I’m at one of the lowest points of my life. Not as bad as during plenty of my twenties, in which I existed as a hikikomori of sorts and barely had twenty euros at a time in my bank account. But emotionally, I feel even more done now. Nearing forty-one, having tried to make it as a public servant during my thirties only to end up in the ER thrice with heart and brain issues due to stress I can’t handle. And in retrospect, as an autist with OCD, I should never have put myself in those situations. I guess I thought I could toughen my way through them, but my health told me in certain terms that it’s no way to live. And that it very well could kill me.

I’ve been unemployed for about seven months, and running out of unemployment benefits. I spend most of my time programming projects that I intend to use as references in future resumes whenever I try to get a job as a programmer. But I think that’s mostly a fantasy. In truth, I’m programming these projects because otherwise I’ll feel like I can’t do anything. And I don’t seriously believe that any company will hire an autistic, generally-mentally-ill forty-year-old programmer who has only worked professionally as a programmer for about nine months since my late twenties. I wouldn’t hire me. Of course, I don’t want to do any of it. I don’t even want to interact with human beings.

For these past weeks, or maybe more, I’ve barely looked forward to anything other than sleeping. I just want to be gone. To be forgotten by the world, to not have to face the utter ruin of society, the fact that I don’t want to be here but I can’t truly move anywhere else. I’ve had lots of nights in which I lie in bed and I give myself permission to die in my sleep. I’m not remotely afraid of dying, but I don’t want to deal with the pain. I’ve also fantasized about going somewhere with my guitar, playing for a while, then resting my guitar against the railing of one of the bridges nearby, overlooking the highway, and throwing myself headfirst. A quote from Nietzsche comes to mind: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Some weeks I manage to get through my weightlifting sessions, but other days, like the recent ones, the depression is so physically bad that I can’t get through a single set. Not for psychological reasons: I simply lack the strength.

I haven’t felt like reading or even writing for a good while now. On a fundamental level, I feel done with all of it. You need to be able to sustain the faintest desire for connection with the world and human beings, even hypothetical ones, to engage in something as complex as coming up with a story and spending hours upon hours crafting your way through it. But I don’t want anything to do with human beings. I would be fully content if I could move somewhere that would allow me to never see people again. If as a child I could see myself sitting near paths and playing the guitar regularly like I do now, being heard and seen by dozens of people, I maybe would have considered myself confident, but it’s not the case at all: I simply do not care about others. I don’t expect anything from human beings other than the possibility of being attacked, which I’m wary of and guides my behavior when I’m outside. I’ve had people sitting nearby while I was playing, a few even addressing me afterwards, and I couldn’t wait to disengage.

I find ironic that young couples have gone out of their way to spend part of their date sitting on a bench near where I’m playing, apparently enjoying it, the girl’s head resting against the guy’s shoulder, while my last taste of an intimate relationship was nearly twenty years ago and it proved to me that I wasn’t made to share my intimacy with another human being. I resented the theft of my time, of my energies. The way she would push me to abandon my needs and my desires to fully support hers. Only for her to eventually cheat, leave for the other guy, and contact me occasionally to tell me how much better things were with the other guy and how he didn’t have my shortcomings; calls and messages that I responded to because I had been fully stripped by that point of what little self-esteem and self-respect I had left.

I do retain fantasies about what could have been. That possibly-autistic girl from middle school who pursued me for some reason, to whom I couldn’t respond in anything resembling a human level, and who wrote me these elaborate letters that I never read and that in my mid-twenties I ended up throwing away because I didn’t want to be reminded of the past. That seventeen-year-old basketball player, a reckless, dreamy, idealistic girl who also pursued me, with whom I lay under the stars in a nearby town, and with whom I made out during our only date. I liked her so much, more than anyone I’ve ever liked or ever will, that I ghosted her because I knew that when it inevitably ended, as all of my intimate relationships would, it would utterly devastate me. I felt to my bones that I wouldn’t have been able to recover. So I never spoke to her again. Due to my issues with face blindness, I don’t even know if I ever saw her again.

I went out of my way in my late thirties to enter the apartment building where she lived back then to see if what I remembered of her last name still appeared on the mailboxes, but it didn’t. I can’t even google her to see what happened to her, as the little I’m sure of her last name is that it started with an “M,” and I don’t know if that was the first or the second last name. What I regret of both isn’t that I failed to date them properly: it’s that I never got to know them as I should have. I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and simply talking to them, learning their likes, their hopes, their fears. I know that plenty of these regrets are pure nostalgia. In practice, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with them in person for more than three or so meetings before wishing that I hadn’t gotten involved. Regardless, that’s how I’ve ended up as a forty-year-old man: with only two human beings I would have genuinely wished to be attached to, both of them lost half a life ago, and the sole girl I did spend years with having ended up as a regret of the opposite kind: with me hoping I had never met her at all.

I’m writing this at four in the morning. Almost every night, I go to bed at nine or ten, only to wake up spontaneously at about two or half past two in the morning. I usually sit at the desk and work some more in my projects. Partly due to the depression, along with maybe the natural decay of my interest, I’m quickly losing steam. Recently I’ve been sinking in a depression that barely let me go outside for half an hour every few days. What always works for me, always putting me in a better mood, is playing the guitar. I don’t know why, it always manages to make me feel brighter by the end of it. The process of playing songs seems unaffected by the emotional disregulation and general despair that colors the rest of my existence. I should probably play much more, learn new songs, but the process of having to learn something new is also affected by depression, so I can’t bring myself to it.

I still rely on the old Alicia daydreams every single night. If I go outside, I tend to replay those scenarios as I stroll, partly because I need to move my legs but I don’t want to look around at the ruinous state of society. I don’t know why I depend on my daydreams with this fictional character so much, but I suspect it has to do because she reminds me of my subconscious self, which I’ve always felt to be markedly female, as I used to commune with her back when I was a child, before my neglectful parents exiled me from my bedroom to be placed as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s bedroom so they could free up my room for a third child. That mute second self that inhabits my brain, which is a very real phenomenon, felt so wildly unique, dreamy, colorful, and a myriad positive adjectives, that the trauma of having been ripped from her at seven years old is something I will never recover from. Even as I regained the ability, little by little, to listen to her again in my twenties, I had to face the fact that she had withered, grown scars, become bitter, and markedly insane. And these days she doesn’t even want to create anything new. She prefers to lose herself in daydreams, falling deeper inwards. I can’t blame her. I don’t want any more of this either.

During the worst moments of my recent suicidal ideation, I thought about what would be worth saving from the works that I’ve done. My site would eventually get removed as the payments failed to get through, so all of it would be gone. The sole thing I would consider a true tragedy if it were lost is my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. A story that came out of nowhere and that I wrote as if possessed. One I don’t fully understand but that I assume has to do with my essential trauma, the fundamental separation I suffered regarding my other half. Either that or something that has seeped from a former life. Whenever I think about moments of that story, I feel the urge to tear up. When I visit the very real places mentioned in that story, for example the spot where the narrator and Izar used to meet in front of his apartment building, my chest gets tighter as if I was remembering my own past.

I guess that’s all for now. I’m not sure why I wrote all this. I thought of writing a blog post at different points of this last month, but I couldn’t manage to push past the “why bother” barrier. I don’t know why I managed to push past at nearly five in the morning tonight. I don’t think I have much agency left, if I ever had it. For years it has been obvious to me that by the time any drive reaches the thinking part of the brain, everything has been decided already, and you’re left believing you have any choice in the actions you’re taking. I don’t know if the decisions to come will improve my life to any degree or will contribute to ending it, and to a fundamental level, I don’t care. I’m overdue from that moment back in my very early twenties when I knew I had to jump but I pussied out of it. Once you’ve truly wanted out but you stick around for whatever reason, you remain forever a stranger to this place.