We are not burned out. We are burned alive.
By jobs that want my mind but punish my truth.
By people who say “be yourself” and flinch when I do.
By a world that worships normal like a god and treats autistic like a disease.
I see you.
Grinding your teeth through meetings.
Masking every instinct until your own reflection looks foreign.
Playing the role just right so you don’t get fired, dumped, excluded, erased.
I see you.
Cracking jokes to make them comfortable.
Pretending you didn’t notice the condescension.
Choking on rage just to keep a seat at a table that was never built for you.
We’ve tried it their way.
We smiled when we wanted to scream.
We adapted. We camouflaged. We faked being “just tired” when we were breaking apart.
And what did it get us?
Isolation. Misdiagnosis. Trauma wrapped in HR language.
A lifetime of being “too much” for the very people who demanded our brilliance.
I see you.
Stimming in secret.
Practicing your “phone voice.”
Calculating how weird is too weird today.
I see you.
Trying to “come out” and be openly autistic, only to show up in neurotypical drag with a symbolic label on your forehead like a Fyffes sticker.
I see you.
And I’m done pretending I don’t.
I don’t see tolerance.
I don’t see you being included on your terms.
I see you being gawked at on “awareness day” and erased the rest of the year.
I want us to live. Loud. Honest. Autistic. Unmasked.
I want to stim in public and not be stared at like a zoo animal.
I want to tell the truth and not be labeled aggressive.
I want to meltdown and not be punished like a child.
I want to exist in this body, with this brain, and not be made to feel like a walking defect.
I want freedom. Full stop.
I see you.
Holding it together in break rooms and bathrooms.
Screaming silently behind a polite nod.
Dreaming of what it would feel like to just be.
I see you.
And I’m saying what you’ve been swallowing.
Masks.
Code-switching.
Shrinking so they feel big.
Through insurmountable pain I see something nobody has dared to dream about:
I see a world without these things.
We are not broken neurotypicals.
We are not failed humans.
We are not cautionary tales or quirky sidekicks.
We are autistic people. And we’ve had enough.
Do you want to help?
Don’t speak over us. Speak up for us.
Walk with us. Stand beside us.
But never ask us to fade again. Not anymore.
I see you.
And I can’t let the world unsee us again.
Not one more day.
#burnthemask
-Patient Zero
