Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.

As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?

It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.

This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”

Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.

As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.