Oh my. Yes. It would explain A LOT. I feel like I’ve been exhausted almost all of my adult life - that I’ve never known that sense of peace or excess energy that people so often seem to have to fill their weekends and evenings with fun, productive things to do.
Well, aside from when I was out of work due to the pandemic - but that kind of led to a touch of depression in the end, so it didn’t really feel that restful.
I’ve genuinely had thoughts of ‘what’s the point?’ recently. Like, what’s the point in living like this? I don’t mean this in a depressing sense - just a practical one. I’m getting nothing out of it except somehow simply existing.
How did you get out of burnout? What did you have to do? What did it take?
I’ve honestly never met anyone else who has related to this sense of exhaustion. I miss the old me. If I weren’t so unable to think or do anything, I’d think my life is... miserable, right now. I used to write, to play music, to go for long walks in nature, to draw, to enjoy spending hours getting ready to go out (I love clothes). Now I just exist. I wear whatever is most comfortable. I can barely even face doing my washing, never mind doing fun projects. My creativity has just gone.
I've recently started wondering about how much fatigue has played a role in my life and functional abilities and... well, such. (maybe I'll post those thoughts later). Stress and fatigue. And how much energy depression takes, and... so many things. I've experienced many many years of crap, and a handful of years where things were really good, and calm and quiet, and now I'm in this in-between state, and have been for a couple years. I'm still trying to figure out what to expect of myself, and where I should expect my autism issues to be (or not be) etc. It's all pretty weird,=.
... Anyways, to answer your question about how I got out of it, I think I'd have to say it was a combination of graduating university, and therefore not having that stress, antidepressant medication, and several years 'off', where I didn't/don't have the stress of having to participate in the world unless I want to. At first I really, really, needed some time to myself (more than the few months of 'medical leave' or whatever between school years, or even the year or year and a half between degrees), and that took 2-3 years. I did do some volunteer research work for a bit, from home, but then gave that up. And then, I started trying to mentally sort out some of the traumatic experiences I'd had near the end (oh, and I supposed there was also delayed grief from a death in the family), but ran into difficulty, as I didn't have the energy to do it all myself, though I'm typically pretty good at such, so I started searching out a therapist who had experience with both autism and trauma (both very important, as just anyone isn't going to have a clue, and probably just make things worse!). While I was waiting for that to work out, I started writing an autobiography, so I'd know what I wanted to tell them, when I found somebody. That helped. As did discussing it with my current autism specialist (and psychologist) after she volunteered to help. And as the writing progressed. (I did it off and on, as the mood struck.)
Somewhere along the way, I was able to learn how to regain various skills and abilities I'd lost along the way, when I was so knee deep in University, and fighting with 'the system', etc. (and working on the whole identity formation/adulthood thing, which I'm beginning to think, more and more may have had as much to do with everything, as anything else. It took up a lot of energy!)
I had over an hours worth of performance testing with two other staff, meanwhile, my wife was being interviewed. Then, I had my interview and further testing,...and after that, another hour of written testing. It was a good 3-4 hours. Received a full 10 page report. 
