When People Find Me Exhausting: A Compliment to My Unmasking Journey

Earlier this year, a stranger on TikTok let me know that I was “exhausting.”

I’d posted a video recounting a moment from my time during agency life when a supervisor complimented my weight loss after my dad died. My response? “Thanks - body by grief.” My supervisor’s face froze. My supervisee, watching, stifled a laugh.

Reader, I cackled at the stranger’s comment, and then began thinking about the relentless calculus of surviving being exhausting to others.

For decades, I trained myself to be digestible. Autistic “too muchness” isn’t just a personality quirk - it’s a moral failing under neuronormativity. So I folded myself into pocket-sized origami swans: intricate, silent, and disposable.

It didn’t work.

People still found me too intense, too honest, too something difficult for them to define (too autistic). Masking didn’t make me palatable - it just made me a different flavor of wrong. Meanwhile, the invisible tax of performing “less exhausting” nearly killed me.

The stranger’s comment wasn’t an insult - it was a receipt. Proof that after years of trauma recovery, I’d finally become “annoying” again. “Annoying” like a truth no one wants to hear.

When I said “body by grief,” I wasn’t being “difficult” to my boss. I was refusing to let her coat her body commentary in kindness. Unsolicited compliments about bodies aren’t kindness - they’re violence with a smile, the kind of violence that harms marginalized people. My supervisee needed to see that. I needed to say it. Modeling accountability was my loophole carved from my credentials and white femininity - tools that others often aren’t handed. It was a way to dismantle my supervisor’s script and call attention to the harm while being playful/disarming/vulnerable enough to disrupt without being punished any more than I already had (it had been enough). My ability to ‘disarm’ her script without punishment wasn’t just wit - it was the armor of whiteness and professional status.

That stranger had no idea what it cost me to become someone they could be annoyed by so easily - how could they know the labor of learning to mask and unmask?

Not all autistics are able to mask, and not all autistics are able to safely unmask. My whiteness, education, and complicity in the mental healthcare system provide a great deal of systemic cover that many autistics don’t experience, and for countless BIPOC autistics, unmasking and being “exhausting” can be a death sentence - many folks are not allowed to be “too much” and survive. When you’re autistic in a world that often pathologizes your existence, “exhausting” is code for uncontainable, and that is incredibly dangerous when you are living in a society that wants to control you.

Here’s to the glorious menace of being “too much” again. To reclaiming the exhaustion that was always mine to wield. I will continue to fight for a world where no one’s “too muchness” is met with contempt instead of acceptance - it is a debt owed that I am both honored and obligated to repay.