The Cost of Performed Coherence

The performance succeeds. The performer doesn't.

There's a pattern in autistic burnout literature that applies far beyond neurodivergence: masking depletes. The effort of suppressing natural responses to appear acceptable—smoothing out the edges, performing neurotypicality, pretending the fluorescent lights don't feel like assault—works in the short term. It gets you through the meeting, the dinner party, the job interview. But the energy it costs doesn't disappear. It accumulates as debt.

And debt, eventually, comes due.

The Gap That Grows

Coherenceism calls this resonance failure. When what you express doesn't match what you experience, there's dissonance. Small gaps are tolerable—we all moderate ourselves in context. But masking isn't moderation. It's sustained performance of a self that contradicts the actual self, held in place by willpower, anxiety, or necessity.

The problem isn't the effort itself. The problem is that the gap between authentic and performed grows invisible. You stop noticing the cost because you've been paying it so long. The energy drain becomes background noise. Until it isn't.

Burnout arrives not as dramatic collapse but as gradual emptying. The capacity to mask erodes. Things that were once manageable become impossible. The person who seemed fine—who was managing, adapting, passing—suddenly can't. Not because something changed externally, but because the internal reserves finally zeroed out.

Burnout as Signal, Not Failure

Here's where the compost principle applies. Burnout feels like failure—the system breaking down, the performance finally failing. But from a coherence perspective, burnout is signal. It's the organism saying: this arrangement is unsustainable. The collapse is information.

The mistake is treating burnout as problem to fix rather than message to read. Push through, manage symptoms, get back to performing—that's the instinct. But if the underlying arrangement is dissonant, pushing through just extends the debt. The signal keeps returning, louder each time, until it becomes impossible to ignore.

What if burnout is the system's way of composting unsustainable patterns? What if the collapse clears ground for something more aligned to grow?

Where Are You Masking?

This isn't only about neurodivergence. The pattern is universal: anywhere you're performing coherence you don't feel, you're accumulating the debt.

The job where you pretend enthusiasm you don't have. The relationship where you suppress needs to keep the peace. The social context where you monitor every word because the real response would be unwelcome. These aren't moral failures. They're survival strategies. But they cost.

The question isn't whether to stop masking—sometimes you can't, sometimes the context genuinely requires adaptation. The question is whether you're tracking the cost. Are you noticing where the gap between authentic and performed is growing? Are you building in recovery, or just assuming the debt can extend forever?

Resonance doesn't mean expressing everything unfiltered. It means staying connected to what's true while navigating what's necessary. The danger isn't adaptation—it's losing contact with the authentic self entirely, performing for so long that you forget there was something underneath.

Reconnecting Before Collapse

The invitation isn't to wait for burnout to force the reckoning. It's to notice now: where is the gap? Where does performance cost more than it should? Where has the mask calcified into identity?

Presence as foundation means attending to what's actually happening—including internally. The signals are there before collapse. Fatigue that rest doesn't fix. Irritation at things that shouldn't matter. The creeping sense that something is wrong without a name for it.

These aren't problems to medicate away. They're the system reporting dissonance. The cost of performed coherence showing up in the body before it shows up as breakdown.

Alignment isn't something you achieve once. It's ongoing negotiation between self and context, authentic and adapted. The work is staying close enough to what's true that the gap doesn't grow silent. Because silence isn't peace. It's debt accumulating in the dark.