I’m 41 years old, unemployed for more than a year, savings running out, and no drive whatsoever to get another job, as I cannot imagine one that wouldn’t feel like torture to the oversensitive autistic brain that I was born with. The alternative I tried to build has not become viable.

I suspect I may be locked into a state of autistic burnout, if that’s truly a thing (and internet searches suggest that it is), after about seven years of working in IT for a hospital, which sent me to the ER at least three times with heart and brain problems due to stress: arrhythmia, and a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I fear may have been a small stroke, as I haven’t felt the same since that happened. For some reason, despite everything I had learned for about thirty years of how my brain works, I thought I would be able to toughen that job out, and it utterly destroyed me.

Toward the end of that last contract, I was unable to look at my coworkers in the face or even acknowledge their existence, other than my direct bosses who were the sole two people sending me tasks. All the supporting actors of the nightmarish play I had been forced to act in for years were pressures on me to continue acting the part that had been proven to be detrimental to my physical and mental health. I couldn’t wait for my contract to run out and for me to never return there.

I’ve kept busy this past year of unemployment, but sadly it has all been for nothing when it comes to one of my main purposes: finding another source of income that wouldn’t involve working at an office. We’re in a gold rush of sorts regarding video games, and I thought I could find my niche in tabletop games and deep RPGs. Tabletop games in particular. I own a few shelves full of them, and years ago, some of the biggest solitary thrills in my life involved playing them. I was fascinated by their mechanics, the cleverness of their systems, how they engaged my mind. So, as a 40-41 year old man, I developed a comprehensive pipeline to create tabletop games, which involved a sophisticated mechanics catalog with about 220 mechanics, and a way to do an AI-assisted sweep through every single one aligned with the design and emotional requirements of a game concept.

It became easy for me to produce game prototypes on a web browser, but one of the biggest shocks of my adult life is that, when it came time to actually playtest the games I was producing, I realized I couldn’t care to play them. I found myself utterly unengaged. And not because of the games I was creating; if anything, the fact I was tailoring them to my supposed tastes made developing them more interesting. But whatever allowed me years ago to be engaged when playing board games no longer seems to be part of my brain. And I can’t immerse myself in video games anymore, either. I get a pervasive sense that there’s no point to any of it, that involving my mental faculties in any of it would be a waste of time. So I ended up parking my big projects that were supposed to make me money down the line.

That pervasive sense that nothing is worth the effort has extended to the extent that I’m uninterested in virtually everything in life. I don’t care to learn what’s going on in the world; I know it’s going to be terrible. I can’t be arsed to learn about subjects such as history, archaeology, and other stuff that used to fascinate me; I feel there’s no point to any of it anymore. The single subject I’ve managed to care about outside of my personal projects (like producing songs) has been a sudden obsession with a 70s actress for reasons that my brain isn’t eager to share. Other than that, I truly wish to know nothing whatsoever about anything. It feels like any knowledge beyond that will wound me, torture me somehow.

I’ve always been a low energy person, but it has only gotten worse with age. Just this morning, I forced myself to take a stroll a few streets away from home, along generally deserted paths, to daydream and read more of Sissy Spacek’s autobiography, but I felt my body pulling down on me. A mere hour of walking around utterly exhausts me, to the extent that I have to take a nap after lunch. And even with the nap, by about nine or ten at night, I’m completely done. I’ve gotten blood tests done (I’m required to, due to a pituitary gland tumor I was born with and that I’m chronically on treatment for), but nothing in those results makes it obvious why I feel such exhaustion. It’s like being conscious, or even alive at all, is a huge burden on my energies.

And of course, high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD, my personal demons, make being conscious a nightmare in general. The older I get, the more I’m aware that my inability to connect with human beings on any significant level is the most crippling thing in my life, far more than my oversensitivity to sensory stimuli, or my pervasive anxiety the moment I’m not alone in a room. Merely being around my family members growing up, or meeting people, would have been fulfilling otherwise, but human beings are a constant annoyance, a source of pain and anxiety. Every interaction with them feels at least pointless, but usually worse than that, because I can gain close to nothing from those experiences, while they can burden me with terrible memories that my OCD will make sure to bring up at random points of the day. The only reason why I would even consider interacting with someone I’m not forced to deal with is if they would feed my sexual fantasies.

It happens daily, at all hours, but just as I was strolling this morning along a quiet stretch of grass behind a gym, bordering the Bidasoa river, my brain hit me with a vivid recreation of “Hey, remember when back when you were twenty-one or so, you brought your then-girlfriend to meet your family, and it was an embarrassing disaster?” I had to stop once again, in sudden psychic pain, and repeat my mental litanies of “Leave me alone, there’s no point in me remembering that now” until the OCD demon left me be for a few minutes. It’s hard for me to comprehend, as apparently is the case, that most other human beings don’t have to endure such mental assaults daily. And that’s not even counting the intrusive thoughts of violent, sexual or generally disgusting nature. For example, I abhor when shitheads out there spit in the streets. Not only does it make me cringe, but my OCD also produces intrusive imagery such as me licking the spit off the ground. It also happens with random stuff in gutters. I also get intrusive, vivid imagery of me pushing sharp or hot stuff into my eyes, and plenty of other stuff I don’t want to get into at the moment.

I’ve mentioned before that I will never drive a car nor hold a baby, because I don’t trust myself to remain myself when the inevitable onslaught of intrusive images comes. I’ve already dropped valuable stuff after intrusive imagery prompted me to do so and it found me too exhausted to resist. I have a very vivid imagination, and when I’m too tired, a vivid intrusive mental GIF of me doing something can slip into an immediate order to my body. I ruined someone’s hard drive when I was a teenager due to this, and I also dropped a coffee onto an extraordinarily understanding customer that didn’t deserve any of it. This demon is my antediluvian source of chaos, violence, and sexual deviancy that has been my most reliable friend ever since I was born.

I also have to deal with passive suicidality. I had a concrete plan to kill myself back when I was 23-24. I chickened out of it, like the little bitch I am. I had to deal with consequences that I was sure wouldn’t come, because they wouldn’t find me alive to face them. But on a regular basis, I find myself wishing, giving myself permission even, not to wake up again. And almost always when I wake up, I’m disappointed to have to endure more hours of being alive. That’s with me being unemployed; when I was employed, my attitude when waking up was “The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors,” to quote Ignatius Reilly. Whose author also had mental issues, and ended up killing himself. My daydreams and regular dreams are so vivid, and vastly more interesting than anything that has ever happened to me, that over the years I’ve lost interest in watching movies, reading stories, etc., because whatever my daydreams or dreams could show me would beat virtually all of it.

I’ve always been a person driven to creative pursuits. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a comic book author. Well, technically I wanted to become a manga author, even though I’m not Japanese. I also wanted to be a songwriter, even though I didn’t know how to play an instrument back then. Afterwards, I wanted to become a writer. I spent most of my late teenage years writing a disastrous, psychotic novel that years later I ended up throwing away, as I felt that rereading it would contaminate my brain (now I’ve regretted it for the single reason that I used the last name of the girl I liked most for one of the characters, and I’ve ended up forgetting it, so I couldn’t search for her online). I wrote a few books that ended up self-published for virtually no readers. I attended writing courses that showed me that I don’t actually like writers, and that my writings disturb and/or annoy others. I was accused of lacking empathy by an instructor; along with the passive-aggressive barbs that another instructor, an elderly man who ended up dying shortly after, was throwing me in the other class I was attending at the time, I dropped out of both, and never engaged again with the local writing scene. Never felt the need to do anything similar again.

I love to write when I truly need to do so, but I see no point, nor really miss it, when my brain doesn’t compel me to write stories. The best work I’ve ever done, as far as I’m concerned, was the tale of a motocross legend, which was truly about the fundamental trauma of my life (neglect destroying my childhood). From time to time, my brain compelled me to write certain stories, only for that same brain to flip the switch a few chapters in and decide that I had already gotten everything I needed to get out of that experience, so I should move on. And given that I have virtually no readers (except for whatever nosy bastard is reading these words) and I’m not getting paid, there’s no point in pushing myself to finish anything.

If I had to summarize how I’ve felt throughout my life, I guess it’s the sense that my whole existence was a mistake from the moment I was born. From my physical and mental issues, from the family I was put in, from the environment I was forced to endure. I’ve felt that there was little point in even trying to succeed when I was dealing with such terrible cards. The right play was to fold and wait for better odds. Or for a reset button. When I think of the abdominal pains I get on a daily basis, likely due to IBS, I’ve thought that maybe it’s bowel cancer. And when I imagine myself being told that it’s actually cancer and at an advanced stage, I feel relief. Other than technological advances that may interest me, I see nothing of worth down this path I’m forced to be on. The things that feel worth engaging with (experiencing the seventies; growing up in a small, tight-knit community; hanging out with people that I genuinely admire and who interest me; being able to make a living through my talents) are permanently outside of my reach. Some of them, literally impossible. So it’s inertia for me. Still hanging around because there’s no simple “off” button that I can press to end this ride.

The main point, I guess, is that I need a way of living I can sustain (even though I don’t even want to stick around), and at present, I can’t see how to build it.