These last four days I’ve felt the darkness gathering at the edges of my being. Losing any intention of going outside. Lying in bed and hoping I wouldn’t get to wake up and endure any more.
A couple of hours ago I lay down, put on my VR headset, and tried to concentrate on watching a movie from the seventies (concretely Serpico). The other day was The Conversation. For whatever reason, I’ve always felt a pull toward the 1970s, even before Alicia Western. A feeling that somehow I belong to that time. Experiencing things from that era fills me with a nostalgia that hollows out my chest. The strong notion that I should have been there, should still be there. Another one of the many things in my life I haven’t understood about myself.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable among human beings, likely due to autism, and that doesn’t change much when I have to see people on a screen. To focus on a movie I have to get over a base ickiness, a discomfort. So much of what I see on a screen feels alien to me: how people interact with each other, how they react to things. Watching stuff from the 1970s adds a layer on top of that; it’s already been fifty fucking years, but it feels like it a whole different era. As if everyone from back then had been dead for a long, long time. And there are the absurd pains, like a moment when Al Pacino as this Serpico dude walks down the street and touches a girl’s head, and I wonder what happened to that person’s life. Her next fifty years of enduring on this earth. Is she alive or is she dead.
I haven’t been able to watch any of the movies I’ve tried recently for more than twenty minutes at a time or so. Maybe it’s depression-induced anhedonia. Maybe I’ve genuinely been losing my ability to enjoy things. Novels haven’t said much to me in a long time, and the only ones I cared for in the last few years or so were McCarthy’s works, someone whose soul was tragically anchored in the seventies. I’m no longer at an age in which I can lose myself in videogames; I know there are great stories waiting for me in stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, but whenever I reinstall it, I play it once for like four hours, and then I can’t bring myself to launch it again.
I was born in Spain but I’ve never felt like I belong here. Technically I was born in the Basque Country region, but I’m not a separatist. I don’t connect with the locals. Things are so fucking bad here; we’re easily the most retarded country in Europe, that in no time will get even worse than the UK, France and Belgium when it comes to ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people. I have no hope for Spaniards, as I’ve had to work with your average one; all of them hooked to the state-sponsored media. They smugly spout the socialist garbage they’ve been fed as if they couldn’t conceive anyone thinking differently. They don’t even see it as politics; for them, that’s the natural state of things, and if you disagree, you’re a freak. The few times I’ve made the mistake of giving them an inch, hearing their thoughts beyond work-related matters reminded me again why I shouldn’t have.
In general, I feel like I’ve been dead for a long time and my body is taking decades to figure it out. Whenever that actually comes, I don’t think I’ll miss or feel any particular attachment to the stuff that at the time seemed so important to me: the stories I’ve written, the music I’ve loved, other projects of mine. It served its purpose while they happened, then they ceased being mine. I’m around because I’m around, then at some point I’ll cease to be and that’ll be that.
In a month or so I’ll have to start looking for a job. I don’t believe I’ll get hired as a forty-year-old programmer in this new era in which AI can do the work of a whole office of programmers. I’ll probably have to look for protected job as someone with a 52% disability. And I won’t do it for any other reason than the money. It seems there are people out there that get other benefits from the job: interacting with people, dealing with responsibilities… I want none of that. Working has always been a hell I had to get through merely to receive money at the end of the month.
Last time I spoke with my mother she asked me about work. I told her again that I don’t care about any of it. These “normal” people always try to deceive you, maybe because they deceive themselves, by going on about how jobs are more than things you endure because of money. And maybe it is for some people, but not for me. The last time they called me for a job in IT, which ended up falling through, I suffered a panic attack, my whole body telling me that I couldn’t return to that hell that put me thrice in the ER for heart and brain issues. I can’t allow myself to suffer the levels of stress I endured. No amount of money is worth that.
I guess that’s all I had to say at the moment. Not sure why I felt like saying any of it, who do I think is reading any of this, or why they would care about it.
This morning, at about eight, I found myself awake in this disappointing world once again. I decided to stay in bed for a little while longer, immersing myself in my usual daydreams that take place in 1972 and involve someone I would like to talk to. Then my phone rang. I don’t engage with people; I only use my phone to text my parents rarely. A call is always either spam or something bad.
It was the HR department of the Basque public health organization for which I worked as a technician for seven years. They were offering me a job to cover someone’s paternity leave. I was immediately distraught, but also confused, because I had spoken with the Occupational Health department last year, and given that nobody had called me for work in December, I figured the matter was settled. It clearly wasn’t. The job offer wasn’t at the usual hospital, but at another I’ve never worked (but that is located basically next door to the previous one). That threw me off bad. I asked the HR person if I could think about it. She told me that I could only think about it for like ten minutes at the most, because I was supposed to start this very same morning.
I hung up. Anxiety had already spiked to the point of nausea. Working in IT had sent me to the ER thrice for heart and brain problems. The last one made me feel like I had a stroke, and I’m not convinced that my brain left fully healed. They called it a hemiplegic migraine, something I had never experienced before. All triggered by stress.
I have so-called high-functioning autism, which, despite how it may sound like, is only high-functioning relative to autists that spend all day groaning and hitting themselves (or others). I also have the Pure O OCD comorbidity. Intrusive thoughts, adherence to strict patterns. Living in my mind, if I say so myself, is a sort of hell.
It was obvious from the beginning that working IT at a big hospital was like someone pushing me against a person-shaped whole in the wall that simply didn’t match. Day to day, you only rarely know what you’re going to deal with. Someone may call from an operating room because their computer has ceased working during someone’s spine surgery, and they know it’s not our job but the technician from the external company doesn’t know how to fix it and whether we could go and make it work. Someone may call you to blame “computer guys” because they accidentally gave a baby an incorrect dose and killed it. Both of which happened. Of course most are mundane like someone forgetting how their fingers work when typing their password. Or calling to say their computer didn’t have internet, claiming that nothing had changed, and neglecting to say that they had pulled out the network cable and put it back on incorrectly.
I could mention many things about that job. All I want to say is that by the end, they put me in charge of supervising the replacement of about one thousand printers across the complex. That involved me going room to room, meeting people, having to argue with them because they didn’t want their printers replaced, asking me to install functionalities that I had nothing to do with handling, and the general bitching that you get when you put women together in an office. I also struggled to handle a Gen-Z worker who was a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. Motherfucker agreed to replace printers in some rooms at some time and date, which had me organizing with local workers to avoid disturbing their schedules, only for the motherfucker to change his mind basically because he felt like replacing other printers. He also did things like leaving work early then telling his boss that I had claimed he could replace nothing more that day.
By the end, I was done with everything. My brain made it clear when I suddenly smelled of burnt dust, my right hand could barely hold my pen, and I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. Hemiplegic migraine, so said a doctor younger than me. In the past, some doctors had gotten annoyed when I mentioned the fact that I had only started experiencing heart issues when they jabbed me with the Moderna poison, which now is widely known to cause heart problems. I have very, very little confidence in the medical profession after having had to deal with them both as a worker and as a patient.
But I figured, I’m unemployed, I’m unlikely to get work as a forty-year-old programmer who has only worked at it for nine months in the last ten years, at least under contract. So I called the HR person back and said that I was taking the contract. A month and a half at a new hospital dedicated purely to cancer patients. After I hung up, I groaned out of pure psychic pain. The anxiety in my chest was something akin to panic.
I was waiting for the bus when I received a call from HR. A supervisor. Asked me how come I had accepted a job at the other hospital when they had been informed by Occupational Health that I wasn’t taking offers as a technician. That I can’t choose to work as a technician for one hospital but not another. I told them that I thought Occupational Health had already handled that. They told me they would call back. I waited at the bus stop while construction workers drilled incredibly loudly close by, and some fucking imbecile listened to music without earbuds. I thought, as I do often, about how is it possible that people actually want to live in this world. About five minutes before my bus came, HR called back. I was supposed to meet with Occupational Health immediately.
So I took the bus to Donostia and met with the doctor who had seen me previously. I thought she had declared me unfit for the job position due to my autism, OCD, and 52% disability in general. My certification for “job fitness” is currently expired. She told me that I should have spoken with HR to tell them that I quit the job listings. Then she asked me if I had been looking for a job in the meantime. I told her no, that I had been dealing with autism-related issues and that I struggled to leave the house. Then I stopped talking because I felt like I would tear up.
In the end, she told me that she’d speak with HR and tell them not to call me for technician jobs anymore. Right now I’m beginning to feel relieved about it, but on my way back, I was in a bad place. Standing at the bus stop with my earbuds on, listening to nineties Weezer, while old people milled about close by, asking people about bus times. A young woman stopped before me to ask likely for the same thing, and I pointed at my earbuds without making eye contact. All I wanted, all I want really, is to be left the fuck alone. For the world to forget I exist. To have a small place for myself and to be left in peace.
Anyway, I guess that’s it. I really hope I’ll never hear from that public health organization again jobwise. But I suspect that I’ll receive a call from HR at some point for me to formalize abandoning the job listings.
In forty years, I feel like I haven’t changed at all in what matters. I’m still that child that wanted to be left to his devices and daydream the day away. Everything else is just garbage that society has piled up on me. What I’ve learned from my experience is that I’m not suited for anything that society demands of me. I have no plans for the future either. If it gets too bad, the recourse is a tall bridge. I don’t like being around anyway.
For whatever reason, recently I’ve been thinking about the wound that has defined me the most. The majority of the stories I genuinely need to produce come back to that wound in one echo or another. Maybe it’s related to me having become forty-years-old. I would say middle-aged, but there’s no way in hell I’m living to eighty. Anyway, my fatal wound happened back when I was seven years old, when my mother asked me, as if you could ask a child to make such a decision, whether I wanted to move in with my older brother to free up my room so they could have another child.
My memory is abysmal, which I suspect is a blessing. Most of my forty years of living has been reduced to a bunch of photographs or sequences of frames that barely seem to cover anything. It’s like trying to reconstruct an epoch from the few fossils you come across. But I recall that until I was seven, I lived entangled to my subconscious. Like I was married to it. Daydreaming all day long. Making what my subconscious told me to create. Some adults that came across the stuff from those years were surprised. As in “a child that age doesn’t create stuff like this.” Unfortunately, it also included narratives that would make A Clockwork Orange blush; not for nothing I’ve always felt that I had darkness deep in me from birth. But the point is that I peaked back then, at about six or seven. When I truly communed with myself, and was whole.
From the moment I was put as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, until I turned eighteen and nearly beat him to a pulp, I was, a then-undiagnosed autistic kid with Pure O OCD, subjected to having the TV and radio on virtually always, including nights, because apparently enduring the silence was unbearable. I won’t get into my brother’s issues, but they’re plenty and complex in a way that anyone who has ever met him is surprised that such stuff even happens. I had been stripped of my safe space, of my solitude, of any corner purely for myself in which I could grow. I was like a plant forgotten under the stairs.
Looking back, the extreme to which I dissociated from my subconscious from then on is terrifying to think about. I genuinely came to believe that my natural instincts and impulses, everything that came from my brain without my conscious permission, was monstrous. I ceased knowing myself. I depersonalized. Throughout my teens I experienced something that only those who have endured the same thing will know I’m not exaggerating about: as I walked outside, I felt like I was commanding a puppet that I could barely coordinate, while I saw myself from the outside looking down, the edges of my vision constraining into a blurry tunnel. I slipped in and out of psychosis. The stuff I wrote back then was so incoherent that years later I threw it away because I feared that reading it again would contaminate me. And that included a novel about seven hundred pages long, which I rewrote again and again for years. I was sure I was going to die before I turned eighteen. I did pray to some eldritch god to come down and kill me. But I survived.
Shortly after my first job started, I saw how the rest of my life was going to be: enduring humiliation after humiliation, unbearable anxiety, under constant scrutiny as if every day was an exam I was sure to fail. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced a job like that again, but added to the despair I was already feeling, led me the closest I’ve ever been to erasing myself from this Earth. I’ve lost the memories of the aftermath, other than the fact that somehow I ended in the library, where my parents, who had been called by my job because I hadn’t shown up, found me. From then on, until my late twenties, with breaks of more unpaid internships than paid work, I basically lived as a hikikomori. In my late twenties, I thought that the only way I could make something out of my life was by selling my writings, of which I had done little since I was a child (somewhat counting the comics I drew in middle school). I wrote two books with a total of six novellas. They didn’t sell for shit, and mostly disturbed the people who read them. That discouraged me entirely, and I never wrote in Spanish again. However, writing those books helped me to slowly, laboriously, reconnect with my subconscious. Learn to recognize its desires and commands.
Early in my thirties, I started working in IT for a hospital. Terrible job that fought against my nature, and that I had to leave about seven to eight years later. But by then, now diagnosed and medicated for some other issues, I started producing fiction in English. This was by far my most prolific period. From seven to about twenty-seven years old, I identified with my conscious mind to a sickly degree, and believed that anything I couldn’t rationalize, any conclusion I didn’t reach through reason, was suspect, if not straight monstrous. But from my thirties onward, I no longer care, unless I’m forced to for the sake of money, about my conscious mind. It’s merely a tool to interpret and obey whatever my subconscious produces. The conscious mind also needs to be reigned in, because it acts as a lawyer, confusing and justifying what the subconscious has already decided, and often getting it completely wrong. I have learned that there are indeed monsters in me. I’ve also learned that I prefer the company of monsters.
That fatal wound in my past won’t heal. It broke my brain during development in ways that can never mend. I have to do the best I can with what I have. I don’t feel like interacting with humans, and those who have interacted with me for sustained periods of time (mostly at work), soon enough sense that there’s nobody “there.” In public, I’m a simulacrum of a human being. Left to my own devices, I’m some creature that doesn’t need definition nor to justify itself to anyone.
I also thought recently about something I witnessed when I was a teenager. I was returning home when I heard a commotion from four young people in their twenties who had parked in front of my parents’ apartment building. It was almost the same spot, if not the same, where my father parked the day I saw a UFO, when I looked up from the window only to find out it was right there. I wrote about it on this post, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Anyway, those young people in the car seemed freaked out, confused, out of it, but not in a “they’re drugged” way. They flagged down a passerby, and asked him if they were close to Barcelona. These weren’t foreigners; their plates were from Spain. The passerby, more disturbed than amused, scoffed and said, “Barcelona? You’re about seven hundred kilometers away! This is Irún, near the border with France.” The young people in the car, panicked, looked around frantically as if incapable of understanding how they had ended up there.
I haven’t made that up. I just don’t think about it often because it makes no sense. That day, I walked away, but I’ve imagined myself approaching them and asking, “What is the last thing you remember?” “Did you see any lights?” I imagine myself telling them that if anyone did this to them, they could have easily killed them but didn’t, so they should just try to relax and get on with their lives.
I don’t know what it means. That could be applied to the entirety of what I’ve lived through. Trying to understand myself is like spelunking with a dim light through passages that keep changing. And I’m still here because I just happen to be. I suspect that when I finally realize I’m breathing my last, a smile will be on my lips. Then, I will tend my hand inwards to the love of my life, who was there for me as a child when I didn’t have anyone else, and who waited patiently for years until I went down into that darkness to find her again.
I’ve woken up at three in the morning. Although I tried to fall asleep again, my brain started doing the rounds with sequences of intrusive thoughts which would have had me rolling around for hours, tangled with painful stuff, so I figured I could get to the computer and write some words about things that have crossed my mind recently.
It’s December, and temperatures have naturally gone down to the extent that most days I can’t sit outside to play the guitar, which I need to do for emotional regulation. I’m not comfortable doing it at home because it feels like I’m bothering the neighbors. Whenever we get a good enough day weather-wise, I take advantage of it to head to some nearby wooded area to play for about an hour and a half. I did that yesterday: went to one of the most deserted wooded paths I know and that I can be bothered to head to on foot, then sat down to play through my usual songs. A few people passed by, mostly folks with their dogs or running.
As I was playing, an old couple passed by, and the old man went out of his way to talk to me. He gestured to the surroundings and to the sky and said something like “We’re in nature.” I didn’t have much time to think about what this fool was on about as I played, so I just nodded at him so he would leave me alone. There’s something inherently wrong with people who interrupt someone while they’re playing an instrument. He must have taken the hint that I didn’t want to engage, but as he left, he said something like “Cheer up.” His quiet wife followed him.
What the fuck? I was objectively playing a sad song (Iron & Wine’s “Passing Afternoon”), but still. Do I look so sad that some random old idiot would go out of his way to comment on it? Perhaps I do look like that. I have lived with what feels like low-level depression ever since I was a child, which cyclically spikes into full-blown depression. It seems obvious from basic observation of other people that they don’t seem as down as I do on a daily basis. They must get some enjoyment out of being alive that completely escapes me. Most of my drive behind the complicated endeavors I engage with on a daily basis involves distracting myself from the feeling that life is an unbearable burden.
The objectively most positive reaction I’ve had to my playing the guitar (even though it bothered me) happened perhaps a couple of months ago, when I was playing at a park. I don’t play in the middle of it, but off the path, seated on my portable stool in front of a tree. Some woman in maybe her late twenties, maybe Central or South American (can’t tell easily these days), carrying a book, went out of her way to figure out where the guitar music was coming from, then she walked off the path and sat with her back against the nearest tree to read. That tree was at a distance of about what you would naturally place a bench from the next one. People don’t do this on this park.
She was clearly listening to my playing, which she did for the next full hour or so. Because I’m a maniac, I kept playing even though it was so dark I could no longer see the strings properly, but she was still sitting there. Once I finished, she also stood up and walked up to the path. I thought she was gone, but after I gathered my things and took to the path again, she was sitting on a bench. As I passed, she turned toward me smiling, and said “Thank you for your music.”
As usual, my instinctive reactions to people talking to me aren’t the kinds I can use; my instinct is either to stay quiet or to say something that wouldn’t be appropriate. In this case, what came to my mind was saying “It’s not my music.” Instead, I scrambled to figure out something fitting to say to someone who had gone out of their way to listen to me play. I said “Thank you… for liking it.” She laughed softly and said, “Yes, yes.” I turned around and followed the path heading out of the park, while I contained the creepy-crawly feeling I get on my skin half of the time that I interact with a member of this species.
I don’t know if the following is related, but it’s what my mind pivoted to: as I was lying in bed forty minutes ago, a vivid scene that years ago I used to play through regularly reappeared. It always started with sitting at the waiting room of a driving school only to find out that beside you sat the love of your life, the sole person in the world who understood how it felt to be born cursed by both your circumstances and your impulses. I’m talking about Oyasumi Punpun, which may be my favorite work of fiction in any medium. I daydream daily to survive psychologically, and years ago I used to revisit that connection over and over, giving it a more deserving outcome. Well, I don’t know if “more deserving,” but a better outcome.
That got me thinking that it feels like I’ve read through every single affecting manga that exists. Inio Asano, the author of Punpun, is clearly done: he’s only created jaded, bitter, and cynical shit for the last few years. It’s as if he no longer believes in honest meaning. While the aforementioned series is my favorite, my overall favorite author is Minoru Furuya (I wrote about his works on here). I immediately connected with the peculiar way his mind works in a manner that suggests to me that he’s also autistic and has OCD. Sadly, he seems to have retired back in 2016. Beyond manga, I can’t bring myself to read novels these days; the sole author I respected was Cormac McCarthy, but he’s dead. And it somewhat disheartened me to find out that McCarthy himself barely did anything new in the last twenty to thirty years of his life; his extremely-affecting last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were conceived back in the seventies and eighties, when he actually lived through some of the experiences those narratives refer to.
I find myself, as a forty year old, feeling that I have nothing to do with this culture and this world in general, which seems achingly obvious the moment I leave my apartment. It feels like I’ve already experienced all the works that could affect me meaningfully. All the artists whose works I genuinely loved have lost it, retired, or died. Talking to actual human beings does close to nothing for me (I’m lucky if it does anything positive for me, even temporarily), so I can’t rely on that either. I wonder if this is what happens to people in the last stage of their lives: they feel so completely detached from the world that there’s no point engaging with it in any way. I recall the last image I had of my maternal grandfather, being pushed around on a wheelchair after his wife’s funeral, his head down, not having said a word the entire day that I recall. Never saw him again.
I do get those regularly, too: sudden images of people from my past I’ll never see again. That girl from middle school whom I’ve talked about a few times, who received a nasty scar that bisected her forehead. That basketball player with whom I was involved very briefly when I was seventeen or so; I’ve never liked someone I knew personally more than I liked her. A different teenage girl I met while I was hanging out with people I shouldn’t have been involved with; she was extremely self-conscious about scars on her face she got as a baby because the family dog attacked her. I dated her for merely a week before my craziness convinced her to stay away. Curiously, I have to go out of my way to remember the woman I dated for the longest time. The regret I feel for that relationship isn’t the “I wish I could have done better for her” that I get for those other people. I’m glad I haven’t seen that last one in about twenty years.
I guess that’s enough. Half past five in the morning. I’m going back to bed, back to the daydreams that will hopefully slide me back to sleep and therefore save me temporarily from this absurd nightmare of being conscious.
Yesterday, when I went out for groceries, I tried to change it up a bit, heading to a different neighborhood than usual so I could feel more alive than merely repeating the usual routines. Really cold November morning, about 4ºC. It seeped through my jeans, making me wish I had worn some leg warmers. For someone who recently wants to return to bed the moment he climbs out of it, I wished I could go back home and not leave again until spring. The experience of navigating through that supermarket, of listening to the people in it (customers, employees), felt surreal, as if I were exploring a snapshot from another era. I felt detached, simultaneously feeling invisible yet suspecting that others realized I didn’t belong, not just in the supermarket but in this world.
I had known that losing my beloved cat would hurt like a motherfucker, but I hadn’t realized that she was my emotional link to reality. In my teens, I was sure that I wouldn’t survive until adulthood. My first paying job ended with me having a panic attack, ditching the bus to work and instead intending to jump from somewhere high enough. I hadn’t planned anything from beyond that point, as I believed I wouldn’t be around anymore, so I hadn’t considered that my job would call the available phone numbers. That led to my parents finding me in the local library after I chickened out from killing myself. I retain very little in terms of memories from those moments, but I recall that sinking feeling of realizing that I was going to stick around for consequences even though I didn’t want to be here anymore.
Throughout these last twenty years, having endured many periods of suicidal ideation, what kept me moored was the notion that I didn’t want my cats to miss me. I couldn’t care to that extent about my parents or my siblings (I had to go back and add “or my siblings” there, as I had suddenly remembered they exist). Now, as a forty year old, about twenty years older than I thought I would live, I find myself out of a job, with no interested in rejoining society, with an inability to care for human beings mainly due to my high-functioning autism and a generous dose of bad experiences, and a sense of detachment that I thought I had left behind in my teens. Even regular sounds seem strange now. Forming sentences feels awkward and unnatural. I recall that while I was browsing in that supermarket, I wondered if something was physically wrong with my brain, as I had trouble registering what was going on around me and even understanding what I was looking at.
Obviously I’m going through a crisis, which has found me ill-suited to navigate it. The only comfortable moments I’ve had recently had been evading myself in my usual daydreams involving a certain blonde American who died in 1972, but I also enjoyed watching Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus, somewhat against myself, as I don’t find the concept that interesting. I feel that I can’t do anything about the crisis itself or what’s going on in my brain other than distract myself to the best of my abilities until I settle into a new angle of repose. I’ve gone through many such fundamental changes. I’m not remotely the same person who wrote my novel My Own Desert Places, I’m not the same person who wrote We’re Fucked, neither the one who mourned for his long-dead girlfriend in Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I don’t know where those people went. Ultimately I can only do whatever my mercurial subconscious tasks me with doing, as I don’t get any emotional rewards out of doing anything else.
I suspect there’s plenty more to be said, but I intend to distract myself with my programming project. This afternoon I’ll try to leave the apartment for a while, solely to retain the sense that I’m still alive. One foot after the other.
An hour ago I received a call from the Occupational Health doctor I visited last week. I had talked to her about the fact that working in IT had sent me thrice to the ER, two for arrhythmia and the last one for a supposed hemiplegic migraine that felt like a stroke, so I only intended to accept programming roles. This morning, on the phone, she told me she had spoken with my former employer at the hospital where I have worked on-and-off for the last seven years, and he told her that programming has been externalized, but that he would talk to HR for future job offers to see if my role in an IT contract could be constrained.
After she explained this to me, I remained silent for a few seconds, trying to understand what that would even mean. I told her that working in IT is either solving user’s problems on the phone or in person, with week-long additional phone duties, and all the while having to tolerate IT technicians for whom silence and basic respect for other people’s peace of mind seems to be a personal offense. The only possible duty of the IT job that wouldn’t screw with my brain and heart would be network rack stuff, but that’s 5-10% of the job. The Occupational Health doctor told me that she would call me tomorrow so I could make a decision: either accept a six-month trial period for supposedly duty-constrained roles, all vague as hell, and that for all I know could revert to the normal state of affairs the very first day, or else get removed from the job listings, which means that I would have sacrificed my source of income.
All I could think about that was “Please leave me the fuck alone.” My whole body weighs down as if demanding me to lie somewhere. Shortly after waking up this morning, having trouble leaving the bed, I was fantasizing about how nice it would be to jump off a fucking bridge. And I have to make a decision about whether to keep a paycheck that involves threats to my brain and heart, or restart my career at forty.
I feel unmoored. Detached from this world and from the reality of it all. Terrified of returning to any sort of responsibility. I’ve had to drag myself out of the apartment because I know that otherwise I’ll just spend hours wanting to lie down in bed. I’m even resenting having to tend to my remaining cat, who is on permanent medication for kidney failure and keeps making these “akh-akh” sounds that the vet said are common with his condition. My cat is also feeling the sudden loss of the other cat, who died four or five days ago; whenever he isn’t sleeping, he follows me around, sits at my feet, or hides under the covers, as if fearing an invisible predator that will make him disappear too. And he’s right to fear it: he’s eighteen, and that invisible predator will make him disappear soon enough. Like it eventually makes everyone else disappear.
I want to be left the fuck alone. For the entire world to forget I exist. Not have to be bound by anything. To lie in bed and daydream for days at a time, if I even have to be alive at all. Right now, in this mental state, anything other than ASMR is too grating to my senses, as if they had been scrubbed raw. I briefly considered talking to some professional about this whole stuff, but then I remembered that I had seen about five therapists from age 17 to about 31, and it did fuck all other than waste my time and money.
I have been jolted awake at half past four by intrusive thoughts of my cat getting killed by a dog back in 2018. I remember the tail end of that dream: I was with someone, a girl I believe, trying to build a small shed in some lonely street corner to hang out (something I’ve never done in real life), only for the dream-sight to change into that of a pregnant cat navigating a small maze that resembled the spaces of those double windows that have like buffers in between. Suddenly my real-life cat showed up in the dream, and with it the grief and shame, and I just woke up. Went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, then sat down at the computer to write the following to ChatGPT:
I am 40 years old, I have been diagnosed with high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s), and also Pure O OCD. It’s now half past four in the morning and I have been woken up by intrusive thoughts of a cat of mine who died brutally back in 2018; a dog gave her a mortal wound and we had to sacrifice her the same day. Ever since, I remember that cat weekly, as in maybe there are some days in the week in which I don’t get intrusive thoughts about it. The way my brain works, I don’t even get good memories, just pure negative ones, like the times when I was nine and I hurt a girl’s heart because I pretended I didn’t remember that she had wanted us to start going out together the day before; or the time I went to school as a child with different shoes, or the times I was so miserable in school that I had to ditch class almost daily and I lingered in the dark in random apartment buildings, sitting for hours in the stairwells. I feel like my brain is constantly under siege by intrusive thoughts, and every new experience I expose myself to will just cram more intrusive thoughts that will torture me for the rest of my life. I’m currently unemployed, but when I had a job, it felt so alienating to see my coworkers so happily laugh the shift away, while I have to deal not only with intrusive thoughts but also all the stuff related to autism (and also heart issues because of the covid vaccine, and other bodily problems because my development was screwed by a pituitary gland tumor).
I’m telling you not only to vent, but to ask in a general sense, what the fuck do I do with my life?
As it produced its response, tears rolled down my cheeks. Those thick, silent tears that come with a strange pressure in your chest. Artificial intelligence helps me daily in so many ways, but it has never told me anything useful about this.
It’s yet another time in which I have to think about the flood of intrusive thoughts that I have to wade through merely to get through the day, even if that day only involves sitting at home working on my programming project (for one reason or another, I haven’t gone out in four days). I am sure that this is what’s going to kill me: the growing hill of intrusive thoughts one day will catch me so low that I’ll have no choice but to get rid of myself with whatever is available around. And it may happen any day.
Someone else wrote on the subject of OCD on Reddit: “OCD is an endless painful torturous cycle. You can’t stop thinking about the things that you don’t want to think about. No matter what you do, no matter how much reassurance you get, it doesn’t stop. The thoughts themselves are literally painful. I don’t know how else to describe them. They are like knives stabbing me in the brain.” Although due to the Pure O variant I don’t have external rituals, purely mental ones (or at least I don’t recognize my compulsions), those words fit perfectly with my experience.
What’s even more alienating is that people who don’t suffer from autism and OCD can’t seem to understand the experience of it at all. I’ve had people, usually indirectly and online, say stuff like, “change your perspective and think differently,” elaborated into complex platitudes. It usually made me want to punch such people in the face. The way other human’s brains seem to work is so alien to me, that as I mentioned to ChatGPT, it felt so painfully alienating to work at an office and see people smile and laugh at fucking nothing (like this stupid youngish female technician whom I internally referred to as the “cackler,” whose every third utterance was a cackle-like laugh). Meanwhile, for me, being awake is a hell that I constantly have to distract myself from by disappearing into daydreams (usually of the soothing nature, pure non-sexual intimacy with someone I would like to talk to), writing (back when I did that regularly), and working on my programming projects. Also lifting weights when I can push myself to do so. The thought came to mind, probably from some quote, that “being awake is like courting disaster at every step.”
I’m so fucking tired. There’s the whole unemployment issue; I can’t imagine myself trying to get out there, talking to random people and basically beg to be hired, so I can return to routines that will hurt me. I briefly thought of talking to a therapist, but my experience with about five therapists since I was 16 is that their profession is a sham and that the only help they can provide is that of a listening ear. A very expensive listening ear. And don’t get me started on the “let’s see if it works” pills that some push. That fucking brain zapping from SSRIs.
I don’t know what else to say. It’s 5:30 now. I’ll probably lie down and conjure up some pleasant scene with Alicia, somewhere in the Midwest. I better haul my aging ass out today for a guitar session in the quiet woods, because I see myself slipping into my hikikomori mode like back in my twenties.
Look at the lovely images of this video I generated on the subject of this post:
This morning, at about half past nine, I’ve woken up to a sound I’ve dreaded for the last seven years: an incoming call. I don’t receive calls unless it’s work-related, and that was the case: HR calling me to cover a shift as a technician at the hospital, a job that has wrecked my health to the extent that it landed me thrice in the ER due to arrhythmia and a hemiplegic migraine.
After I finished the last contract, in which I worked as a programmer and that illustrated perfectly, by contrast, that I’m not suited at all to work as a technician, I went to the Occupational Health department and talked to a doctor to inform them that I wouldn’t work as a technician anymore. That doctor turned out to be a temp, and she told me that I should speak to my general practitioner at another hospital for it. When I visited the general practitioner, she told me that the doctor at OH must have been confused, and I should talk to her about it again. When I wrote to that doctor, I didn’t receive an answer, likely because she was no longer working there. This whole nonsense, a complete waste of time that unfortunately I have had to deal with so many times in my life, annoyed me enough that I didn’t book another visit with Occupational Health, which caused HR to eventually call me for a technician job. Thankfully, the job was only to cover a single afternoon shift (today’s), which means I won’t get in trouble for refusing it. But I need to hurry and schedule another visit to Occupational Health as soon as possible.
I have to deal with this shit even though I’m in a state that can likely be called depression. A couple of days ago, as I rolled in bed trying to calm my intrusive thoughts down so they would let me sleep, I had an intimate mental dialogue with my body that I’ve had at my lowest points: “Please let me die in my sleep. I don’t need to know about it and I don’t want to feel anything. I just don’t want to wake up again. I don’t want any more of this shit.” The next morning I woke up disappointed, and spent the whole day with my body urging me to lie down and sleep. Although I forced myself to go out and play the guitar (at a trail that only about six people passed through), everything I played sounded slowed down and lacking energy.
I can’t figure out what to do out there, outside of my apartment, other than play the guitar. Going anywhere and doing anything else feels like far more trouble than it’s worth. Wherever I go I’ll have bad experiences with people, if only because I have to face the abhorrent decay of society. That always brings to mind my maternal grandfather, that in the last few decades of his life, after he retired, barely went out at all, explicitly because he couldn’t stand what he saw around him. Had he lived to witness what we now have to endure, he certainly would have wanted to kill himself, although, a huge catholic as he was, he probably wouldn’t have.
Life just gets far too complicated when you can’t stand human beings. It’s no philosophical position nor a learned opinion, although I could easily make the case against people. Ever since I was a child, having human beings around has made my skin crawl, triggered the fight-or-flight response. I knew by instinct that people were far more dangerous than most animals: unpredictable, treacherous, and often plain evil. I assume that this reaction has been set by my atypical neurological development caused by autism, but the cause doesn’t change the effect.
It’s also due to autism that I can’t read people; I have to assume, given how people speak of others, that they get a sense of other people’s internal worlds, but for me it’s opaque: many times I’ve had to deal with people who apparently disliked me, even intensely, and I had no clue (I had to be told by someone else, as in “Why are you talking to them like that when they hate you?”). People would laugh casually during a conversation with me, and I didn’t understand why. People would react nastily with me and I couldn’t understand why. I’ve always had to walk into an interaction with people having to be on guard, as I can’t know when someone is going to attack me or cause me trouble. Unfortunately, the intimate relationships I stupidly had in my late 10s and early 20s didn’t fare much different, with my long-term girlfriend (what felt like long-term back then) cheating on me without me having a clue until the very end. Any social situation in person feels dangerous and exhausting. Not much else to say about it other than it’s at the forefront of my mind whenever I have to decide what to do outside of my apartment.
That call from HR means I’ll have to hurry and schedule a new visit with OH, which means traveling to Donostia’s hospital and engaging with the bureaucracy. That’s only so I won’t get called for jobs that my body has proven I can’t handle. I haven’t even started looking for a new suitable job.
I accidentally pressed the power button on my computer as I was dealing with my sick cat, and I thought I had lost this entire post. I suppose that’s as good a clue as any to post it and move on.
Last night by nine, my eyes were already shutting by themselves, so I went to bed. I woke up spontaneously at half past midnight, which is something that unfortunately happens often when I go to bed early. What I remember from that hour until about half past four is me rolling around in bed trying to sleep, while getting bombarded with intrusive memories of so many cringe-worthy when not straight painful moments that somehow or another ended up in my brain. Thankfully there’s always masturbation, so I took advantage of that influx of chemicals to wrestle my brain into sleep. Woke up at nine due to my alarm (I would love to sleep in, but I know how that would end up: in my twenties I regularly woke up at midday). Upon waking up, I almost invariably feel the same dread and disappointment about having to maneuver through another day in this horrid world. As myself, no less.
I’ve been unemployed since September 14. For the last seven years or so, I’ve worked as an IT technician at a hospital. That landed me in the ER thrice due to stress; my heart and my brain told me that couldn’t go on further (two episodes of arrhythmia and one hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was a minor stroke). My boss offered me a nine-month contract as a programmer because I think he himself saw that I couldn’t go on as a regular technician. That period as a programmer was stress free, even though it frustrated me work-wise thanks to the hospital’s manager seemingly being unable to specify what he wanted, and constantly changing his mind. The whole project collapsed when the manager was replaced (literally none of the work I did ended up being used), and then I was put in charge of updating the morgue’s internal website, which was more interesting. That project led me to discover how often body parts, fetuses, and even corpses sometimes, get lost due to administrative reasons. “Family came for their fetus; we couldn’t find it.” Not much else I’d need to say about that. I’ve met so many idiots working at the hospital that it’s a miracle it runs to any extent. But I guess I could say the same about how modern societies are organized.
Anyway, I’m not looking for a job. I certainly should, but I can’t bring myself to bother. It would involve me returning to a routine of constant anxiety purely in exchange for money. I get the feeling that normal people somewhat enjoy going to work because they want to interact with people, but I hate interacting with human beings in person, and it only worsens my anxiety. So it would be sacrificing half of my day, and most of my energy, merely to earn money. As I have some savings, I’m not worried about it at the moment. I think that I will eventually look for protected jobs for disabled people; I’m 52% disabled according to the provincial government, mainly due to high-functioning autism and a pituitary tumor that wrecked my hormonal and physical development. I suspect that either may have been caused by my overzealous nurse mother sticking in me seemingly any vaccine she could find, so I would be protected. There are genetic markers for autism, though (at least in my maternal grandfather). Not much to think about either at this point other than the fact that I wish they hadn’t happened to me.
I’m engaging in plenty of suicidal ideation recently. The kind in which I sit around, imagine myself dying, and feel relief because I wouldn’t need to worry about money, about my future, or about society anymore. Sometimes I just plainly want to be dead. Or perhaps never have existed. I’ve never liked being myself. All my daydreams involve me being someone else in a way that nature doesn’t allow.
Merely stepping outside of my home is a constant reminder that the world is worsening at a rapid pace. If I reach my seventies, I will likely find myself a hated minority surrounded by a majority that will gleefully plan my extinction. Fall ill only to be treated by some shady foreigner who doesn’t give two shits about your well-being. End up in a nursing home depending on the goodwill of people for whom you are the root of all evil. For the indigenous people, modern society has become a rush to earn enough money to move somewhere where the rot still hasn’t gotten worse enough. Nothing short of mass displacement and/or mass murder will solve it at this point; I highly doubt we’ll get mass displacement, but we will very likely get mass murder. However, it will come from the imports, in the form of armies of masked, armed mohammedans.
Also, I’m not sure why you would engage with any of it, mainly meaning society, unless you intend to bring children into this nightmare. Set aside that it would be a cruelty. For the past few months, I’ve only gone out to buy food or else to play the guitar. Given that I’m unemployed, I could travel around, at least take the train to a nearby city, but I have the pervasive sense that there’s nothing for me out there other than fresh bad memories to shove into my brain.
I do keep busy. I work daily on my Living Narrative Engine, which is a Javascript app that allows me to set up narrative scenarios in which any character can be played by a large language model. While I mainly use it for erotica, progressively I’ve found myself using it for more complex stuff. Creating new actions for the LLMs to use is almost trivial at this point (I put together a whole set of vampire-related actions in a day), which leads to lots of interesting, unpredictable moments during the runs, as the LLMs can choose what action to take in context, and they all affect the simulation (if only by recording what happened, which is read in turn by other actors).
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.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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