Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

(A Heroin(e)’s Journey in a Neurodivergent Body)

Burnout did not ask for permission. It arrived like a storm that had been forecasting itself.
Through years of quiet weather reports, the world refused to read.

It was not a noble quest, or a choice or a calling I accepted with grace. It was my body saying: No more, to the masks, to the performance, to the demands that scraped the soul thin.

And so, I fell.

Into exhaustion that erased language. Into darkness where even memory dissolved. Into rooms where light hurt, and noise burned, and the simplest task became a monster too strong to fight.

Skills slipped through my hands like sand. Abilities that once defined me disappeared without farewell. People called it regression. They mistook survival for failure.

But in the underworld, Something ancient waits.

When the mind is quieted by collapse, the truth grows in its flame. Structures that never fit crumble.
The false self, dies first. There, stripped of what I was taught to be, I meet the one I always was.

Autonomy rises like a fierce animal. Special interests glow like stars in a moonless sky.
My moral compass stops spinning; it points home.

This is not recovery.
This is rebirth.

A clearing, where new intelligence germinates, like green shoots breaking through ruin. Burnout is the body’s rebellion against a life lived away from the self. I return from the descent, with fewer skills than they once praised, and more truth than they know how to hold.

I return
not the same
not restored
But re-aligned.

A life grows here that honours what the storm protected.

© Elke T.B. Stevens 28/10/2025

Autistic burnout isn’t pretty. It’s painful, and for some, recovery takes years, if it comes at all. I’m not romanticising it; that would be unfair to those still fighting to feel their soul. But for the lucky ones, there is a kind of return, altered, pared back, yet somehow truer, even with the loss of skills and fragments of who they once were.