Autism in Professional Musicians: A Different Kind of Mind
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jul 15, 2025
- 22 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* Unlike most of my other posts, this one doesn't draw on specific client stories. I see autism in working musicians at every life stage,from teenagers still in assessment to musicians identifying themselves in their fifties... and the line between "this is universal enough to share" and "this is identifying" felt too thin for any single composite to be drawn safely. So this post sits in patterns rather than portraits. For anyone reading who has worked with me: I'm not writing about you. Or if I am, I'm writing about you alongside many others, so you're in good company :)
You feel the sound of the room before you've consciously registered it.
You can hear the click in the third trombonist's key mechanism that nobody else seems to notice, and once you've heard it you can't unhear it for the rest of the season.
You know the exact bar your stand partner finds difficult, the breath they take before it, the way they slightly tense in the lead-up.
You arrive twenty minutes early because being late is a physical impossibility, but you sit in the car for fifteen of those minutes because walking in first feels worse than being late ever would.
You've been told you're intense. A perfectionist. That you take things too seriously. That you're difficult...
Most of the autistic musicians I work with have spent years being told some combination of these things, and most of them eventually started suspecting that the issue wasn't really intense or perfectionist or difficult. It was something more structural...
A particular kind of nervous system, doing what it does, inside a profession not designed for it.
This post is for the autistic musicians working in a profession that asks for things they're often brilliant at, and other things that slowly undo them.
It's also for everyone wondering whether that description fits — including the people who have been masking so well for so long they can't even tell anymore.
A Note Before We Go On
This post is for you whether you have a formal diagnosis, gave yourself one online, only just started to wonder, or got told off by a clinician for "self-diagnosing" and then never finished the assessment process.
Adult autism assessment in the UK and most other countries is expensive, slow, and gatekept. NHS waiting lists run into years, private assessments cost what many musicians can't justify, some workplaces and visas treat a formal diagnosis as a liability...
What's the point of denying yourself accommodations because the process of getting officially named is broken? You don't need a piece of paper to recognise your own patterns, and you certainly don't need one to deserve a kinder way of working.
But before we dive deeper, there's a boundary I want to keep clearly: I'm a music performance coach, not a clinician. I don't diagnose anyone, and I don't get involved in medication conversations. Those belong with your GP or psychiatrist. If anything in this post prompts you to look into assessment, that's a good instinct.
If you want a structured place to start that isn't a Reddit thread or a TikTok rabbit hole, Embrace Autism hosts the full battery of validated screening tools.
A few worth knowing about specifically:
The AQ (Autism Spectrum Quotient) gives a broad sense of autistic traits across the standard domains. Decent starting point, but it was designed before researchers fully understood masking, so it can miss high-maskers entirely.
The RAADS-R is deeper and was specifically designed to catch autistic adults the older tools were missing.
The CAT-Q measures masking itself, and this is the one I'd most want late-recognised or suspecting musicians to take. If you've spent your life camouflaging your autistic traits, you may genuinely not be able to see them in yourself anymore. The other tests ask "do you have these traits?" and your answer is no, because you've buried them so deep. The CAT-Q asks "are you constantly working to appear neurotypical?" — and that question, for many people, finally lands.
Finally, the Aspie Quiz is comprehensive and well-reviewed by autistic users specifically.
One language note before we go further: I use autistic musician rather than musician with autism throughout this post, because that's the language the autistic community has overwhelmingly asked for. Autism isn't a thing you carry alongside yourself, it's the shape of how you experience the world. In that sense, the wording follows the reality.
What Autism Actually Is
If you've ever read the DSM criteria for autism, you'll know they describe what autism looks like from the outside — to a clinician observing behaviour. They don't describe what it feels like from the inside. So here's the lived version, briefly, for anyone who wants to know what they're recognising.
Sensory processing is different. Not just more sensitive, though that's part of it. The filters that neurotypical brains use to push background information into the unconscious — like the hum of the lights, the texture of a label against your skin, the slight smell of someone's perfume across the room — work less aggressively in autistic brains. You take in more of the world, in higher resolution, with less of it filtered out. Sometimes this is wonderful. Sometimes it's like trying to hold a conversation while three televisions in the room are playing different shows at full volume.
Social processing is different too. The thing neurotypical people do unconsciously, like read facial expressions, infer intentions, calibrate tone, match the implicit rhythm of a conversation, has to be done consciously by autistic people. You're running translation software during every social interaction. The software works; you can pass perfectly well in most contexts; but it costs energy in a way that's invisible to everyone else and exhausting to you. By the end of a long social day, you've forgotten how to be a person. Not in a depressed way — in a I've been running diagnostic software for nine hours and my battery is gone way.
Okay, a quick detour because I couldn't help myself:
There's an interesting neurological piece behind some of this. In early childhood, all brains do something called synaptic pruning — the brain over-produces neural connections in infancy, then gradually trims back the ones it doesn't use, becoming more efficient and more specialised. Research suggests autistic brains prune less aggressively. Which means you end up with more connections active, more patterns being recognised, more information being processed at any given moment. It's not that the autistic brain is doing anything wrong. It's that it never narrowed down the way most brains do. You're running with too many tabs open, all the time, by design.
A small number of autistic people also experience synaesthesia — the involuntary cross-wiring of senses, where numbers have colours, sounds have shapes, certain keys feel like specific textures. It's more common in autistic people than in the general population. For musicians, it sometimes shows up as colour-coded keys, tactile responses to particular harmonies, or strong associations between pieces and visual textures. If this is you, you're not making it up. It's a real and documented phenomenon, and it's often a useful one.
Anyway. Back to the list:
Predictability and routine matter. While people often think it's because autistic people are rigid for its own sake, it's usually because an unpredictable world is a sensorily and cognitively exhausting one. Routine is regulation. It's how you protect the system from being overwhelmed by everything else.
Deep, narrow focus. What gets called "special interests" in clinical literature is something most autistic adults experience as their actual relationship with the things they love. Not a hobby or a passing interest, but more like a sustained, intense engagement with a chosen subject. For many autistic musicians, music itself is the special interest. (You can probably see where this is going.)
Pattern recognition. The detail-focused cognitive style that makes social contexts hard is often the same one that makes autistic people extraordinary at noticing what other people miss. There's research on this in musicians specifically, and we'll come to it shortly.
So that's the abbreviated version. There's obviously a lot more, but those are the pieces most relevant to what follows.
Why Music Pulls Autistic People In
Music often starts as a special interest, and the reasons it lands so completely for autistic minds are not accidental.
Music gives you pattern. Bars repeat. Forms repeat. Intervals are predictable. Harmonic functions resolve. For a brain that finds rest in predictability and unease in chaos, a Bach cantata or a Stravinsky symphony — paradoxically, even the most "complex" pieces — are deeply organising in a way the social world isn't. You always know what bar you're in. You always know where the downbeat is. The structure is doing some of the regulation work for you.
Music is sensory pleasure done right. When sensory experience is chosen and controlled rather than imposed, it goes from overwhelming to organising. A familiar piece, in a familiar acoustic, at the volume you chose, is one of the few sensory experiences an autistic person fully directs. It's the difference between a crowded supermarket on a Saturday and your favourite recording on good headphones in a quiet room. Both involve sound. Only one of them feels like home.
Music is a way to communicate without small talk. You can say something that matters without having to perform the neurotypical conversational rituals that surround everything else. Music is the one social context where intensity, depth, repetition, and saying-it-exactly-this-way are expected rather than weird. Where the things autistic people often get told to tone down — the seriousness, the focus, the specificity — are exactly what the work requires.
Detail focus turns into talent. Research on absolute pitch in professional musicians has found a correlation with autistic traits. The same cognitive style that makes social ambiguity hard makes pitch recognition extraordinary; the brain that notices the click in the third trombonist's key mechanism also notices the precise tuning of every note in a chord. (Wenhart and colleagues found this association directly in 2019, looking at neural connectivity patterns in absolute-pitch musicians.) This isn't the ADHD-as-superpower line — some of being autistic is genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise helps no one. It's that the same neurological features cut both ways. The thing that costs you in one context pays you in another.
Repetition that doesn't feel like punishment. What neurotypical musicians sometimes find tedious — the same warm-up, the same scale, the same passage practised slowly, day after day — autistic musicians often find genuinely regulating. The repetition isn't drudgery. It's how you settle the system.
So you stay there, for years... through the bad recital, through the conservatoire entry, through the early professional years where it was still mostly you in a room with the score.
But over time, the music stops being something you do alone, and starts being something other people are watching you do.
The joy and the freedom the music gave you stops being for you... instead, it gets handed over to panels, conductors, colleagues, reviewers. Where the expression used to be reassuring, it now comes with verdicts attached. Where repetition used to settle you, the same excerpt for the eighth week becomes an environment you can't escape... locked-in, no end in sight, the sensory and social load piling up week after week with no decompression in between.
And the criticism that comes with all of this lands much harder than most colleagues realise: When your nervous system already runs without the filter that softens incoming information, a single negative comment doesn't fade out the way it does for other people. It stays in high definition for days.
That trajectory, from the thing that organised you to a profession that slowly overwhelms you, is what lies beneath most of what follows.
Where Autism Collides with the Profession
The friction points are specific, and they're almost never about whether someone can play. They're rather about a working environment that demands constant invisible labour from autistic musicians just to remain functional in the room, on top of whatever the music itself requires.
Sensory load
Stage lights are bright. The audience coughs way too much. The brass three feet behind you is loud. The conductor's perfume is a particular brand you can't name but you can definitely smell. The dressing room has fluorescents (ick!). The green room has a television playing softly that no one is watching but no one will turn off.
And while you're managing all of that, you're also expected to perform.
The energy you spend regulating sensory input is not optional, but also not visible to anyone else and certainly not factored into how musicians are evaluated. Neurotypical colleagues do not understand why you arrive at a rehearsal already tired, because they don't know what you've already done to get yourself in the door. But it's not like you've been slacking... your mind and body been performing the regulatory work that they don't have to do — because their nervous system did it automatically half an hour ago, while you were still consciously managing the lift and the corridor and the door handle and the brightness of the rehearsal room and the temperature difference between outside and inside.
The social labour of the job
There's the music, and then there's everything around the music. Like the post-concert reception, the networking, the committee meetings, the dressing-room chat...
The fact that an enormous proportion of professional opportunities flow through informal social contexts (as in drinks after a concert, a brief chat in the break, an introduction at a function) where autistic musicians often can't compete on equal terms even when their playing is superior to everyone else in the room.
Many autistic musicians have lost work because they didn't say the right thing at the right after-party, or didn't say anything at all because they had nothing left in the tank by the time the after-party arrived.
But this is not a personal failing (even though it might feel like one). It's a profession that has bundled musical work and social work together as though they're the same job, and then evaluates you on both without telling you that's what's happening.
Unwritten rules everywhere
Conservatoires and orchestras run on hidden hierarchies: Who speaks to whom, who waits, who initiates, what tone you use with which seniority, when it's appropriate to disagree and when it isn't. None of these rules are written down, and most are never explained. Neurotypical colleagues seem to absorb them by osmosis. Autistic musicians often only learn the rules after breaking them, and the breaking has already cost you.
Schedule unpredictability
A profession built on last-minute calls, sudden programme changes, additional services, dep work (sub work for the non-UK people), and rehearsal schedules that shift on a few days' notice is, structurally, an autism-hostile environment.
The instability isn't the work itself, it's the system around the work.
On top of it all, touring multiplies this: Loss of routine, unfamiliar acoustics, hotel rooms, time zones, irregular meals, no sensory anchors. Many autistic musicians can deliver extraordinary performances under conditions that other musicians barely notice but that, for them, take a sustained week to recover from afterwards.
The conductor problem
For some autistic musicians (particularly those with PDA traits, which we'll come to shortly) being conducted is its own kind of difficulty. Surrendering musical autonomy to someone else's interpretation, complying with sometimes-arbitrary musical demands, masking the internal resistance to that compliance while playing your part... this is a constant background effort that other players don't experience the same way.
Masking, and What It Costs You Over Time
The biggest invisible cost of being an autistic professional musician is masking.
Hull and colleagues, who've done some of the foundational research on this, describe masking (or "camouflaging") as having three components: Compensation (developing strategies that look like the thing you can't naturally do, like pretending to make eye contact, scripting small talk in advance), masking proper (actively suppressing autistic responses, such as stimming under the desk instead of openly, swallowing a sensory wince that would be visible to others), and assimilation (working to fit in with what's expected of you in a given context).
Why musicians mask especially heavily: The profession rewards a particular performance of professionalism that goes well beyond playing. It rewards charisma in the lobby, ease in social contexts, the ability to be a colleague as well as a player.
Autistic musicians who can't mask well are often filtered out of opportunities before they ever get to play. The ones who can mask well stay in. But the cost compounds.
A consistent finding in the research, across multiple studies now, is that higher masking is associated with worse mental health outcomes — depression, anxiety, identity confusion, and what's now called autistic burnout. Cage and Troxell-Whitman's 2019 work is one of the clearer demonstrations of this: The more autistic adults camouflage their traits, the worse they tend to feel.
And this compounding is the worst part: A single concert isn't the problem. A single networking event isn't the problem. A career of them is. The mask gets heavier, the recovery time gets longer, the gap between the public self and the private self widens... until something has to give.
There's also the invisibility-to-yourself problem. Many late-identified autistic adults didn't recognise themselves earlier because they had masked so successfully for so long that the autistic traits themselves became invisible to them. They couldn't see what they'd buried. This is why the CAT-Q can help to reveal so much, including why so many people's recognition route is "I started wondering, took the AQ, scored borderline or below, took the CAT-Q, and finally understood why".
Autistic Burnout: The Thing That Often Brings People In
If you have only one new concept to take from this post, this is probably it.
In 2020, Raymaker and colleagues published the first formal research definition of autistic burnout, drawing on extensive interviews with autistic adults and analysis of community discussion online.
They defined it as: A syndrome resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch between expectations and capacity, characterised by pervasive long-term exhaustion (typically three months or more), loss of previously held skills, and reduced tolerance to sensory and cognitive stimuli.
Autistic burnout is not occupational burnout. It is not depression, though it is often misdiagnosed as such. It is what happens to a nervous system that has spent years or decades operating beyond its actual capacity with masking, accommodating, regulating, working twice as hard as colleagues to look half as composed... and finally runs out of the reserves it was running on.
For working musicians, the part that often blindsides them is the loss of skills. The sight-reading that used to be automatic stops working. The intonation you used to have without thinking deserts you. The ability to manage your own warm-up or learning process disappears. You can't reliably do things you've done thousands of times before. Skills that took decades to build seem to dissolve in weeks. Some of them come back with recovery, some come back differently, and some take longer than anyone has the right to expect.
It often arrives mid-career, and disproportionately in late-identified autistic women in their thirties to fifties, though it happens across the full range. The musician has spent decades pushing through, masking, accommodating, and the system finally runs out.
And when it does, the people around them (including the musician themselves) almost always interpret the collapse as depression, anxiety, occupational stress, or some failure of resilience. The autistic component goes unrecognised. The treatment misses. The burnout deepens.
Recovery then almost always have to involve unmasking somewhere. Not necessarily professionally (though sometimes that too), but somewhere in your life, with at least some people, you need to be able to stop running the translation software. Otherwise the system can't actually rest, and the burnout becomes permanent.
If any of this is describing the last two years of your life, there is a chance you're not depressed in some unfixable way. You may be a musician whose system finally ran out of what it had to give to an environment that wouldn't bend.
Perfectionism, Anxiety, and Why CBT Often Fails Autistic Musicians
The anxiety that autistic musicians carry is rarely just performance anxiety. It's layered.
There's music performance anxiety (MPA), which sits on top of social anxiety, which sits on top of the chronic background anxiety of a nervous system processing a sensorily and socially hostile environment, which sits on top of a lifetime of adverse social interactions that have taught the system that other people are unpredictable and often dangerous. Each layer reinforces the others.
What's specifically true for many autistic clients I see is that they're often already highly self-aware about their own thinking. They've had to be: A lifetime of running self-monitoring software means most autistic musicians are more articulate about their internal states than neurotypical clients... that is, when they have the words for it. They often know their anxious thought isn't rational. They've already examined the evidence, often many times, often years ago. But the thought persists anyway.
This is why CBT often fails autistic adults. CBT's central technique is to identify an anxious thought, examine the evidence against it, find that the evidence doesn't support it, and replace the thought with a more accurate one.
For many neurotypical clients, this is genuinely useful.
But for many autistic clients, it lands as: I already know the thought isn't rational. I've known for years. Knowing hasn't fixed anything. You can't argue someone out of a feeling they've already argued themselves out of and that's still there.
This is also why ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) tend to work better. Both are about a different relationship with difficult internal experience, not about arguing with it. Pahnke and colleagues published a controlled pilot study of an ACT-based group treatment (called NeuroACT) for autistic adults, and found that participants reported less stress, higher quality of life, and improved psychological flexibility compared to a control group. One of my favourite things about ACT is that it doesn't ask you to debate with your nervous system. It teaches you to notice what's there, hold it lightly, and act according to your values anyway.
For musicians, the practical version of this is something like this: Anxiety management isn't about catastrophic thinking exercises or evidence-checking. It's about noticing the early signals (like the irritability, the sensory edge, the fatigue, the urge to leave a room) before they become a meltdown, and meeting them with regulation rather than judgment. You don't argue with the impending overwhelm (that doesn't make anything less overwhelming!). You give the system what it actually needs.
If you want the broader piece on what's happening under evaluation, my post on performance anxiety in musicians covers it more fully. And the perfectionism post is worth reading alongside this, because the perfectionism research applies to autistic musicians too, often more intensely. Neither are specifically about the autism layer, but together with this post they might give you the fuller picture.
The Persistent Drive for Autonomy (PDA)
Many autistic musicians will recognise themselves in this section the way they haven't recognised themselves in anything else. So I want to take it a little bit slowly.
The original term is Pathological Demand Avoidance — coined by the British psychologist Elisabeth Newson in the 1980s, formalised in research in the early 2000s. It describes a profile, most commonly seen within autism, characterised by an intense anxiety response to demands and expectations, even self-imposed ones. Not defiance or laziness per se, but something closer to a physiological inability to comply with a demand framed as a demand.
The term has become increasingly contested in the autistic community, and for good reason. Many autistic adults now prefer Persistent Drive for Autonomy (sometimes Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) instead. It's same acronym, with a very different framing.
And that reframe is significant: It stops describing the experience as a pathology of avoidance and starts describing it as a legitimate need for self-determination that becomes distress when the environment doesn't allow for it. Both terms are in use, but the autistic community largely uses PDA-as-autonomy now.
What it looks like in practice for working musicians:
The practice routine that collapses the moment it becomes obligatory. You genuinely wanted to practise this morning. Then your teacher said you should, or you wrote it on a schedule, and now you physically can't open the case.
Repertoire that becomes impossible to learn because it's been set. The piece you'd have loved on your own time becomes the piece you cannot bear to look at once it's been assigned.
A particular kind of difficulty with conductors, teachers, panels. Surrendering musical autonomy to someone else's interpretation isn't just slightly uncomfortable, it can be genuinely physiologically difficult.
Audition requirements that feel viscerally unbearable in a way that doesn't match the actual stakes. You can play the piece well, yes, but you cannot play the piece well when they ask you to play the piece.
An ability to do things voluntarily that becomes impossible the moment they're required, even when the requirement comes from you.
Strategies that work for PDA musicians are different from standard ADHD or autism strategies. The aim isn't to get better at compliance — you physiologically can't, and trying makes it worse.
So my aim with clients is always to design a practice life that doesn't require surrendering autonomy you can't actually surrender.
That means using options instead of instructions, even with yourself (I could work on this today, or I could work on that, or I could do neither rather than I will work on this today).
It means treating routines as flexible defaults rather than rules.
It means framing demands as choices wherever you can, and accepting that some external demands (auditions, deadlines, etc.) will need specific PDA-informed strategies to navigate, rather than willpower.
There's also significant overlap between PDA traits, ADHD, and OCD... the picture is often messier than any one clean category. If the ADHD piece sounds familiar alongside this, my post on ADHD in professional musicians covers that territory.
AuDHD is its own thing, which brings us to the next section.
AuDHD — When One Masked the Other
Estimates of autism-and-ADHD overlap vary, but most research now puts it somewhere between 50% and 80% of autistic adults also having ADHD, and a significant share of ADHD adults having autistic traits. The two conditions co-occur far more often than the older clinical models assumed they could.
What's interesting, and important, for late-identified musicians is that the two often masked each other for decades.
The ADHD made the autism look less rigid — your impulsivity, novelty-seeking, and chaotic energy obscured the underlying need for sameness and routine, so you appeared more flexible than you actually were.
The autism made the ADHD look less scattered — your routines, rules, special interests, and intense focus looked like discipline rather than ADHD compensation.
Together they often presented as just quirky, or intense, or high-functioning weird — not as either condition in clear form. So neither got identified... and you probably spent years assuming you were the problem.
For AuDHD musicians, the accommodations needed are often contradictory. You need novelty AND routine. You need stimulation AND quiet. You need flexibility AND structure.
The standard advice for either profile alone often makes the other worse — ADHD strategies that introduce variety can destabilise the autistic side, autism strategies that lock in routine can starve the ADHD side. Finding what works is genuinely harder than for either alone, and it almost always involves a customised mix rather than a clean method.
(This is part of why blanket advice doesn't work for AuDHD musicians, and why being met with a one-size-fits-all approach in coaching or therapy is often part of what brings them in.)
What Helps — Designing a Practice and a Life Around Your Actual Brain
Most of the practical answers come back to a few principles.
And those who've been binging my blog for a while will notice that the structural answer is the same as it was for the ADHD post: Stop trying to force the brain to work like a different one, and build the conditions it actually responds to.
Here's what that looks like in real life:
Notice the early signals. Irritability, sensory edge, an urge to leave the room, a sudden inability to take in another piece of information, the start of verbal shutdown... these aren't character flaws. They're your system telling you it has used its capacity. Building the habit of noticing these signals before they escalate into a full meltdown or shutdown is the single most useful skill an autistic musician can develop. Most of the meltdowns I hear about in coaching could have been prevented by an intervention an hour earlier.
Build routines around your actual needs, not "best practice". The standard advice (three hours a day, fifty minutes on ten off, structured warm-up, cross-training, journaling, etc.) was written for a neurotypical body and often fails autistic ones. Your version might involve a longer warm-up. A shorter session. A different time of day. A specific order of repertoire. A particular kind of break. There's no one best way. There's the one that works for your nervous system. Find it, and then protect it.
Make practice feel comfortable and contained. The lighting that helps. The temperature. The chair. The acoustic. The particular cup you drink from while looking at the score. In my approach none of this is 'precious' or 'twee'. They're all serving regulation work that happens to make the practice be enjoyable. The musicians I see who treat sensory comfort as essential rather than optional have far longer, far more sustainable careers than the ones who treat it as a luxury they can't afford.
Sensory accommodations are not indulgences. Maybe you need loop earplugs in rehearsal. Or a quiet warm-up room. Or eating before the gig instead of after. Or a long walk to decompress before any social demand. Sometimes knowing what your mind and body need can be the difference between sustainable and unsustainable.
Self-compassion as structural requirement. Beaton, Sirois, and Milne's work on self-compassion in ADHD adults applies here too — autistic adults score significantly lower on self-compassion measures, partly because of a lifetime of being told the way they experience the world is wrong. Their 2022 follow-up showed that lower self-compassion is one of the mechanisms linking neurodivergence to poorer mental health overall. For autistic musicians, meeting yourself with kindness is more than a cute wellness trend. Rather a structural requirement for sustainability in this work.
Notice, don't argue. When the anxious thoughts or the perfectionist spirals show up (and trust me, they will), the goal isn't to convince yourself out of them. You've already tried that. The goal is to notice them, name them as what they are (an old protective response, not a fact about the world), and act according to what you actually value anyway. This is the ACT-shaped move, and for autistic minds it tends to land where CBT doesn't.
For PDA traits specifically: Reduce the demand framing. Even self-imposed demands. I might practise this today, or I might not, depending on what feels possible opens a door that I have to practise this today slams shut. You can still get the work done, you'll just need to come at it sideways :)
Plan recovery the way you plan rehearsals. Touring, intensive runs, audition periods... all of these will cost you more than they cost your neurotypical colleagues, and the recovery time required is real. Putting breaks and down time in the diary in advance is how you can stay in the profession for the long term.
What I Want You to Take From This
I'll risk sounding like ChatGPT at this point, but this has to be said, and I don't know how else to say it as a non-native English speaker.
You are not a defective neurotypical musician. You're a musician with a nervous system that experiences the world more vividly and processes it differently, working in a profession that was designed without you in mind.
The exhaustion, the burnout, the social struggle, the sense that you're working twice as hard for half the recognition... what they are is evidence of how much the system has been asking of you to get where you already are. What they're NOT is evidence that you don't belong here.
One more thing: You don't have to grind harder. You probably need to grind less, and grind based on the actual facts around who you are.
This is what I spend most of my time on with the autistic and AuDHD musicians I coach: not correcting an autistic mind, because there's nothing in it to correct, but building the conditions where your nervous system can do its best work, finding the accommodations you've been denying yourself, and learning to meet your own setbacks with something other than contempt.
I work with musicians whose brains work this way, in private coaching. This is where we work on building a sustainable musical career around how your mind actually operates. If any of this reads like your own week (or your own decade), that's where you can read more.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
Research cited & further reading
Raymaker, D. M., et al. (2020). "Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew": Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. Read here.
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., et al. (2017). "Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.
Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the Reasons, Contexts and Costs of Camouflaging for Autistic Adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911.
Pahnke, J., et al. (2019). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Autistic Adults: An Open Pilot Study. The follow-up NeuroACT RCT (2023) is also available.
Wenhart, T., et al. (2019). Autistic Traits, Resting-State Connectivity, and Absolute Pitch in Professional Musicians. Molecular Autism, 10(20). Read here.
Beaton, D. M., Sirois, F., & Milne, E. (2020, 2022). Self-compassion in adults with ADHD — relevant here because of the overlap. Linked in my ADHD post.
Newson, E., et al. (2003). Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome: A Necessary Distinction Within the Pervasive Developmental Disorders. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 88, 595–600.
Embrace Autism's autism resources page — autism tests, PDA / autonomy, autistic burnout test and resources.
