Ghost

Right now, I am a ghost. One that drifts from room to room, half here, half not. The kind that watches life happen from the edges, but does not quite remember how to step back inside of it.

I have been nearing full burnout for a while now. Sitting on the edge of a nervous system collapse, building up for the big crash. I could feel it circling. The warning signs were there. The thinning capacity. The brain fog. The sensory overwhelm. The exhaustion that sleep does not touch. I tried to move carefully around it. I tried to be gentle and pace myself. But I couldn’t outrun it. It finally caught up with me.

Autistic burnout is a nightmare. Especially as a high masking person who usually puts on such an act of competence and normality out in public. But it’s all a lie. I am not the person most think I am, someone who, despite being autistic, has seemingly low support needs. No, that’s all part of the mask that I wear to go unnoticed in a society that really has no patience for people like me.

What I actually am is a highly trained autistic girl who is a master at hiding my needs. But I can’t maintain the illusion indefinitely and many times in my life it has run me down so heavily that it wound me up in the hospital or bedridden for weeks on end.

If you have never lived through something like this, it’s hard to fully convey the misery and complete shutdown that comes with it. My mind is in a daze and I am left in a fog of nothing. Even writing this has taken me days of slow, tedious work to process my thoughts into writing. But I so desperately wanted to write, so I trudged along.

With burnout like this, flare-ups from my other chronic conditions are never far behind. And this time, my immune system, already fragile, finally gave out. I have been home sick with COVID for over a week now, stuck in bed, watching days blur together, unsure when my body will feel even remotely like mine again.

All of this is utterly disabling. This is what life with a dynamic disability is like. Some days, weeks even, life goes on pretty smoothly, almost like I am not a sick person at all. But then, out of left field, it knocks me off my feet again and steals the joy from my life.

My days become monotonous, going through the motions of work and duty inside a deep, cellular tiredness that never quite resolves. I sleep badly. I wake up exhausted and in pain. I drift in and out of shallow rest that doesn’t restore anything.

Nothing sounds good.

Not TV.

Not books.

Not creating.

Not even the small pleasures I usually cling to.

Just nothing.

Grief overshadowing it all.

I am someone who loves life. I love writing. I love cooking and baking. I love being outdoors. I love spending time with my family, watching movies and playing games. I love tending to my garden and hanging with my chickens. I love my community and the people in my life.

But right now, all of that is on pause. And that hurts so damn bad.

My bakery business. My regular writing practice and book project. The momentum I worked so hard to build. Even my usual day to day tasks like taking care of my home and body and going to work feel impossible. I simply do not have the capacity. My nervous system is tapped out and staying alive and vaguely functional is taking everything I have. Thank God for a boss who understands all this and for the vacation time I have available. Or we would be in a much more dire situation.

But there is so much grief here. And this kind of grief is hard to process, like it carries a shame with it that can creep in when your body becomes the limiting factor in your life. A quiet, poisonous voice that says to try harder, that if only you were less broken, if only you managed it better… I am trying not to listen to that voice.

I try to remind myself that being sick and needing rest is not a moral failure. That pausing is not the same as quitting. But surviving a season like this is a lot of work and I am missing out on my actual life in the process. And I hate that so much.

I feel like a ghost haunting the world. I have stepped back from social media and the greater online world almost entirely. It all disgusts and bores me these days and I do not have the energy to be perceived. I do not have the words to explain myself in small, casual ways. Even responding to messages feels like lifting something impossibly heavy.

I have disappeared again. Not because I do not care or because I do not love the people in my life. But because I do not have access to the version of me who knows how to show up right now.

And layered underneath my own ghostly shell are other ghosts that haunt me right back. Many of them come from the death of my dad in December. I knew they would come for me after he passed, but I was so unprepared for how hard it would hit me.

Between the long-time fractures in our relationship and the ugly, drawn out nature of Alzheimer’s, I was feeling settled about his imminent passing and just wanted to see him finally in peace. But it feels so much different than I expected. So much sadder. And I feel like I finally miss him, but have never missed him before. Grief is always unpredictable like this. You really never know how anything in this life will affect you until you go through it.

The ghosts of grief are my constant companions. I am grieving for my dad. I am grieving the version of myself who existed before that loss. I am grieving the healthy body I wish I had and the life I have lost due to chronic illness. I am grieving the life I imagined building at my age, but have never been able to get to. I am grieving all the small futures that feel so out of reach.

When everything stacks like this, it is hard not to feel haunted.

Being a ghost right now does not mean I am completely gone. It just means I am moving slowly through a dark hallway, feeling my way along the walls, doing my best not to disappear entirely.

This version of me still counts. The quiet one. The sick one. The one who is not producing, not performing, not building, but simply surviving. I do not know when I will feel solid again, when my energy will come back, or what shape my life will take when it does. All I know is that I am still here.

For now, I remain a ghost. A ghost on sabbatical from plans and projects for the foreseeable future. Right now, surviving is the only thing I have to offer.