Autistic burnout is not a personal failing.

The week I went into burnout, I cancelled three meetings I had been looking forward to and then sat on the floor for an hour because I could not work out what to eat. I had been managing fine the week before. Or I thought I had. The collapse, when it came, was not a feeling. It was a system going dark.

What we call Autistic burnout is what happens when you have spent years masking in unaccommodated environments and your nervous system runs out of money to spend. The body has been doing the work of translation every waking hour, without being paid for it, and without being told what it was paying for. At some point the bill comes due. For most of us it comes due more than once.