on the street · the big lights are off · the door is ajar · no need to knock
A shopfront on the street, borrowed after hours
Dead Tired Society
est. whenever you got here
Peer support, by and for people who are burnt out and people on the far side of it. Nobody here is a professional, nobody is at the front, and nobody is going to fix you, because you are not the thing that broke. It is a room somebody has borrowed after hours, with the big lights switched off and the door left ajar — so that anybody can find it, anybody can leave by it, and nobody has to sit in the light.
If tonight is worse than tired: our Help page is a set of doors, and Coping lists crisis lines and warmlines.
The standing orders
They are called standing orders. Nobody is standing.
- Nobody has to talk. Being here with your camera off and your mouth shut is being here.
- You may lie on the floor. Most of us already are.
- The meeting starts when you arrive and ends when you leave, and neither needs announcing.
- Minutes are not taken. Neither is attendance.
- Nobody asks how you are doing. If you say anyway, nobody tells you what to do about it — unless you ask, and asking is allowed.
- Nobody stands on the desks. Most of us have been told to stand up for ourselves quite enough.
- Nobody in here seizes anything, least of all the day.
- You can pass. Passing is a whole turn.
What we mean by dead tired
Not the tired a weekend fixes. Burnout, and autistic burnout in particular: the kind that comes from years of being asked to do more than you could, in places built for somebody else, with nowhere to recover in. The research that defined it was built out of interviews with autistic adults who had been through it, and the title the researchers gave their paper says it better than a definition does.
Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew
The title of Dora M. Raymaker and others, Defining Autistic Burnout, Autism in Adulthood, 2020
This society is not a clean-up crew either. It is some of the others who were left without one, in the same dark room, which turns out to be a good deal of what a crew was ever for. And it puts the cause where our own writing puts it:
Burnout therefore reflects a failure of relational ecology, not a lack of individual resilience.
Stimpunks, The Ecology of Neurodivergent Burnout
By the door, on the pegs
Everybody comes in carrying something, and there is a row of pegs by the door for it. What wore us out has names, and none of them is yours: every one below is a thing done to people, or asked of them, and not a flaw in the person carrying it. Each peg says what is hanging there, gives one line from somebody who has written about it, and adds one line of ours.
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Masking
On the peg: A plain half-mask with nothing painted on it, hanging by its string.
Masking is exhausting. Utterly utterly draining.
Finally Knowing Me: An Autistic Life, Wasting Energy, 2018Hang it up. You may need it again on the way out, and nobody in here will pretend otherwise, because the street has not changed while you were sitting down. What nobody in here will do is ask you to put it back on. That is the whole of the difference, and for a great many of us it is the first room it has been true in.
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Minority stress
On the peg: A rucksack gone out of shape at the bottom, the way a bag does when it has been carried full for years.
Researchers hypothesize that decreased social standing leads to stigmatized minority groups being exposed to more stressful life situations, with simultaneously fewer resources to cope with these events.
Monique Botha and David M. Frost, Extending the Minority Stress Model to Understand Mental Health Problems Experienced by the Autistic Population, 2018It is not one heavy thing. It is the stone somebody added this morning on top of every stone from before, carried by the people who were handed the fewest ways to set any of it down. Nobody in here asks why the bag is so heavy. Everybody in here already knows.
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Epistemic injustice
On the peg: A lanyard with a visitor's badge clipped to it, although the building was your own life.
Epistemic injustice refers to how people from marginalized communities are denied the opportunity to create knowledge and define their own meaning from their experiences. It’s about who is believed.
Sonny Jane Wise, a post on LinkedInThe badge says visitor. It has said visitor in every room where the subject under discussion was you. In here the expert on your life is the person living it, and the next most expert is anybody else on the floor who has lived something like it, which is what the word peer means and all that it means.
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Justice sensitivity
On the peg: A whistle on a cord, worn smooth where somebody kept on blowing it.
The world demands resilience. We are measured more often by our ability to take the hit and keep going rather than encouraged to stop the world from throwing punches.
NeuroHub Community Ltd, Justice Sensitivity And Autism: What Is It?, 2024Noticing what is unfair and not being able to stop noticing is heavy to carry, and it gets described as a flaw in the person carrying it. Nobody in here thinks you are too much about it. You are also allowed to put the whistle down for an evening, which is not the same as agreeing with anything.
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Moral injury
On the peg: A work apron with a name badge still pinned to the bib.
No matter the profession, moral injury destroys the capacity for trust and creates an expectation of harm, which leaves few options for the individual to act.
Brianne Kramer, Denisha Jones and Clint Broadbent, The Intensification of Moral Injury in Teachers During the Pandemic, 2026This is the one that comes from being made to do the harm, or to stand beside it, by a place that told you it was your job: a classroom, a ward, a caseload, a helpline with a script. It is not the same thing as being tired, and it does not lift while the place that did it is still open tomorrow. Nobody in here will tell you it was not that bad.
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Neuronormativity
On the peg: A school blazer on a hanger, cut for somebody else, with the sleeves hanging down past where any hands would be.
Normal is merely a social construct that controls individuals by enforcing a right way to function, a right way to be, a right way to exist as a human.
Sonny Jane Wise, Normal Is A Social ConstructBehind every other peg on this wall is this one: the idea that there is one right way to have a mind, and that the rest of us are that way done badly. The blazer was never going to fit and it was not cut for you to grow into. Hang it up with the others.
The wall is longer than this, and nobody has finished putting pegs up. Further along it: the double empathy problem, the disability double bind, affective injustice, spoon theory, shutdown and meltdown. All of them are in our glossary, argued by the people who carried them.
It has come round to you
In a circle like this a talking piece goes round, and whoever is holding it may speak or may pass. Passing is a whole turn, and nobody comes back to you afterwards to check whether you have thought of something.
What is not in this room
- No advice nobody asked for, and no tips. Not one list of ways to get better. Advice is for when somebody asks, and asking is allowed.
- No resilience. Nobody here is going to congratulate you on how much you can take. That is how most of us got here.
- No timeline, and no before and after. Nobody is waiting for you to be better, and nothing in this room assumes you will go back to how you were.
- Nothing counted. No attendance, no days since, no streak, and no check-in that remembers you came.
- Nobody at the front. No facilitator with a clipboard and no professional in the corner. The only expertise in the room is having been there.
- No light you have to sit in. It stays in the corridor. The door is ajar so that it can find you if you want it, and so that you can leave by it if you do not.
Where the society actually meets
Not on this page. A web page cannot sit with anybody, and this one is the sign on the door rather than the room behind it. The people are in our community, by and for neurodivergent and disabled people, which is where our peer support lives. If what is wearing you out is money, mutual aid is the part of Stimpunks that exists because the systems failed us first.
Further, and better than this page: Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing · The Ecology of Neurodivergent Burnout · Peer support · Peer respite · Rest
Whose these are
The name is a play on Dead Poets Society, the 1989 film directed by Peter Weir and written by Tom Schulman, about a group that meets away from a school built on conformity in order to resist it. We took the shape of the name and nothing else: no line, no scene, no character and no still. The poets in that title are dead. Everybody here is merely tired, and would like it on the record that merely tired is quite enough.
Every line on a peg belongs to whoever wrote it, and is credited to them rather than to our glossary, which is where we found it: Finally Knowing Me, Monique Botha and David M. Frost, Sonny Jane Wise, NeuroHub Community, and Brianne Kramer, Denisha Jones and Clint Broadbent. The definition of burnout is Dora M. Raymaker’s and her co-authors’. The words under each quotation are ours, written for this room, and nobody else is responsible for them.
Every quotation in this room is 30 words or fewer, is credited to the person or place that said it rather than to our page, and was read off our own glossary entry for that peg on 2026-09-23. tools/make-dead-tired.py refuses a longer one, and refuses advice, a tally and the vocabulary of bouncing back in the room’s own voice.
The type is Sorts Mill Goudy, Barry Schwartz’s revival of Goudy’s Oldstyle, for the society’s name, and Lexend, drawn by Bonnie Shaver-Troup and others to reduce visual stress and ease reading fatigue, for everything you read — which is why a room for the dead tired sets it. Both under the SIL Open Font License. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a rubber doorstop wedged under the door
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: The desks are for sitting at
Before the code: Dead Tired Society’s standing orders mention the desks. Who stands on them?
Hint 1
It is in the standing orders, the ones nobody is standing for.
Hint 2
It is the order that mentions standing up for yourself.
Last hint
One word, meaning no person at all.
Give me the answer
The answer is Nobody. Nobody stands on the desks, because most of us have been told to stand up for ourselves quite enough. It is a society of people who are dead tired, and it meets on the floor.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: DOORSTOP
That is the one.
Nobody stands on the desks, because most of us have been told to stand up for ourselves quite enough. It is a society of people who are dead tired, and it meets on the floor.
Quest code: DOORSTOP