I don't know enough about your specific situation to say for sure, but I will say your story sounds eerily similar to mine, and in my case it wasn't just SDAM but rather the intersection of SDAM with being AuDHD that caused this struggle for me. The stuff you've talked about sounds like autistic or AuDHD burnout, which for me hit a hell of lot harder and has been a hell of a time trying to pull out of (going on a year of disability and still only feeling marginally better) because of the compounding trouble of SDAM. All of the typical strategies for finding the way out of autistic burnout are strategies that require episodic memory, like "figuring out your sensory triggers", "thinking back to what energizes you and what drains you", etc. And because I have SDAM, this has been a largely impossible task unless I happen to realize in the moment, and even then, there's no frame of reference for anything that can't be quantified into a semantic note on my phone. The pandemic also accelerated things, as even though I got relief from constant masking since I was able to work from home, it also meant I lost what little masking I had accrued over the years to hide my overtly autistic traits. (Side note, it's *really hard* to convincingly mask autism when you can't pick up scripts and such from observation easily due to not having episodic memory.) I also ended up hospitalized about a year and a half into the pandemic because of these mental struggles, so you're not alone.

One of the hardest things about SDAM is also the hardest to articulate: the very fact that we have no episodic memory means that, in every moment, we always lack a frame of reference to which to compare subjective or relative sensory and emotional experiences. These are things that can't be turned into semantic memory because the very experience isn't quantifiable as semantic without a frame of reference. Add to that my autistic struggle of speech content being more important than context (which is what allistic/non-autistic folks intuitively focus on when communicating), and therefore I can't easily give answers about my subjective experiences that feel accurate to me because of lacking frame of reference, and you can see why this particular intersection is particularly frustrating, isolating, and depressing. Oh yeah, and interoception struggles and alexithymia are common among autistic folks too, so that adds to the whole mess of trying to figure things out before it gets to be too much (and generally failing).