ASDKings.com

Burning out the Autistic Mask I discovered this method at my sales job one day by accident. For years I had masked using the old method of basically having an alt personality for the setting I was in. It was extremely taxing and I burnt out regularly.  But the brain is built for efficiency and survival, and one day my brain was on ‘Critically Low power mode’ after 20 sales calls with NT’s. My mask did not have the fuel to keep going but I kept pushing myself to do my job and what happened was phenomenal.

I’ll never be one of them. I’ll never be normal. I can wear the skin of normal, talk normal, walk normal and even… in short bursts… think normal (I assume) but in my bones I will always be who I am. And when I look towards the people who are what I am, I still don’t get the feeling I’m really allowed to feel like one of them.

This is an excerpt from my ebook. This is not the beginner’s handbook they give you at HR orientation. This is the underground playbook. The one they would never approve for distribution. Because if every autistic person knew how to weaponise their differences instead of being shamed for them, the balance of power would shift overnight.

Gaining Perspective It doesn’t matter if you have no skills, education, or work experience. What matters is that in the pursuit of these things, we follow the correct path by leaning into our neurotype’s natural strengths, optimising for maximum return on investment, fulfilment and happiness. As I learned the hard way, you do not build a career worth a damn by pretending to be someone else and specialising in things you’re not naturally inclined towards.  You build it by knowing exactly what you are good at, owning it without apology, and then finding the spaces where those skills are not just tolerated but in demand. If you are autistic, this is not optional. It is survival. The first step is stripping away all the noise about what you “should” be good at and looking dead in the eye at what you actually excel at. You see the flaws and the fine print, the thing that will blow up in their face, the thing everyone else misses. The 8 Unfair Advantages of Autism In the pursuit of our i...

Do you feel like a resistor in a world full of conductors? It feels like everyone else is plugged in,  tuned in, moving with the current. While you’re burning out,  sparking at both ends, trying not to explode from the sheer voltage of existence.

Right now, there’s a young boy excited for his big first day of school tomorrow. He’s playing Xbox in his pyjamas, laughing, loved, safe. He doesn’t know any different. He doesn’t know he’s living the last truly happy days of his life. Soon, the real world will come for him. It will bulldoze his mind, crush his spirit, and pack him into a neat little neurotypical box: quiet, compliant, acceptable, suffocated.

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...

  This isn’t satire, it’s a survival manual dressed in metaphor. Manipulation isn’t evil by default, but if it’s misunderstood, we are vulnerable to being played. By educating ourselves on these things we can avoid the pain of being blindsided by them. On the spectrum, we pay close attention to people, trying to learn how they work. Sometimes this studying of humans leads us to unpleasant knowledge we didn’t originally set out to find. Today I decided to write about manipulation. This isn’t a guide for wannabe cult leaders. It’s a breakdown of how power works in the real world, stripped of polite lies. Manipulation happens everywhere: in families, friend groups, offices, schools.  Most of us do it without even knowing, or worse, get eaten alive by people who do it better.  This post isn’t glorifying abuse. It’s exposing patterns.  The cat, the pimp, the warlord are metaphors for influence, control, and survival. You can learn from them without becoming the villain. A...