EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Work That Took Everything, And A Life That Keeps Going Anyway

April 16, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from managing things that never quite resolve, from paperwork that breeds more paperwork, from obligations that replicate themselves the moment you think you have completed them.

I am still nowhere near finishing the details of my mother's estate, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, my system simply failed—cleanly, completely. Not dramatic, not loud—just a full autistic shutdown, fueled by my own overwhelm combined with the incompetence of others.

There is a specific kind of overwhelm that does not feel like chaos, but like too many rules, too many moving parts, too many expectations layered on top of one another until even asking for a moment to figure it out feels procedural.

By evening, I found myself looking back through old pictures, trying to trace the line of my life like a map I did not remember drawing. I am forty-six years old. That number sits differently than I expected it would—not heavy, not light, just chronological.

My career was not kind to my body, and it was certainly not kind to my mind. It demanded everything, and then it demanded more after that. And yet, if I am honest—fully, brutally honest—I would do it again without hesitation.

Someone had to do that work. I understood it. I was good at it. It was necessary work, and sometimes even I was recognized for it in the press.

The cost ended up being more than I could bear. It was a slow extraction over years, taken in hits and increments small enough to ignore until suddenly there was nothing left to give. And then it ended. Not gradually, not gently—just… done. Over. Retirement after that kind of intensity is not rest. It is absence. It is stepping out of a world that required everything you had and realizing that nothing else in life asks the same of you. There is nothing that compares—not in scale, not in urgency, not in meaning. And so you are left holding all of that capacity with nowhere to put it.

There is a moment that comes—quiet, almost unremarkable—when you realize you have had enough nonsense for one lifetime. Not in a dramatic, declarative way. Just a simple, internal acknowledgment. Enough. And for me, that feeling is never clean. Autism complicates it. It adds layers—sensitivity, processing overload, the constant negotiation between what the world expects and what my system can tolerate.

I recently got frustrated with how life outside of the structure I had become accustomed to at work somehow didn't exist in the "civilian world". Instead of accepting this, I got upset with my friend Maddie about how I'm always the one who arrives 90 seconds on time to everything, and nobody else does, and it is really disappointing and tiring for me. She didn't deserve it. Maddie and I are close friends, and she has one of the biggest hearts I have ever known.

I try, sometimes, to trace the line from there to here—to understand how that version of me became the person I am today. The timeline is not clean. It loops, it doubles back, it disappears and reappears in places that do not make immediate sense. It has been a life of intensity, always intensity. A need to be inside things that matter, even when they cost me more than I can afford to give. A willingness to accept conditions that others would reject outright, because the experience itself felt worth it.

I used to talk about Vermont winters like they were proof of toughness. And maybe they were. I am allowed to admit that even the most perfect of places can sometimes exhaust you.
It looks like participation—fully, completely, sometimes recklessly. I have lived that version. I am still living it, in quieter ways now. And tonight, sitting here with the remnants of the day still scattered around me, I can feel both truths at once—that I have carried more than I should have had to, and that I chose much of it anyway.

Sometimes, late at night, when everything else quiets down and the world finally stops asking anything of me, I hear it—the outside. The insects, the wind, the subtle movement of things that do not care about human timelines or expectations.

And just like that, I think back to my many years at summer camp. Back in that strange, intense pocket of my childhood where everything felt sharper, more immediate. I can still hear my father's voice—matter-of-fact, immovable—telling me that if I wanted to go, I would be sent as a boy. And I did not care. Not even a little. It was summer camp. It was challenge, intensity, structure, fire. It was everything I craved without yet having the language to explain why.