These last two days, I’ve struggled to keep my eyes open by half past ten at night, then fell asleep at about eleven only to wake up at two or three in the morning. It’s half past three now. I figured I would watch some YouTube videos and fall asleep later. Well, YouTube was doing its thing recommending awfully relevant videos: about abandoning the 9-to-5 and buying a van. About aging while being alone. About how modern life is slavery and that, other than the technological amenities, most people live worse lives than medieval serfs. That all of it is just getting worse.

Then, I started going down the spiral of three A.M. thoughts. If I had any choice in it, I would have never been born. My mother is a weird person who fled her home because her father stole her wages, then she settled with pretty much the first guy that danced with her (I don’t know much about their past, and I don’t want to know). Both of them have always been friendless, the black sheep of both of their families. My father has complex brain damage and possibly some degree of autism; he should have never had children, as he’s not fit to raise anyone. But my mother wanted friends, a girl friend in particular, so she had three children to get one. The two first children, my brother and I, were a bust. My brother has something similar to cerebral palsy (again, I don’t want to know more), and he always was the focus of my parents’ worries and efforts.

Then I was born. An extremely quiet child (other than when I was singing in the bath, which has carried over into my guitar playing in adulthood), I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. I was usually found alone in my room reading, drawing, writing, or playing out complex scenarios with toys. Honestly, that was the best period of my life. But there were only two bedrooms, and my mother wanted her do-over child (hopefully a girl), so they moved me to my brother’s room. There, until I was eighteen, I, an undiagnosed autistic person, was subjected to constant sensory overload, a lack of agency and privacy. The TV and the radio were always on, even at night. Merely having to listen to my brother’s noises felt harrowing. I couldn’t watch nor listen to what I wanted, only through headphones. My personal space was a corner of the room, with the back of my computer monitor facing the door. Whenever I complained to my mother (my male progenitor was physically present, but not a real father), she dismissed me with some variation of “you have to understand.” She’s the kind to sweep problems under the rug, as if something isn’t real as long as you don’t talk about it (fitting boomer behavior, I guess). I got the barrage of “you’re intelligent, you will succeed at everything you try,” only for real life to teach me over and over that I couldn’t even get to the level that normal people achieve seemingly with little effort. I interiorized that if I didn’t succeed at something in the first try, that meant I was stupid, so I didn’t even try, nor put sustained effort into anything, with very few art-related exceptions.

Middle school and high school were beyond miserable. I endured significant acne. I got bullied in different ways. Some well-meaning teachers (that’s the most charitable thing I can say about those empty-headed, equality-worshipping fools) pushed me to hang out with people to get me out of my shell. They actually told one of the girls to incorporate me into her group of friends. Throughout the years of hanging out with people I met in such ways, I had to deal with innocent bullies (the kind for whom bullying comes so natural it’s not even malice), coke addicts, sociopaths, and possibly the worst of them, a malignant narcissist who literally tried to ruin my life until he died in an accident in his mid-twenties. I’ve talked about that guy before; he was a rising socialist politician, and I have no doubt that he would have gone far. When I saw his obituary, I burst out laughing.

My years from twelve to seventeen or so were so miserable that it seems obvious in retrospect that I was slipping in and out of psychosis merely to tolerate being alive. My behavior, which I don’t want to go in much depth about, seemed often incomprehensible to me. I remember ditching school to sleep in public bathrooms (I couldn’t get proper sleep at home due to my brother). I sneaked into random apartment buildings pretending I lived there, then I sat in the pitch-black stairs for literal hours. During a few of those instances, I prayed genuinely; the only times in my life I felt like doing so. I prayed that if some supernatural being existed and was listening to my thoughts, he or she or it should come down and kill me.

I didn’t want to interact with anybody, but I was surrounded with teenagers. I was always the weird-looking, if not straight-ugly guy. Drunk girls would catcall the other guys I was walking with at night, deliberately excluding me. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I briefly dated a fourteen year old who clearly didn’t know what she was getting into; years later, my then girlfriend casually met this former fourteen-year-old, who wasn’t even from this city. The former fourteen-year-old got into a rant about the horrible guy she briefly dated from this city, which made things very awkward for my then girlfriend as she quickly found out it was me. I didn’t rape her or anything, I was just the most autistically crazy person imaginable. She gave me my first kiss, and all I did was swing my tongue around fast in her mouth, while she sat there like, “What the fuck is he doing?” During those years, I often felt possessed, unable to stop myself from doing stuff I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I hoped I would die soon, and I didn’t imagine myself living past eighteen. It still doesn’t feel real that I’ve lived past that age, as if I essentially died back then and these past decades have been my body slowly decaying until it ceases to function.

If you can stomach it, I wrote a novella in free-verse prose about that period of my life. The story is mostly autobiographical in subtle ways: A Millennium of Shadows (hey, remember when I used to be capable of writing compelling stuff?) I got the Deep Dive couple to produce a podcast about the novella, which makes the story sound appropriately hardcore.

My first, and only, years-long relationship ended when I was 21 or 22. I was grieving the loss (mostly of the structure, because I never liked her that much) when I had my first paying job. I had already gone through a disaster of an internship in another company; I couldn’t connect with anyone, and only later I found out that my boss had issues with me, but I couldn’t tell because, due to autism, I simply can’t read people. Anyway, my first paying job was a nightmare: I was hired under false pretenses, was ordered to get a driver’s license and a certificate in the French language for my contract to be extended, and two of my bosses, who sat at the same table, clearly didn’t want me there. I don’t want to get into it, but the anxiety and stress worsened to a point that one morning I simply couldn’t get on the bus. The rest of my life opened up before me: utter misery and humiliations until I retired. And I didn’t enjoy anything about my existence. Why would I continue enduring it?

I didn’t have any plan beyond that day; the thought didn’t even enter my mind that they would call any available numbers to figure out why I hadn’t showed up at the office. I didn’t care about anything beyond that morning because I fully intended to kill myself by falling from a great height. I haven’t retained any memory of those moments, just that I didn’t do it, and instead ended up in the library. Where my parents found me. Obviously I got fired. I started my first period as a hikikomori of sorts, terrified of going outside or even leaving the room. I filled bottles with pee for no rational reason. I befriended spiders.

I suppose my whole point about all of this, at nearly five in the morning, is that I’ve never truly wanted to live. I’m just here, and I’m forced to struggle to earn money even though I don’t see any point in continuing to exist other than inertia and occasional pleasure (not only physical but also artistic). I depend on compensatory mechanisms to merely tolerate existing as me: losing myself in daydreams, in music, in writing when I did that, in the brief moments of pleasure that shooting cum out of my penis provides. Otherwise, existing as myself and in this world feels so abhorrently abrasive that without compensatory mechanisms, I would progressively go crazy until I returned to the tides of psychosis of my teenage years.

One of the best memories of my life was after waking up from a colonoscopy: for a few blissful seconds, the anesthetic had completely erased anxiety from my brain. It was like floating in white, not having any care in the world. I understood then why people ended up addicted to such drugs. It also made painfully clear that anxiety is the bedrock of my whole existence. I assume that’s not the case for most other people, or at least to this degree; it’s said that there’s no such thing as autism without an anxiety disorder, which leads me to believe that most of the seemingly empty-headed people in this world, who take such retarded decisions and eventually ruin society with their carelessness, simply don’t worry remotely to the extent that my brain does automatically.

I don’t know. I don’t feel like the same person that produced hundreds of pages of a comic, which I did from years 12 to about 15. I don’t feel the same person who wrote my bizarre free-verse poems in 2021, nor the one who created We’re Fucked, nor the one who grieved for a motocross legend. I feel like something vital in my brain has died. Perhaps it was a base level of hope that I didn’t even know I still retained. A “maybe…” that drove me in the past to attend writing courses, even though they were disastrous and now I wish I hadn’t met any other writer in person. Now I don’t expect anything good from people nor from the world, and for me it’s obvious that it’s only going to get worse as I age, not only because I’m getting older but because everything is getting worse. And one day it will be too much and I’ll simply jump from a great height or tie a noose around my neck. The only way it could end differently is if my health fails me along the way, which it very well may, due to my history of heart issues and nasty migraines that may not be migraines.

Anyway, those were probably enough witching-hour thoughts for a night. I’m going back to bed. I left Alicia in a hotel room somewhere in the sunny Midwest, and I figured that I could introduce her to some futuristic VR glasses and watch a movie that has yet to exist in 1972. Good night, humans.