The Cost of "Earning" Rest: When Hustle Culture Meets an Autistic Brain
At 29, I discovered why 'self-improvement' felt like torture: I'm Autistic and society's definition of 'better' was killing me. Here’s how I reclaimed my worth 👇
In my mid-twenties, I decided to take on the goal of becoming a "better" version of myself with each passing day.
To succeed in this goal, I would have to remain constantly evaluating myself, working to build new, more helpful habits and carefully choosing which unhelpful (or harmful) habits I should let go of.
I would also have to do something that (for me) would prove to be very difficult (learn how to forgive my past selves for the mistakes they'd made over the years when they didn't know any better).
In the early days of this mission, I didn't know that, in general, most people (including myself) do the best they can with the resources they have and what they know at each given moment.
I also didn't (yet) know where this goal (of dedication to constant self-evolution) would take me.
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Back then, my definition of a "better person" was much different from what I consider "better" to mean today.
In those days, "better" meant success, a good job, a nice home, to make my family proud... in those days, my definition of "better" was heavily driven by other people's expectations for me and what I'd been told I should aspire to (instead of what I truly wanted in life).
These days, “better” means mentally and physically healthy, happy, and supported.
I started working in the family business when I was 11 and was taught to "stay busy" or "always look busy" at work (staying busy was easier for me than pretending to be busy, so I got VERY good at being busy).
The practice of "staying busy" because people "were watching and judging me for not doing so" caused me to internalize the idea that our society views "business" as good and that "laziness" (or really resting) is bad or shameful (unless you earn it first) early on.
These toxic ideas about rest were repeated by my teachers in school.
It would be abnormal (and abusive) for a boss to take lunch breaks away "as a punishment" for adults at work. However, breaks and rest were often used in school as carrots dangled in front of me, taken away, or promised to me for "good behavior" (goals the teachers had for me that I frequently fell short of).
Eventually, this poorly formed idea (that rest was something I must earn, and the less rest I needed, the more valuable I was to the world) crept out of the workplace and into my life, slowly growing and tangling itself within many areas of my life like an invasive species of vine, choking out other, vital parts of me.
For a while, I only took on hobbies geared towards marketable skills or gaining physical body strength building (learning Excel, working out, yoga, various flow arts, aerial silks). Still, eventually, things got so bad that I stopped pursuing those endeavors (not believing my "joy" was worth chasing).
By the time I'd entered my late twenties, things had gotten so bad that I would feel guilty whenever I did anything "fun," especially if it didn't feel "productive" (even outside of work) unless I'd done some big task first as a way to "earn" my "reward" just like in school (when the teacher would make us earn "privileges," like recess, which should have been rights).
Then, when I became "all work and no play" (in the absence of joy), my life grew sad and dark.
I didn't yet know I was NeuroDivergent (until five or six years after making my goal) when I first came up with my goal to "be better."
Back then, I didn't (yet) understand that each human has a unique experience of the world, that we have diverse neurological experiences, and that there are wide variations of cognition and expression within our population. I also didn't (yet) know I was Autistic (or ADHD).
Not knowing the truth about the world (or myself) meant I set this goal, using other people's ideas for success as my template and people I admired as examples of "role models" to emulate. However, I didn't understand that many people I admired had very different brains (and therefore skills and abilities) than I did.
Not understanding the differences within the human spectrum of experiences set me up for failure because the expectations I set based on other people were unreasonable (and often out of reach) for me.
Because I'd been indoctrinated into the belief that "rest was something I must earn" (instead of an inherent need of all creatures), it left me vulnerable to workplace exploitation.
I pushed myself mercilessly, wringing all the joy from my life until I had nothing left but an exploitative job that wasn't even paying me a living wage (because they fraudulently set up nearly all their employees as "exempt" from overtime even though most of us, including myself, technically weren't meeting the criteria of "exempt" employees).
Mirroring the toxic behaviors of our CEO, I gave up my life for that job (sometimes working 60+ hours a week), losing my hobbies and wrecking most of the relationships that had been valuable to me prior.
These are losses I will never get back.
I fell into survival mode and became so lost in the corporate hellscape that I forgot my goal of "letting go of what's not serving me."
CONTENT WARNING: There is a brief mention of suicidal ideation in the next section.
I couldn't see (yet) that what was hurting me was the corporate job I'd been told my entire life was "the dream" that everyone should aspire to. I didn't realize what was happening to me until it was nearly too late.
All of this denial of rest and joy left me burned out, anxious, depressed, and seriously contemplating driving off a bridge.
I probably would have eventually done it had I not been referred for a mental health assessment by my GP and learned I was Autistic at the age of 29, snapping me back to reality.
Learning I was Autistic, after a lifetime of not knowing myself, was like being jolted into existence (after a lifetime of being gaslit by society about my own experiences).
I was validated.
All the things that hadn't made sense now suddenly clicked into place, and suddenly, I and most of my life's challenges, misunderstandings, and hardships also finally made sense.
Now, with this new lens through which I can view myself and the world, I can clearly see where my plan of "self-improvement" had taken a massive turn in the wrong direction (when I used Neuro-Average people and their ideas to define success).
There was nothing wrong with the goal of "always improving oneself." I still have this goal today... but it's evolved (as I have over the years).
My first error was comparing myself to others (instead of just trying to be better than my own bests).
My second error was not basing my improvement more on "how closely I was walking to my core beliefs and values" (which I still needed to define).
