Three Times the Work

For most of my life, I have had a weird relationship to work production. In many ways, I am able to do three times the work of a normal person in the same amount of time. For much of my early life, I thought this meant I was special and even superior to other people. I hyper focused my way through math classes and reading classes. But there were definitely classes that I couldn’t do the same thing in because the hyper focus didn’t come to fore all the time. If I didn’t love the class, I would tend to be able to do B work by taking a deep breath and getting through the material very sloppily and very quickly, but I couldn’t do it on a daily basis. I had to spread out the nasty work.

And then in my twenties I started to see another pattern that had always been there, lurking unrecognized. I crash. I didn’t call it that at the time. I didn’t really call it anything. I was just becoming aware of the reality that when I pushed myself three times as hard as other people, then I ended up unable to move or get out of bed for days on end. This was, it turns out, not an optimal way to live my life, both because it wasn’t acceptable to drop out of school or work for days on end and because it made me acutely miserable and sometimes suicidal when I was in what I now see as a kind of autistic burnout.

So what I learned to do was to do short bursts. Sound familiar? I would do my work three times as fast as other people and then—take breaks for the rest of the day. Only the problem here became that I had to make very, very sure that other people didn’t realize how fast I could work. Because they would first of all think I was doing it sloppily (which, yes, sometimes I was, but that didn’t mean I could do it less sloppily if I had no hyperfocus) and also because if they realized how quickly I could work, they would pile three times the work on me that they did on other people. And that would be very bad because I would try to do it for a few weeks, then be unable to continue and drop out of class, work, or life entirely.

This is an obvious pattern of autism (neurodivergence in general) and for a while I wondered if everyone was like this. But no, the more I dared to ask around, the more I realized that I was very strange in this way. Most people did not work super intensely for an hour and a half a day and then try to pretend to work the rest of the time. I was lucky that this was enough work to manage college and grad school and most jobs after that. Because capitalism means trying to exploit people’s labor as much as possible and that is not great for autistic people. Capitalism doesn’t care about you burning out. You just get fired. But I needed to keep my jobs and keep my life, so I had to learn to manage my intense periods so that I could eek out daily life.

Now that I know my own patterns and keep track of what state I’m in, I know better what I can do on a given day, and it’s still often more than most people can do. But it’s not three times what they can do, not day after day, week after week, year after year. Most people naturally space their work effort out. I just cannot do that naturally. I have to consciously hold myself back from going whole hog because it isn’t sustainable and it isn’t healthy. It’s annoying to do this, but most of the time, I try to listen to myself. Because I actually do know who I am, and being me is only really terrible when I’m in autistic meltdown mode.