Grief is overwhelming for anyone.
But in an autistic nervous system, it doesn’t just hurt. It floods.
There is less filtering. Less background quiet. Less automatic regulation.
Everything arrives louder, closer, and harder to set down.
I didn’t understand this at first. I only knew that grief didn’t feel contained inside me. It didn’t rise and fall. It stayed. It pressed. It showed up in my body before I had words for it.
Grief wasn’t just sadness. It was sensory.
The world became too loud. Not only in sound, but in information. Lights, movement, conversation, expectations. Everything asked something of me when my system had already reached capacity. Even neutral experiences felt abrasive. Even kindness required processing.
Grief removed what little buffer I had without me realizing that buffer existed.
Before loss, I was already compensating. Masking. Translating. Regulating internally so the world could stay smooth. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I only knew I was tired.
After loss, that quiet effort became impossible to sustain.
My nervous system stayed on high alert. Not anxious exactly, but vigilant. As if something catastrophic had already happened, because it had. And as if something else catastrophic might still be waiting, just out of view. There was no reset button. No return to baseline. The baseline itself had changed.
Grief didn’t come in waves for me. It arrived as constant pressure.
It lived in my chest, my stomach, my throat. It disrupted sleep, memory, and time. It made transitions harder. Decisions heavier. Ordinary tasks cost more than they should have. Not because I was incapable, but because everything required conscious regulation.
Even rest wasn’t rest.
Being still meant feeling everything. Being busy meant managing myself while doing it. There was no neutral state. Only varying levels of effort.
What surprised me most was how much grief increased the cost of masking.
I still needed to appear functional. Still needed to be appropriate, calm, capable. Still needed to reassure others. But the energy required to do that doubled while my capacity shrank.
I didn’t fall apart loudly. I talked about my grief, and about Kayla, until my system couldn’t hold that level of exposure anymore. Then I pulled back. Not away from the grief itself, but from the constant effort of carrying it out loud. What changed was how selective I had to be about when and where I could speak it.
This is where grief and autism intersect in ways that are often invisible.
From the outside, I may have looked composed. Inside, my system was working constantly to keep me upright. To regulate emotion. To monitor tone. To decide what could be tolerated and what couldn’t.
Grief didn’t create weakness. It removed the margin that had been hiding how much effort functioning already took.
There is also the way grief loops.
My mind returns to the same thoughts without warning. Images. Moments. Questions without answers. This isn’t rumination for me. It’s how my brain processes what cannot be resolved. It doesn’t move on because there is nowhere to move to.
The loss is permanent. So the processing is ongoing.
That looping isn’t a failure to cope. It’s a nervous system continuing to integrate something that changed everything.
What has helped, slowly, is not fixing this, but understanding it.
I no longer expect grief to soften just because time passes. I don’t expect my nervous system to behave the way it once did. I work with the reality I’m in, not the one I miss.
I rest differently now. I say no more often. I reduce input where I can. I stop explaining myself when explanation costs more than it gives back.
This isn’t withdrawal. It’s regulation.
Grief in an autistic nervous system isn’t louder grief or deeper grief. It’s grief without insulation. Grief without automatic dampening. Grief that reaches the body first and the language later.
Understanding that hasn’t made the loss easier.
But it has made me kinder to the system carrying it.
And that matters more than trying to return to a version of myself that no longer exists.
