When an autistic adult wants to create but can’t find the words, energy, or starting point, what might be happening beneath the usual label of “creative block”?
Oh gosh, so many things. Sensory overload, decision fatigue, struggles with inertia or task transition. But the thing I find most useful here is to broaden and soften our sense of what it means to be blocked in the first place.
I sometimes like to make the bossy proclamation that “writer’s block” doesn’t exist, which is really my way of challenging the capitalist story that says we must be producing at all times or else our value will temporarily drop. So even when the blocks are real, I think the standard interpretations of them definitely aren’t. And anyway, a robust creative life, especially for an autist, is going to include breaks and rest periods, interruptions, cycles, and rhythms—none of which are “blocks.”
This is why I think it’s vital that we take a holistic view of our creativity, as it’s never just about what we are or are not making. It’s about how we work, how we measure our efforts, and the expectations we have of ourselves. It’s about looking accurately and compassionately at the whole field. Because for autistic creatives in particular, the conditions surrounding creative work can have a profound impact on the accessibility of the work in the first place.
I think there are some really practical things we can do to support ourselves through all this—things like building up a collection of prompts for getting started; preparing our work stations the night before or making choices about what we’ll work on prior to sitting down; and recognizing the role environment and location play in our work sessions. But those strategies will be most impactful on top of a holistic foundation, one that looks at, and cares deeply about, the whole person.
Autistic burnout can involve exhaustion, reduced capacity, and loss of skills. How can that affect a person’s relationship with writing or other creative work?
Well, it can make the whole thing feel impossible, period. And it can also steer people away from their creativity altogether, sometimes for years. I see this sometimes in my 1:1 work—an amazing, skilled writer and creative will come to me because they haven’t made anything in years and aren’t sure how to find their way back to the page after burnout.
One of the most common places I see people get stuck is when they’re measuring their present, post-burnout capacity according to a pre-burnout iteration of themselves. And look, I don’t want to pretend there isn’t immense grief here: to find ourselves in a phase of life where we just don’t have the same amount of time or energy that we once had. That can be a really sad and frustrating thing to confront. But I want to suggest that it’s sad and frustrating and natural—not the burnout itself, but the impact burnout has on us. Which means we don’t need to second-arrow ourselves about it! Too often, I meet writers for whom a loss of skills or reduced capacity is formalized into: “I can no longer write, period.”
Yet I think there’s a more useful—and gentle—doorway here: okay, your capacity has changed, maybe a lot. What version of creative work does your present life hold? I’ve seen so many different kinds of good answers here: tiny ones, playful ones, mundane ones. People easing themselves back into their creative waters through the smallest, most pointless activities. We have to practice remembering that all of it counts, even the stuff nobody sees. Even the iterations that don’t “pan out.”
I feel very antagonistic to the language of “doing our best,” because I think “best” is a living, dynamic thing that changes over time—changes daily, if I'm being honest—and that the way that word typically gets used is in reference to something static and perfectionist, a version of “best” that secretly reproduces a strict logic of productivity.
But I don’t want to put different iterations of myself in competition with each other! And I don’t want that for you, either. I want us all instead to ask ourselves, “In this season of my life, at this moment, what’s possible?” To let “best” be a fluid, contextual thing we get to redefine as often as needed.
You’ve described creativity as an ecosystem. What does that mean, and what parts of that ecosystem tend to need care when an autistic person is depleted?
It means that a creative practice is made up of so much more than the distinct moments of visible production.
For me, this ties back with what I’ll call the myth of discipline. There’s this pervasive tendency to valorize discipline at all costs—a disciplined writer, for example, writes every day, no matter what. I don’t meet a lot of fellow autists for whom “no matter what” is feasible! Yes, we like our routines, but we also work in fits and bursts, and we have meltdowns and shutdowns that require periods of recovery. “No matter what” lacks too much context to be true or helpful.
Instead, we benefit from variation and diversity: options, strategies; different methods and mediums in which to give our creativity an outlet, so that the whole ecosystem won’t collapse when one or two outlets become temporarily inaccessible.
I also think the movements of the natural world are embedded in our ways of working: tides, the ebbing and flowing of our energy; periods in which we must hibernate, when things need a chance to overwinter underground, followed by bursts of blooming. What humans call restriction, nature calls rhythm.
How we tend to this ecosystem depends on the source of our depletion, but I think the answer needs to be contextual enough to account for rest and our special interests, which we know can be regulating and calming in their own right. So turning away from creative work entirely, especially if the making intersects with special interest terrain, may not be the right move for a depleted autistic nervous system.
Sometimes we think we need to feel better in order to resume making, but just as often, the making is what contributes to feeling better. These are the times when I think having some really silly, low-stakes creative outlets can be life-saving. If I’m recovering from a meltdown, maybe I’m not going to sit down and work on my book manuscript. But maybe I can journal, or collage, or write something stream-of-conscious or bizarre, or grab a piece of junk mail and a Sharpie and make a blackout poem—something, anything, to let my mind move the way it loves to. Teeny tiny creative gestures, even pointless ones, maybe especially pointless ones, can be powerful resets.
In Sarah's words
“What humans call restriction, nature calls rhythm.”
Why can productivity pressure, deadlines, or external validation make it harder to create, even when the work matters deeply to someone?
Well, there’s PDA for one thing, lol. I’m working on a book right now, a book I was already working on before its proposal was accepted for publication, and which I’d be working on regardless, and it’s been hilarious and strange and illuminating to watch myself react to suddenly having external deadlines to negotiate—that creeping sensation that someone else now has a claim on my time [insert melting emoji face here].
But let’s go a further layer down: I think a lot of us autistic folks (& ADHDers, too), particularly those of us diagnosed late in life, tend to struggle with self-worth. We just spent so many years not understanding how our brains work, which led to intense masking and camouflaging and long stretches of time in which our needs went unmet, and we often internalized a ton of shame and ableism along the way. Productivity Culture is an absolute nightmare on an already limited sense of self-worth, because it teaches us to define that worth through strictly external measures.
Maybe what I’m trying to say is: I think the cult of productivity is unhealthy for all of us, and that the toxic effects are amplified for ND folks, who are often carrying the effects of trauma, too.
When we get beneath all this stuff, we make space for our deepest reasons for creating, which tend to have private, internal roots—and here I’m thinking of Brenda Ueland’s notion of the “intrinsic reward,” that primal reason we make: because it keeps our souls big. It makes life feel expansive and worthwhile and keeps creativity and self-expression at the center of it. I’m of the belief that the external benchmarks will always be at odds with the internal stuff, at least a little bit, and that rather than trying to resolve that tension fully, it’s a tension we must get good at holding. I’m not going to pretend I don’t care at all about metrics—of course I do. But I’m also not going to allow them full ownership of my oldest and truest creative purpose.
How can someone honor limited or fluctuating capacity without deciding that their creative life is over?
I think it goes back to the need to examine what our “best” looks like—which really means: what do we expect of ourselves? How do we regard ourselves? When I’m in a 1:1 container with a client, there’s all the practical stuff we’re working on—time management, honing in on craft, stretching and building our creative muscles. But a lot of this work is emotional, too—and a lot of it comes back to self-regard and self-compassion.
I know self-compassion can feel really aspirational, but I also think there’s something accurate about it. To assess our creative efforts and capacities not by some arbitrary neurotypical standard, but in the context of our real life: that’s accurate. It’s compassionate to let ourselves see ourselves truthfully, to make decisions with our full context in mind.
There’s a neutrality to all this that I think can soften things. Maybe loving myself unconditionally feels like something I’m still working up to. Okay, but can I approach myself neutrally? That feels like a more feasible starting point. And from there, I think neutrality walks us toward accuracy, which creates the conditions where self-compassion becomes possible, because it means we stop judging ourselves and begin observing ourselves instead. Observation will always give us better information than judgment.
For someone returning to creativity after burnout, what’s a gentler way to begin than setting a big goal or daily streak?
Oh gawd, streaks! I hate them. I downloaded an app recently to help me with daily stretching, and I knew the minute my initial streak broke, I’d find myself turning away from the app and stretching altogether, which I absolutely did.
Rather than talking about gentler ways in, I want to talk about gentler structures. Because I think what’s often most meaningful about setting goals aren’t the goals themselves, but the marking of our attempts and our progress. I struggle to track both—to make my efforts feel real and not just some abstraction. I’m someone who needs a lot of lists, charts, talismans, tangible ways to go, yes, I did that thing, it happened. I suspect that’s partly why some of us are drawn to setting big goals and maintaining streaks, not because we’re obsessed with measuring ourselves but because the marking, the commemorating, lets us register our effort before it dissipates.
For me, this all relates to something I think about a lot as an autistic person: the porousness of self, how it feels hard to pin myself down sometimes, which means I’m often craving things that give me edges. Practically, I could chalk this up to embodiment struggles, or inconsistent interoception, or my sensitivity to input. But it feels a little stranger than that, too—self as thing that’s always sort of floating above me, a balloon on a string. (Which is probably why I love trapping myself beneath a weighted blanket, or the physical input of getting tattooed.) For me, that sense of “Here I am. My efforts are accumulating” isn’t automatic or stable, and I need external markers to help create that sense of continuity.
I actually think community can be a great resource here—having, for example, a really low-stakes creative group you meet with infrequently, a place where you can be witnessed; a place where you can break your streak and show up anyway. It’s not just about accountability—though that’s really helpful, too—but about having a container. The right kind of community can be an incredibly nourishing and gentle structure.
Writing can help people understand what’s happening inside them, but sometimes language itself becomes hard to access. What other ways can someone stay connected to creativity when words won’t come?
Well, there are the obvious things: collage, coloring, doodling. Lynda Barry encourages her students to draw spirals over and over again on the page to warm up the mind/hand. Or there’s the craftier things—knitting, paper quilling, the tactile stuff.
But let’s go one step deeper: I think creativity lives in the quality of one’s attention, that it's a generative mix of curiosity, interest, and something like enthusiasm. It’s what we make, yes, but it can also be how we approach the world. Which is why I feel confident saying that when I’m on a hike and catch myself looking closely at the weeds and bugs, I’m being creative. Or when I’m indoor bouldering, staring at the wall and trying to make sense of the pattern of handholds and footholds through the movement of my arms and legs, I’m being creative. Or when I’m walking to the coffee shop and listening to music, and I’m really there, you know—with the music, with the neighborhood, with the weather—I’m being creative.
It’s an attentional thing. Which means when language disappears, creativity isn’t something that automatically goes with it.
Can you walk us through a low-pressure practice for reconnecting with a creative project that has gone quiet?
First of all, I think we sometimes assume we can only re-approach a project by going back to its previous iteration, the same door we went through the first time around. There can be this contractual, nearly coercive feeling.
Yet that approach doesn’t account for all the context that has undoubtedly changed over time: you've accumulated skills, your perspective has grown; maybe you’ve moved, changed jobs, even changed relationships. The context is different now. Which makes it meaningful to find a way to encounter the project anew, to look for its current pulse rather than the previously catalogued one, and to release that automatic sense of obligation to the earlier stuff.
How do we do that? I think it’s a little bit about mindset, a little bit about choice, and mostly about redefining your relationship to the project. It’s pulling up the old work and looking at it not as a set of instructions or obligations, but as fascinating archaeological material. It’s giving yourself permission to, Marie Kondo-style, honor and let go of the parts that no longer resonate. It's giving yourself permission to return to the content but update the form. If a new client came to me today with an old manuscript they’re stoked to return to, before we even look at it, I’d ask them to talk to me, for 10 or 15 minutes, about what they’re most excited about, and we’d use that to guide us in our re-entry. Maybe I’d have them print it out, sit down with some colorful highlighters, and mark the phrases, lines, and themes that jump out at them. Maybe I’d have them write a short summary paragraph of each section from memory, and we’d let the discrepancies point us in the direction of the current pulse. It’s about treating our earlier work as beautiful source material without feeling wedded to every single part of it. It’s not about betraying the work you’ve previously done, but honoring your current reality.
