#also please i am exhausted if you have a smart comment about the battery bunny wars please just keep it to yourself

[myautisticpov]

Okay, I think it's time I talked about my Duracell Bunny/Sleepy Time scale for autistic people/people with ADHD...

So, what's the scale:

If you have autism and/or ADHD, every activity exists on a scale from Duracell Bunny to Sleepy Time (with Normal in the middle).

A Duracell Bunny activity is something that you do to an extent that most neurotypical people are exhausted just thinking about. For example, before the joints in my hands got all fucked up, I could consistently write a really high word count per day, and I would regularly see people call it impossible. And as the years have gone on, most of the people I know of who hit similar word counts have all been diagnosed as autistic and/or ADHD.

A Sleepy Time activity is one where just looking a neurotypical doing it a regular amount makes you exhausted. Where the amount of energy required to do the thing wipes you out for the rest of the day.

Different people have different Duracell Bunny and Sleepy Time activities and one thing that I've noticed a lot of autistic and ADHD people do about their Duracell Bunny activities is look at autistic/ADHD people for whom it is a Sleepy Time activity and say "well, I'm autistic/ADHD and I don't have any trouble with it, so clearly you're just making an excuse."

And this is extra annoying because ADHD/autistic Duracell Bunnies have more energy for the thing than neurotypicals, so they can end up in leadership positions and entrenching a really unhealthy environment for everyone. Including themselves - Duracell Bunnies are not always immune to burnout, so you can get a Duracell Bunny who is obviously engaging in dangerous and/or unhealthy coping mechanisms yelling at Sleepy Times who aren't because the Sleepy Times have had to firm about their boundaries from the beginning.

(In fact, sometimes people can end up in crisis because of burnout, and instead of learning anything, go right back to the level of effort that caused burnout and use their crisis as proof that they are actually worse off than the people who set boundaries and didn't end up in crisis, and that those people, therefore, just don't care enough...)

But yeah, TL;DR: Sometimes autistic/adhd people have more energy for certain activities than even neurotypicals, and these people can have a bad habit of pointing at autistic/adhd people with less energy for the activity and saying "well, if I can do it, that must mean every adhd/autistic person can" which leads to people refusing to provide accommodations, or shaming people who cannot show up in the same ways