our peaks as promises. The version of you where capacity and ambition were aligned was not a lie, and neither is the one who can’t get out of bed.

I am not offering a solution. Wellness culture has enough of those, and most of them were designed for people with a surplus I don’t have and you may not either. I’m suggesting the metaphorical freezer dinner (or a real one, if cooking is as hard for you, too). I’m suggesting paper plates. I’m suggesting that peanut butter on crackers can be a complete meal.

My kids don’t have a mom who is on top of everything, but I’m modeling that I can love and accept myself anyway. That I can ask for help, that my worth is not measured by my output. That some mornings I can make waffles from scratch, but most of the time I rely on someone I never expected to be my lifeline, their dad (who, fortunately, is not the man I’m currently divorcing), to plan and execute the meals that land on my table.

Learning the actual shape of our capacity rather than the shape we wish it had, or the shape others need it to have, is the beginning of becoming truly well. Not optimization, not hustle. Just: this is what I have today, and I will work with that, and that will have to be enough. Sometimes it will be, and sometimes it won’t, and both are survivable. Gentleness can guide me either way. And sometimes, there will even be waffles.

A note on perspective: I'm writing from my own lived experience and don't intend to speak for all autistic people, all suicidal people, or any other group. I also recognize and acknowledge that my privilege and access to resources are significant factors in why I'm alive today. At the end of this essay, I share free and low-cost resources—everyone deserves access to life-saving support, regardless of their circumstances.

Wanting to end my life felt like stumbling through the world as a burn victim of sorts: raw flesh exposed and unprotected. Bumping into counter corners, dirt from my kids' shoes and cat hair sticking and healing into the wounds; wounds that ripped open like tracing paper at every effort to tend to the mess I was making.

It was a pain that I couldn't escape or understand, and that no one could see.

If these were actual burns, the issue would be obvious. The pain would be palpable. I'd probably be offered wound coverings, antiseptic, and tools to cope with the distress. No one would doubt the searing pain. People would send flowers, they’d ask how I was coping. My loved ones would get support, too. Instead, most of us are too ashamed to seek support, and when we do, many people avoid acknowledging what couldn’t be more real.

This is why being suicidal was initially a profoundly invalidating experience. Like the acquaintance who said "you can't be depressed! You just took a beautiful trip!" or the therapist who spent our first session baffled, saying "but you've got so much going for you!" She closed the session by peddling a rubber Livestrong-style bracelet with motivational quotes from her online shop; I wanted to die.

She also threw out a potential diagnosis which, while it turned out to be inaccurate, led me to an office two summers ago with a psychologist who got my attention.

"This works," the doctor said, referring to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), the therapeutic gold standard for suicidal people "but not if you kill yourself first." I tilted my head to understand. Reading my face, he continued, "you have to physically stay alive long enough for treatment to begin working. Do you think you can do that?"

From his brown chair across a gray room, he could see the burns. He didn't try to talk me out of the pain, instead he sat with me in my tender, marbled darkness. It was the first real step toward saving my life.

It's been more than two years since that meeting, and thanks to the support of brilliant psychiatrists and therapists, I no longer live in constant fear of dying by suicide, but it hasn't been a linear path and I'm not yet free of the searing pain; recovery rarely works that way. It's been a jagged journey with progress punctuated by setbacks and good days that collapse into bad nights, good weeks that plummet into very hard weekends. Psychologists note that this is normal; healing from suicidality almost always includes periods that feel like backsliding, and those are not failures so much as part of the process of learning to cope.

I have learned that burns need to be cleaned and covered, and experts that can see these burns teach me how to treat my wounds and minimize further injury. Psychologists who study post-crisis recovery note that the shift from seeing pain as forever and inescapable to something temporary and treatable, is a key marker of true resilience. And for me, it's been the difference-maker in staying alive.

When I was in a crisis, I didn't need platitudes; I needed to understand what was happening in order to feel less like a confounding burden, I needed to accept and accommodate my reduced capacity, and I needed practical steps that could help me manage and reduce vulnerability to intense emotions.

Understanding Why We Want to Die: The Science Behind Suicidal Thoughts

The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, developed by psychologist Thomas Joiner, helps explain why some people develop the desire to end their lives and what pushes them from thinking to acting. Understanding this framework helped me make sense of my own experience and gave me tools to interrupt the cycle.

The theory identifies three key factors that interact to create suicide risk: perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and acquired capacity. Knowing about these can help you make interpretations and choices to keep yourself safer.

Feeling Like a Burden

Perceived burdensomeness is when you believe that your death would be worth more to the people you love than your life. It's the crushing weight of thinking you're making everyone's life harder just by existing. When the sadness is so intense and won’t lift, and feels like it never will, what can you even do except feel guilty for it?

For me, this feeling intensified during what I now recognize as autistic burnout. As I wrote in Too Pretty to Be Autistic:

When workplace expectations were obscured, when goalposts moved, when I witnessed leaders alternate ignoring and justifying an abandonment of values–my neurodivergence magnified the damage; my entire construct of my workplace and the ways I’d contributed to its success broke, taking my sense of self with it.

I began to lose my ability to mask and perform neurotypicality. My gripping white knuckles became more translucent until hands weren’t on the wheel anymore. I was depressed, anxious, and descending into a systemic shutdown…

Autistic burnout involves losing the ability to constantly mask and pretend to be okay, meaning suddenly I was sparring with emotions in ways I'd never been expected to. I was used to stuffing uncomfortable feelings away and pushing through—suddenly I couldn't. I had no map for how to function through pain I couldn't ignore. I'd lost the ability to pretend.

As I said in Prelude to a New Chapter:

When the familiar tools and coping strategies weren’t working, my urgent, panicked scramble to get better turned into a powerless slip into an unfamiliar, horrifying darkness. I slipped, and I kept slipping. I slipped until the idea of taking my own life made absolute, perfect sense.

This burden logic is particularly seductive for those with complex trauma or whose neurological wiring has been pathologized since childhood, such as those who are autistic or have ADHD, who've spent decades translating their natural intensity into a lifestyle of apology. We’ve learned to see our needs as impositions, our emotions as something to “make go away,” our very way of being as something requiring correction or concealment.

Research shows that autistic adults are nearly three times more likely to die by suicide compared to non-autistic people, and the risk is even higher for those without intellectual disabilities—over five times more likely. The pressure to mask autistic traits and appear neurotypical has been specifically linked to increased suicidality.

Crucially, these beliefs are often distorted and untrue, but they feel absolutely real to the person experiencing them. The logic seems airtight: If I am the problem, then removing myself solves the problem. If my existence causes suffering, then my non-existence eliminates suffering. The syllogism feels unassailable because it's built on real pain, real pain that hurts people you really love.

The data is very clear, though, that when someone dies by suicide it does not decrease the burden on those they love. In fact, they may be forever burdened with questions like “what if I’d only...” And it can hurt the people you love in other ways–death could also serve as a curriculum for others in crisis. When we choose suicide, we model it as a viable way out of pain.

A Canadian study found that adolescents who lost a friend or peer to suicide were two to four times more likely to attempt suicide themselves compared to those who had not been exposed. The effect is even more profound when the loss is a parent. Children and teens who lose a parent to suicide are three times more likely to die by suicide themselves, even decades later.

At my lowest points, I carried these studies around with me, printed out and folded and unfolded many times. While my kids deserved an emotionally regulated parent, knowing they were better off with me doing my best, even if imperfect, than with me dead, helped me out-think the burden logic.

My intention isn’t to guilt you into staying alive. It's about understanding that the Interpersonal Theory reveals why the burden logic feels so compelling, and why it's based on incomplete information. When all three elements of the theory are active, suicide feels not just reasonable but necessary. But when you understand the mechanics, you can begin to interrupt them.

Thwarted Belongingness

This second component has to do with feeling fundamentally disconnected from others, like you don't truly belong anywhere or with anyone.

Thwarted belongingness can happen through lost community due to a move, job change, job loss, or values shift. It intensifies through disillusionment in systems, social structures, organizations, or groups that you trusted. Bullying, social rejection, and isolation can all feed this sense of not belonging.

For autistic people, this feeling often starts early. I’d come home from elementary school, decompress by watching Oprah with a bowl of ice cream (literally every day), then spend hours staring into the mirror, practicing expressions and running social scripts. We learn to mask our natural responses and mimic neurotypical behavior, but underneath, we often feel like we're watching human connection through glass, never quite able to break through to genuine belonging.

In my case, belonging was thwarted in multiple ways. Losing the ability to perform neurotypicality resulted in a sense of alienation due to feeling incapable, incompetent. Separately, the one place in the world where things had always made sense to me—business, and a specific context where I felt deeply invested–Meta and their stated values, was a construct fully destroyed after I saw the company I trusted making decisions that hurt people and the business. When I did my part to get us back on track, I was literally removed from the rooms I needed to be in to do my job. I was told that I was the problem, that I was the risk. For a while, I internalized this.

Healing has required finding new communities who share my values, and working to right the wrongs that I was a part of. If I were to walk into the same rooms that excluded me 3 years ago, I’d likely feel a profound absence of belonging. So I don’t go looking for acceptance there, instead, I walk into rooms of other online safety advocates, others with lived experience with suicide or neurodivergence, and rooms that don’t require I compromise myself to belong.

Acquired Capacity

The third piece of this theoretical puzzle is acquired capacity: the ability to overcome your natural self-preservation instincts. Most people, even when they desperately want to die, can't overcome the biological drive to stay alive. But through repeated exposure to painful or frightening experiences, some of us develop the capacity to act on suicidal thoughts.

This was perhaps the most terrifying part of my experience. Each time I hoarded prescription medications or researched methods of fatal self-injury, I was desensitizing myself to the fear and pain involved. Each time I drove down to the beach with sleeping pills, weights, and rope in my trunk, contemplating just walking into the water and ending the pain, like the young man with the backpack who didn't make it home, I was building my capacity to actually do it.

This is a very dangerous path. The theory helps explain why people with histories of self-harm, those who've experienced physical trauma, young people exposed to pro-suicide content on social media, or those exposed to others' pain and injury (like healthcare workers and veterans) have higher suicide rates—not because they want to die more, but because they've developed the ability to overcome the natural fear that protects most of us.

Those with the capacity to overcome self-preservation instincts must reduce access to means and over-index on getting ahead of burden logic and pre-thwarting thwarted belongingness. This is why mental health care is essential.

What Saved My Life: Learning to Tend the Burns

Studies have shown that DBT not only reduces suicidal ideation but can cut actual suicide attempts by about 50% among high-risk individuals. DBT is based on four core modules: emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, and mindfulness. The idea is to equip you with tools to survive acute crises and also build a “life worth living.”

As I wrote in Too Pretty to Be Autistic,

I found DBT because it was created to help suicidal people, and for me it also offered a framework to navigate my sense of "missing software." DBT helps me recognize when I am performing emotional wellness for others' comfort and to make choices based on what's best for my needs and values, even if it's not best for everyone else.

DBT also taught me practical skills that I use and practice every day.

What to Do in Crisis: Surviving the Moment

When you're in acute suicidal crisis, the goal isn't to solve everything—it's just to survive the moment. Solving everything is actually an explicit non-goal, because we rarely come up with the best solutions when we’re emotionally dysregulated. Think of it like emergency first aid for those severe burns: you're not trying to heal completely right now, you're just trying to prevent further damage and get to safety.

Use distress tolerance skills. These are techniques specifically designed to help you get through intense emotional pain without making it worse:

• Temperature change: Hold ice cubes, take a hot shower, or splash cold water on your face. Extreme temperatures can interrupt the emotional escalation.

• Intense exercise: Do jumping jacks, run up and down stairs, or do push-ups until you're breathing hard. Physical exertion changes your body chemistry.

• Paced breathing: Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Try counting 4 in, 6 out.

• Distraction: Watch funny videos, do a puzzle, clean something. The goal is to occupy your mind until the intensity passes.

Reach out for help. Like I’ve done many times, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, contact a professional, or reach out to a trusted friend. In DBT, we decide in advance who we can call in those moments - a list of people who are safe to tell we’re feeling that way (mine was very short) and a list of people who are safe to talk to about anything else, to momentarily distract. I hate phone calls, but I still made those lists, and I used them.

What to Do When You're Not in Crisis: Building Your Safety Net

Create a safety plan. This is essentially a written, step-by-step guide you make for your future self, so that when you’re overwhelmed and thinking of suicide, you don’t have to figure out what to do, you can follow a plan you prepared. Yours could include warning signs to watch for, coping strategies that have worked for you, and steps to make you safer in the immediate term.

Reduce means. Remove or limit access to things you might use to harm yourself. This might mean asking someone to hold your medications, removing weapons from your home, or avoiding certain locations when you’re feeling dysregulated. This is about creating barriers between your future self and suicidal action.

Consider your environment. What makes your suicidal thoughts worse? What helps? You might need to limit certain news, social media, or even well-meaning but triggering conversations. You might need less or more light, less or more structure, less or more social connection. Are you in a profoundly invalidating job, relationship? What needs to change?

Build emotion regulation skills. One of the most valuable things I learned was how to identify and name emotions as they arise in my body. When I notice tension in my shoulders and a tight chest, I can recognize that as anxiety and ask myself: what information is this emotion giving me? What does anxiety want me to know or do? Instead of immediately acting on the feeling or trying to make it go away, I can observe it with curiosity.

The Ongoing Reality: Learning to Live with the Scars

I'm still constantly invalidated. Even relatively well-informed, well-meaning people in my life say things like "you're not in burnout! Look at these essays you write!" I can tell myself, and sometimes them too, that both things can be true. I am able to write an essay, but it’ll take me hours upon hours and I’ll probably spend more hours on either end curled in a ball, rocking back and forth, crying. I can speak on a panel, with a huge amount of prep and support and planning and scripting, but I really can't manage any amount of interpersonal ambiguity without fully melting down. I often can't return texts, phone calls are even harder. I work with an occupational therapist to be able to do things like regulate my sleep, check my mail, and file my taxes. I’m still recovering from burnout, or learning to live with an altered capacity—I’m not sure which, yet. And I’m okay with that.

I've saved my life by accepting that my experience and expectations of myself might not match up with someone else’s.

Someone else saying "you can surely handle another big corporate job by now?" doesn't bury me in shame anymore. Instead, I feel compassion for both of us. So while I still feel extremely misunderstood by most, I can provide myself understanding. I’m learning the skills to validate myself, to pep talk myself, and learning how to seek that understanding in therapy and with safe people who are willing to make space for my experience even if it doesn’t fit into their paradigm.

I still feel like a burden, I still wrestle with the difference between what I want to be doing and what I'm capable of doing, I still hate the way bad news can derail my entire day and require what feels like a small forest worth of tissues. But instead of thinking "why am I this way?" or "what's wrong with me?" I can be kind and gentle with myself: "it takes a lot of time and processing to integrate big emotions right now." I can turn to emotion regulation skills that I've learned in DBT, like observing the sensations in my body and mapping those to specific emotions, then working to understand and validate why I might be feeling that emotion.

I've learned that my emotions give me information, and I am working to better interpret these signals in the context of my needs, values, and unique trauma history, without always confusing them for instructions to take immediate action, ruminate, or withdraw.

The burns are healing, but they've left scars. Most days the scar tissue feels tight and uncomfortable. On a rare day, I barely notice it. But I've learned to tend to these places with the same care I'd give any other injury—gently, consistently, with the help of experts who understand how to treat this kind of damage.

Why This Matters: Breaking the Silence

As I wrote in Backpack in the Water,

I stood frozen in my kitchen while my brother in suffering slowly sank to the silty bottom. Had we passed each other walking our dogs or at the grocery store? Would we have ever imagined knowing this shared darkness? Is there a resource or a community that would have made the difference? Would coming out with my story have helped him feel less alone?

We need to normalize talking about suicidal thoughts not because they're pleasant or easy, but because silence kills. When we don't have language for these experiences, when we don't have frameworks for understanding them, when we're too ashamed to reach out—that's when the mathematical equation becomes: subtract me, problem solved.

But the math is wrong. Your death is not worth more than your life.

And if you're reading this while standing at your own water's edge, metaphorical or literal, l need to say this: your pain is real, and so is your capacity to heal. The skills that saved my life can save yours too, but you have to stay alive long enough to learn them. Do you think you can do that?

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Immediate Crisis Support

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org

• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

• Veterans Crisis Line: Call 988 and press 1, or text 838255

• LGBTQI+ National Hotline: 1-888-843-4564

• Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860

Safety Planning Resources

• My3 App: Free safety planning app available in app stores

• Safety Planning Guide: Download free templates at suicidesafetyplan.com

• Grouport Safety Planning Guide

Free DBT Resources

• Rutgers University offers DBT YouTube videos to learn and implement skills

• DBT Self Help includes an overview of the modules and a deep dive into skills

• DBT Tools: Free worksheets and practice sheets

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Free 26-week course or do-at-your-own-pace modules

Professional Support

• Psychology Today: Find therapists trained in DBT and suicide prevention, filter by insurance or sliding scale

• DBT-Linehan Board: Directory of DBT-trained providers

• Therahive offers online DBT skills groups including those for adolescents, parents, as well as a free mini course

• Grouport offers online, affordable DBT-informed skills groups

Autism-Specific Resources

• Self Care for Autistic People by Dr. Megan Anna Neff

• Resources on Autistic Burnout Recovery: Free resources on masking, burnout recovery, and more from Dr. Megan Anna Neff

• The Neurodivergent Woman Podcast: By Dr. Michelle Livock and Monique Mitchelson

• My favorites on Substack: and

• Occupational Therapy Directory for those struggling with functional loss or in need of additional support

  Overturned by Kelly Stonelake is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“You meet the diagnostic criteria for autism,” the psychiatrist said, peering over his glasses like he’d spotted a typo. “But you’re too pretty to be autistic.”

My face flushed maroon. I scanned his expression, waiting for a smirk, a wink, any sign this was a terrible joke. He never explained, and I was too overwhelmed to ask for clarity, so I left his office humiliated and confused.

The laugh came later, when I relayed this story to my Primary Care Provider, a middle-aged woman whose warm face froze before she threw her head back and cackled. This initially felt validating until I realized she was surprised by the suggestion I was autistic, not by the psychiatrist’s misogynistic delivery.

“You’re not autistic,” she said after recovering. “You have ADHD, and it’s not possible to have both.” She wasn’t laughing with me, she was laughing at me. It was 2010 so she was correct, technically. It would be a few more years before the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), would acknowledge that autism and ADHD can coexist. Research reinforces that these two diagnoses in fact often co-occur: in one study, 28% of autistic people also met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD.

The idea of daring to believe there might be an explanation as to why I’d felt like an alien my entire life was so humiliating that I was careful not to identify too closely with the diagnosis. I kept it at, this might be a reason for why my directness was often misperceived.

I scrambled to understand my brain and get to the root of things for another decade, as a growing list of medical providers scratched their heads. I wanted an explanation for why I would lose the ability to speak and would strike my own head repetitively when overwhelmed with emotion I could not make sense of, why I could read chapter books at age 2 but never learned to tie my shoes–or why I experienced crippling social anxiety while appearing confident and extroverted. They wouldn't, or most likely couldn't associate these traits with autism, despite being textbook experiences–especially for women and those assigned female at birth.

I loved to learn but often got in trouble at school – interrupting, asking questions out of turn, making inappropriate jokes, rigidly regulating rules that seemed like life-and-death, while violating other social norms that everyone understood but me. I struggled to turn in assignments, distracted, but tested in the 99th percentile, so my differences year after year were attributed to matters of effort.

My teachers wrote that my “commitment,” “care,” and “dedication” were the root cause, a 6th grade report card saying “there’s really no reason such a bright and talented student should be getting anything other than all A’s…”

This is such a common experience for neurodivergent folks that there’s a term for it: “twice exceptional” or “2e,” describing those who have both exceptional abilities and disabilities. Research shows these children are often either missed entirely or only identified for their strengths or their struggles, but rarely both. We’re the kids being asked to do things we can’t, and we’re often as confused as the adults around us as to why we are the way we are, often resulting in internalizing shame and self hate.

Imagine a child who uses a wheelchair— what if every time they come up to stairs, they’re teased for being stuck, asked what’s wrong with them, while the adults they love and trust urge them to simply try harder to ascend the stairs? The kid needed a ramp.

In the box with my report cards and school records, I also found a depression survey I’d filled out in a sterile medical office the summer before my senior year of High School, indicating that I felt disappointed in myself and had thoughts of ending my life, although I did not believe I’d carry them out.

By then, I’d already been conditioned to question my perception. My feelings were wrong. I was wrong. Instead of experiencing emotions, I learned to intellectualize them and stay moving. If school and side hustles, later remodels and children kept me busy enough, I’d never have to face my grief.

And work? Work was a great place to hide from grief. While I felt like I came without the preinstalled social software everyone else got, I could master business. From my early career in startups through to much of my time at Facebook, I thrived with structure, clear expectations, measurable outcomes, and values on the wall reinforced in board rooms. Clear marching orders toward complex problems. It was the AuDHD dream (AuDHD is a portmanteau of autism and ADHD).

Peer and manager reviews described me as a leader who saw and elevated people, not just projects; someone who brought rigorous clarity, strategic vision, and relentless drive to the work. I treated global CMOs and garage developers with the same level of respect and forthrightness, creating deep trust and long-lasting partnerships. These traits didn’t come in spite of my neurodivergence—they came because of it.

While my manager feedback and ratings were overwhelmingly positive, I did occasionally receive feedback that I could get rigid and intense—jumping in to save projects, over-clarifying, or holding reins too tightly. At the time, I didn’t understand these were expressions of my hyper focus, need for predictability, and hyper vigilance. If I hadn’t been dismissed because of how I looked, I might’ve gained skills to lead with less over-functioning, and I would have been able to better understand and validate those colleagues’ experiences of me.

When workplace expectations were obscured, when goal posts moved, when I witnessed leaders alternate ignoring and justifying an abandonment of values–my neurodivergence magnified the damage; my entire construct of my workplace and the ways I’d contributed to its success broke, taking my sense of self with it.

I began to lose my ability to mask and perform neurotypicality. My gripping white knuckles became more translucent until hands weren’t on the wheel anymore. I was depressed, anxious, and descending into a systemic shutdown that almost cost my life.

Trying to take care of myself, I booked bucket list trips to “recharge,” only to find myself suicidal overseas instead. I had no idea what was wrong or how to make it better, and most of my interactions with health professionals made things more confusing.

Soon, I couldn’t get out of bed. I experienced regression in my cognitive, emotional, and executive functioning capabilities, and found it hard to tolerate an overwhelming feeling that felt like being expected to sprint on a treadmill in a pitch black room while sleep deprived. Like the bottom of bottomless grief.

After a year of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (“DBT”), including the Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD (“DBT-PE”), my PTSD was in remission and yet I still couldn’t manage to complete tasks as simple as checking my mail or paying my bills.

I kept thinking back to my autism diagnosis, and sought out updated literature from diverse authors. I downloaded Devon Price’s “Unmasking Autism” and was shocked by how much my experiences made sense as an autistic person: childhood rejection to my overwhelm-meltdowns, burning out in an environment that punished women for doing their jobs, and even becoming so desperate to die.

Donna Henderson, Sarah Wayland, and Jamell White’s book, Is This Autism? A Guide for Clinicians and Everyone else, which is full of experiences shared directly from autistic people, and Dr. Michelle Livock and Monique Mitchelson’s podcast “The Neurodivergent Woman,” further validated my experiences and helped me accept my altered capacity. Through The Neurodivergent Woman podcast, I discovered Dr. Megan Anna Neff's research on autistic burnout recovery.

I learned that healing comes through embracing autistic identity rather than fighting it, finding spaces where autistic traits are valued rather than pathologized, and developing genuine self-acceptance instead of constantly striving for neurotypical presentation.

I’ve seen the same TikToks as you, shaming people for using neurodivergence as an excuse, and I was convinced many would reject the idea I was autistic. I was terrified of continuing to be a joke, just like I’d been in those doctor’s offices.

I was scared to ask my psychologist for a referral for a neuropsychiatric evaluation; I wanted to confirm my years-ago autism diagnosis and deepen my understanding of what I’d been experiencing. I asked and she didn’t laugh at me; it was everything.

She validated me and sent me to an expert to whom I sent school records, my mom’s memories, medical history, mental health history, photos of different chapters of my life, and a Notion database of experiences or traits I’d been unable to explain. Her testing process was safe and her practice was informed by modern research. She didn’t laugh at me either, except when she told me that without even looking at the database, the fact that I made one was diagnostically relevant; I felt so seen, and we laughed together.

Confirming my diagnosis resolved a long series of open loops and non-computes in my mental hierarchy that had distressed me for decades. Instead of being confused and convinced I was defective, I could start learning to navigate my differences with a sense of agency, a more informed support system, and the skills to feel my feelings. I grieve the life I had to leave behind, and I also get to look forward to finally living.

I found DBT because it was created to help suicidal people, and for me it also offered a framework to navigate my sense of “missing software.” DBT helps me recognize when I am performing emotional wellness for others comfort and to make choices based on what’s best for my needs and values, even if it’s not best for everyone else.

“Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love.”

- Devon Price, Unmasking Autism

Check out Self Care for Autistic People by Dr. Megan Anna Neff and Dr. Neff’s workbooks on masking, burnout recovery, and so much more on her website, Neurodivergent Insights.

Working with my occupational therapist to apply Dr. Neff's frameworks has given me practical tools to navigate life in recovery with more self-compassion and sustainable coping strategies. She emphasizes establishing necessary accommodations rather than pushing for "recovery" to pre-burnout functioning, which is likely neurologically unsustainable if possible at all.

The trend to discredit neurodivergent people and their diagnoses fits with a history that erases neurodivergence to maintain power and control. Why? Systems that value and reward conformity are threatened by divergent thinkers.

Despite greater awareness, several myths about autism persist in the public sphere and media. One is the idea that autism has become a “trendy” diagnosis or is over diagnosed. It’s true that reported autism rates have risen dramatically – but experts attribute the estimated 800% increase in diagnoses not to a sudden epidemic, but to new diagnostic criteria, direct access to accurate information, and reduced stigma leading more people to seek evaluations​. In other words, we are finally counting people who were always there. In fact, many clinicians argue autism is still under diagnosed in certain groups (like females, adults, and ethnic minorities), even as overall numbers climb. The misconception that “everyone has autism these days” or that normal behavior is being pathologized can undermine legitimate diagnoses.

Another pervasive misconception is the gender stereotype that autism is a “male condition” – leading to beliefs that girls “can’t be autistic” or that it’s exceedingly rare. This myth was grounded in a lack of research and has been refuted by current evidence.

Finally, one of the most damaging myths is the false link between vaccines and autism. This idea began with a now-debunked study in the 1990s that was disproven by extensive research by the CDC, WHO, and others who have found no association whatsoever between childhood vaccines and autism.

The history of how society has treated neurodivergence follows a pattern of elimination, suppression, and disinformation:

• First came strategic elimination of neurodivergence in the form of institutionalization, sterilization, and murder. ​In NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, Steve Silberman examines the historical context of eugenics and its impact on autistic individuals. He discusses how eugenicist ideologies, which sought to "improve" the human race by eliminating perceived undesirable traits, led to the forced sterilization and euthanasia of disabled individuals, including autistic people, particularly during the Nazi regime.

• Then came medical suppression, achieved in part through under-educating healthcare professionals, a lack of funding for research, and pathologizing neurological differences as disorders to be corrected rather than variations to be accommodated. Diagnostic criteria were narrowly defined and gate-kept by a flawed, biased medical model.

• Now we're in the era of mockery and disinformation, where diagnoses are dismissed as trends or over diagnoses, and where RFK Jr. reinforces the vaccine myth and proposes sending neurodivergent people to “wellness farms.”

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Neurodivergence isn't new, it's a natural human variation that has existed throughout history. Access to information doesn’t cause diagnoses, in the same way that the sudden spike in incidence of left-handedness wasn’t due to more left-handed people, but reflected their unwillingness to pretend to be right-handed after learning they weren’t actually deviants.

When left-handers began using their left hands, it only threatened the ideologies demonizing them, but recognizing the scale and scope of the neurodivergent experience would require education, healthcare, and employment systems to change.

Erasing and invalidating neurodivergent people and their diagnoses was never about health or truth, it is about preserving the status quo; about keeping power and money where it is.

We’ve always been here, erasure has always been the strategy, and diagnoses aren’t death sentences–they’re footholds.

When we tell people they’re too pretty, too successful, too capable to be neurodivergent, we’re perpetuating institutional gaslighting and harmful stereotypes that deny people access to understanding themselves and receiving the support they need. We are taking beautifully complex, layered, and multifaceted humans and flattening them into two dimensions.

As Dr. Alana McVey and fellow researchers note in Mindshift in Autism: A Call to Professionals in Research, Clinical and Educational Settings (2023): "The way society currently treats autism does not adequately respond to the diversity of autistic people and the plurality of ways in which the experience of being autistic manifests itself in different lives."

Parenting children who feel deeply and think differently without understanding them is catastrophic to families. Advice from most parenting books did not apply to my kids, and I had no other framework aside from my own experience.

With better understanding and resources, I can model and offer them compassion and validation, as well as tools and skills to navigate environments not designed for them. If you’re contemplating whether or not to tell your neurodivergent child about their diagnosis, YES! Emphatically, completely, from the depths of my deeply feeling heart, yes!

Intergenerational healing is the ultimate revenge against a system that tried to convince us we didn't fit.

A couple of weeks ago, while tucking a Minecraft comforter around my kid’s rapidly growing feet, I looked up and asked if they felt different since their diagnosis. “Of course,” they said, sitting up a little, “instead of wondering why I’m such a broken horse all the time, now I know that I’m a perfectly normal zebra.”

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When I found myself crying at work dinners and getting lost in terrifyingly dark thoughts, it wasn’t enough to get help. I raised the white flag only after mentally crafting the entire redemption arc: I’d be the leader who takes a medical leave, turns her frown upside down, and returns with jazz hands to her former kool aid-chugging glory.

I joined Facebook 16 years ago, as a 21 year old hourly-paid employee, and was a director by 30. My performance history includes superlative after superlative after superlative rating, promotions, equity awards. I’d built a rocket ship with what I thought was emotional astuteness (spoiler: intellectualization of emotions) and courage to go against the grain (spoiler: autism). I was successful and successful and successful until I was suicidal.

My suicidal urges could only square with my role as a corporate show pony for resilience if I returned as an example that you, too, could prioritize yourself and recover so that you, too, could return and reprioritize the company.

After a year of medical leave, still in intensive treatment, I was laid off – I wouldn’t return, I’d write no company memo about resilience. A year later, I reach for paper scraps and scribble ideas as they come to me, like, “what if women didn’t need to be resilient to succeed?”

It’s been months of my fingertips grazing the keys, of my pen hovering just above the lined page – I know that I want my experience to help others, but I struggle to wrangle stories that won’t be shoved into a tight, tidy corral.

Watching a corporate show pony prance back to her post fits the narrative; a middle-aged woman who has clearly seen some things, stumbling like Moses coming down from the mount, mumbling in mixed metaphor about mares led to pasture– or glue factories– doesn’t.

Yes, I survived - but it wasn’t neat. The truth, it turns out, doesn’t care.

My survival story expands like an almost-murder-mystery; scraps of paper, photos on a wall, connections marked with string. String labeled with phrases like “the double empathy problem” or “unchecked corporate power,” or “social-emotional learning in schools,” even “the health insurance industry’s stake in the medical gaslighting of women.”

Surviving doesn’t mean I’m back to my former self; surviving means she’s dead. I don’t operate at the capacity I used to, and I probably won’t again. But, surviving means exploring new capacities, it means rebuilding a human (me!) from the ground up, with novel ingredients like self compassion and self acceptance. It means going to occupational therapy at 37 years old to learn how to meet my basic needs, it means another round of trauma treatment, it means saying no to 3 invitations out of 4. Surviving requires me to recognize there’s more to me than what pops into a Zoom room, and it requires being okay with anyone seeing it differently.

The experience of taking part in Facebook’s transformation from a startup in Palo Alto to Meta, the trillion dollar company with 3.5 billion active users was the opportunity of a lifetime. I got to partner with, coach, learn from, know, and be known by some of the most intelligent, impressive, passionate people from around the world. The strongest emotion is gratitude, but it’s not the only one.

Surviving requires confronting the ways I’ve been harmed, and then of course the ways I harmed others with misguided guidance, with a narrative of me doing it all, succeeding wildly, with full faith in company -. I bedazzled blinders before asking what they were obscuring, like the way I braided my own lead, the way I saddled so many people I loved – surviving means seeing it clearly now, surviving means doing what I can to make it right.

Survival meant saying no to a severance agreement that would’ve required self abandonment. Survival is speaking out, especially when my story challenges narratives that uphold systems of power.

That redemption arc promised a clean ending, an answer. Survival offers something better than an answer, survival offers the chance to chase the truth.

Survival is finally, finally existing.

The rescue boats and helicopter searched Puget Sound just a few hundred feet in front of my house.

According to my neighbors on Nextdoor, a young man stood at the water’s edge for a while, contemplating something. They called 911 when he began walking into the water, backpack and shoes still on. By the time rescue teams arrived, there was only the backpack left, floating a couple hundred feet off shore. He’d died by suicide.

Very few people knew at the time that I was on leave from Facebook, where I’d worked for nearly 15 years, because I was struggling with my own intense, daily urges to end my life. I felt a deep sense of grief for the young man with the backpack, along with the eerie recognition that I, too, had stood at that exact beach considering the same action many, many times that year.

We had been traveling the same path, and a matter of momentary impulse had instantly become the difference maker in the rest of our lives and the lives of everyone we love.

I stood frozen in my kitchen while my brother in suffering slowly sunk to the silty bottom. Had we passed each other walking our dogs or at the grocery store? Would we have ever imagined knowing this shared darkness? Is there a resource or a community that would have made the difference?

Would coming out with my story have helped him feel less alone?

For him and every person who has felt hopeless, for the people who love them left confused and helpless. For every parent who wants to raise confident, compassionate children who are protected from their own worst thoughts. I intend to continue learning and sharing the evidence-based therapies, resources, skills, and medicines that have helped me save my life and transformed the way I parent.

I’m sharing my experience and research to find people likewise committed to healing themselves, their families, and their communities — to deepen understanding of trauma, mental health, depression, suicide, healthcare access. This is how we build the capability and confidence to collectively engage.

I hope to challenge the idea of what a suicidal person looks like, thinks, or feels so that we can better support, prevent, and heal our individual and collective trauma.

A year has passed since I began a medical leave of absence from work after the depression and anxiety I’d always kept well managed spun out of control. When the familiar tools and coping strategies weren’t working, my urgent, panicked scramble to get better turned into a powerless slip into an unfamiliar, horrifying darkness. I slipped, and I kept slipping. I slipped until the idea of taking my own life made absolute, perfect sense.

I’d been working at a company I helped to build and thought I’d retire from. I was traveling to bucket list destinations, and I’d just adopted a puppy.

How could I want to die?

Yet there I was — the swelling around my eyes and eyelids from hours of crying, competing with a horde of self inflicted bruises — writhing on the floor of my kitchen with a butcher knife in my hands, disconnected from any reality other than the one where I urgently needed to end my suffering.

These dissociative episodes continued, usually with untethered paranoid delusions, and always with the intense urge to die. I had no idea why they were happening or how to help myself, and everything my providers and I tried seemed to make it worse. The shame and confusion after an episode were unbearable, banking more and more self hate and reinforcing my problematic beliefs.

When not in crisis, I printed out studies about outcomes for children whose parents die by suicide and kept them under my mattress and in my glove box. I pulled them out and read them over and over many times per day until the pages tore.

Dr. Marsha Linehan, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), describes the suicidal experience as being trapped in a burning room, only able to find one door out. I might have thought that opening the door was a weak and selfish act; abandoning your loved ones and leaving them with lifelong grief. Now I know that this isn’t the entire picture. Paradoxically, and tragically, the strongest force driving me toward that door was love. Unable to explain my words or actions was more terrifying than experiencing them in the first place. I didn’t know what was coming next or how I was going to hurt the people I loved, and so I became consumed with the need to protect my partner and children at any cost. While trapped in a burning room, real or figurative, all sense of reason incinerates.

“The suicidal person is like someone trapped in a small room with high walls that are stark white. The room has no lights or windows. The room is hot and humid, and the boiling heat of the floor of hell is excruciatingly painful. The person searches for a door out to a life worth living, but cannot find it. Scratching and clawing on the walls do no good. Screaming and banging bring no help. Falling to the floor and trying to shut down and feel nothing gives no relief… The room is so painful that enduring it for even a moment longer appears impossible; any exit will do. The only door out the individual can find is the door of suicide. The urge to open it is great indeed.”

Dr. Marsha Linehan

It was a series of trauma-informed problematic beliefs that led to my unconscious vow to avoid unpleasant emotions. My drug was achievement - starting my first company as a teen and never stopping. When you’re always 10 steps ahead, you can justify deprioritizing the now. I was completely dependent on the drug, and I pushed the proverbial button harder the more the hurts accumulated. When no amount of button pressing gave the desired effect, I fell apart completely.

While we’ve come a long way in reducing stigma around mental health issues, that is not the same as increasing understanding. When a gregarious public figure dies by suicide, we are in shock. Conceptualizing that someone who had it all turned on themselves so tragically requires facing that money, adoration, success are not protective.

I intend to share more about the evidence-based therapies, resources, skills, and medicines that have helped me save my life. Right now, I’m focused on completing my intensive treatment and on being present and mindful with myself and my family. If you are struggling, tell someone. If you’re too afraid to tell someone, or have no one to tell, call 988. Calling 988 saved my life twice. Both times, licensed therapists helped me tolerate my distress long enough to think clearly. Rutgers University teaches DBT skills on YouTube, which include emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, mindfulness, and distress tolerance - the last set of skills particularly helpful when surviving a crisis.

I also hope to use my experience to contribute to an important conversation about access to healthcare. It took me 5 months of wanting to die before finding the psychologist who accurately assessed my therapeutic needs and knew how to treat me. Considering that I had best in class insurance to support as many consultations as I needed, and disability coverage to supplement my pay while unable to work, this is an inarguable example of privilege and whiteness being critical factors in my survival, and that’s unacceptable. Full stop.

Thank you for taking the time to read and witness my experience. I’m grateful to say, with confidence, that there’s much more to come.