Restorative Power in the Stillness

Shutdowns, disappearances, and the shape of autistic recovery

Burnout doesn’t always come with warning signs.

Sometimes it sneaks in, under the skin—creeping, cumulative, impossible to name until the damage is already done—until everything is already unraveling.

It’s not about effort. It’s about structural misalignment. Hours, weeks, years spent bracing against the world without ever admitting—to them or yourself—that you’re struggling. It’s about having to translate your own regulation into something recognizable, so people don’t mistake your silence for withdrawal, or your pacing for distress.

You spend enough time in that space and even your rest stops working. You lie down, but your body’s still running diagnostics. You close your eyes, but the world keeps echoing, pulsating, droning, tearing, crushing…

And what they see—yeah, they call that burnout too. But what they mean is: you seem off.

What I mean is: my system is no longer inhabitable.

For me, real rest doesn’t come from stepping away. It comes from falling in. Into stillness. Into alignment. Not just the quiet routine of meditation or breathwork, but a full-bodied, fully existential refusal of the world’s demands. No movement. No cues. No effort to prove I’m okay.

Sometimes it’s a dark room.
Sometimes it’s underwater.

Sometimes it’s just me, curled up on the floor, unable to speak in a way that would satisfy their concerns.

And it looks like I’m gone. But that’s just it. Ironically, I’m not disappearing. I’m reappearing—in the only space left where I can still recognize myself.

That kind of rest doesn’t show up clean. It doesn’t end with peace or epiphany or revelation. It ends when my senses soften. When language starts to feel less like an obstacle. When I realize I’m no longer gasping for a breath that actually satiates.

I wish I could explain this to people without having to justify it. Without having to translate a hierarchy of needs they’ve never felt in their own skin.

I’m trying now, because right now, I can.

But most of the time, I can’t.
So instead, I disappear.

And if I’m lucky, when I come back—I come back whole.

Not because someone felt obligated to reach in and pull me out.
But because no one tried to pull me out too soon.

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Amphibious

I'll tell anyone 
I prefer being underwater.

I appreciate the reality 
of an environment
where time is centripetal, 
gravity is cheap,
and thoughts are free 
and clear.

See, I was the kid always winning 
the underwater breath-holding competitions
(back in a time when that was a thing).

I was good at it.

But the adults—
they’d insist I move
an arm or a leg,
more for their sake than mine,
refusing to care that playing dead
was my key to success.

There's restorative power in the stillness.

But they wanted no part of this.
To them it was akin to death.
Death meant trouble.

So, I'd appease their silly fears,
twitch an arm or leg,
just so,

but all the while, 
remain in the zone,
so focused on not requiring oxygen
from the air that I'd fail to hear them
calling my name, growing concerned,
so much louder and angry—oh.

That’s what that was.

And so it was,
back to the surface,
the judging faces
invalidating a win earned
fair and square;

back to pretending
to the living. ∞

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