This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a suicide crisis, please call Talk Suicide Canada (1-833-456-4566). There is also the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people across Canada (1-855-242-3310).

NAOMI HAD ALWAYS hated school, so much so that she cried for hours when school breaks ended. She hadn’t always considered herself disabled, though. Sure, she’d felt lucky to have discovered her autism and learning disabilities relatively early—and to have started getting accommodations in junior high— given that most autistic women aren’t diagnosed until adulthood, if at all. But until her second semester of university, Naomi hadn’t realized how much autism impacted her life. Then, just before semester’s end, COVID-19 crashed in.

Before lockdown, Naomi had been planning to skip classes for a couple of weeks because she felt herself hurtling into autistic burnout. The phenomenon looks different to every person affected by it, but for her, it includes stress responses like difficulty maintaining personal hygiene, being almost too exhausted to leave bed, nausea, lack of interest in life, and brain fog.