Tag: mental-health

Life update (11/03/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

These past couple of days, as I was strolling around mainly to move my legs, I thought of what I could write on here. The appalling, hopeless state of the world warranted writing about it, I thought, but ultimately I didn’t see the point. I would be either preaching to the choir or to people whom I don’t want reading these words. All I’ll say about it is that the only sane decision these days must be to move somewhere with the fewest number of people possible, become self-sufficient, stock up on weapons, fortify your territory, and be ready to kill in self-defense regardless of what the law may say. Wait it out under the very faint hope that people may have regained their sanity one or two decades from now. Which would be pointless anyway because the damage is already done and nobody has the balls to reverse it.

I visited the Fundación Adecco in Donostia, a center that supposedly helps disabled people get employment. The woman I spoke to seemed reasonable, which is rare. She told me that these days they have to fight with companies so that they publish the wages they intend to pay the employees, which supposedly they’re obligated by law to state. The companies seem to want to “talk it out” with the prospective employee, likely to pay them as little as possible.

In addition, I told her I’m not willing to work any job involving a split shift; the jobs I had that required it utterly destroyed me. Due to IBS, I need to be calm and alone after eating; anxiety ruins the digestion and I find myself heated, if not sweating, and with my guts in even more pain than usual during the second half of the shift, which rendered me almost incapable of focusing on anything, as well as in massive discomfort. In addition, you’re usually pressured to spend your breaks with your coworkers or even your bosses, which for me would be a worse curse than the work itself as I can barely tolerate the presence of human beings, let alone interacting with them.

In one of the software companies I worked for, they also pressured me to work extra hours after five or half past five, mainly because the sequence of departments that handed us the work had screwed up. My manager at the time told me that I wouldn’t have trouble with transport, because someone would drive me home. Apart from the fact that I had no certainty that they would pay my overtime (they were paying me minimum wage as a programmer), I also don’t want to spend my commute in a car with coworkers. I didn’t last much longer at that job.

My therapists, during my second session about a week ago, suggested I search for courses on subjects I may be interested in. I’m not really interested in anything, but they said that given that I’m always using AI, maybe having some certification on AI would help. That seemed reasonable enough, but I haven’t searched for anything yet. I’m demotivated again, not that I care about this matter to begin with. Right now, on a November Tuesday, I feel strange about the fact that I’ve been going out of my way to get help finding a job, or even going to therapy. I make these arrangements in one state of mind and have to face them in another. Right now I’m like a wall climber who finds himself on a ledge and has a panic attack, thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?”

I no longer feel much drive to do anything creative. I think the reason is that I’ve done what I was compelled to do, and I don’t have any human being whom I would want to experience any new work. I was always doing things for my subconscious anyway, but she seems satisfied enough with what I’ve produced, and she hasn’t been pushing me to do anything for a while. Over these past thirteen months of unemployment, I’ve tried to produce games, only to find myself not caring about playing them, and there would be no reason to push myself for others. Devise a complex plot for a story? Who would I be trying to impress? In general terms, it feels like this whole artistic drive is a symptom of the search for a mate to procreate with. You’re trying to create something impressive so an attractive-enough woman would go “Oh” and want to open her legs for you. That’s all it seems to be under the rationalizations. And as I fully intend to remain single for the rest of my life, which I highly doubt will reach my retirement age, there’s little point in me bothering.

Sexual fantasies do remain, though. There’s always that. But I’m never myself in my fantasies, and the kind of ladies I find attractive aren’t ones I could get, or even meet. Besides, my interest lasts as long as the horniness lasts.

I recall a moment I had with the therapists. I was trying to explain to them, as an analogy of sorts, how once you start traveling around, everything starts looking the same. One of them told me that when she traveled to South America and Asia, the people she met were very different, and that she got to learn very different perspectives about living. And I was surprised, because I hadn’t considered people at all. When I travel, which has always been a mixed bag, my main issue is people. Barcelona was attractive, but the throngs of people and the effects of so-called multiculturalism were horrifying. I enjoyed going to Zumaia and visiting the flysch, but had to deal with screaming tweens. Wherever I go, it’s always people who ruin everything.

One of the therapists suggested that my ability to relate to people and want to interact with them is blocked due to my childhood trauma. While I’m certain that there are blockages there related to childhood neglect, which will never clear out, the intrinsic process that led to an autistic brain simply hasn’t wired up those circuits properly. Anyone in my past who tried to engage in a relationship with me, even if it just resembled friendship, found out quick that there’s no progression with me. I may be interested in talking to you from a curiosity standpoint, particularly if you catch me during one of my writing spells, but otherwise, nothing is building up. And eventually, the annoyance of having to sustain that link outweighs whatever benefit I get from it.

I’ve been thinking of the cowardice that has determined my life in many ways. I think that it’s mainly tied to my fear of psychic pain brought by Pure O OCD. I’m extremely careful about new experiences, because they all leave wounds in my brain that OCD will bring up to ruin moments for the rest of my life. When I was seventeen, I met the girl I’ve liked most in my life, but I ghosted her after making out, because I could see the future: I was going to become obsessed with her, and the more time she spent with me the more she would realize she had made a huge mistake in getting involved with me, and when she eventually broke up, it would ruin me in a way I wouldn’t be able to recover from. So I preemptively ended things. I never talked to her again, and due to prosopagnosia, I’m not sure if I ever saw her again.

I was also sure at one point in my early twenties that it was my time to die, but due to cowardice, I continued living. It’s my fear of finding myself trapped in an office that has kept me from looking for a job this past year. When I brought up these matters, one of my therapists told me that risking being hurt in new experiences is part of life. Well, the equation is not mathing out for me: at the most, I get passing satisfaction from new experiences, but they only leave bad memories. Virtually nothing good registers in my brain as a memory.

I’ve loved my cats, for example, but when I think back on them, the absolutely overwhelming emotion and memories are those related to their deaths. My mother brought up, in the way this person has done in the past, whether I would ever want another cat, with her usual lack of understanding of my experience, and I had to put in no uncertain terms that I’ll never want to own a cat again. This woman is capable of showing up at my door with a cat and a big smile and then failing to comprehend why I’m angry at her.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a software implementation of the game Arkham Horror LCG. It’s the sole game I’ve genuinely felt like playing recently, but I don’t like the hassle of setting it up and processing the rules myself through Tabletop Simulator, so I figured that I could spend my Codex subscription on this. There’s an online Haskell implementation, but it doesn’t inspire me any confidence. Arkham Horror LCG is a very complex game rules-wise, particularly due to the timing windows and what the cards allow you to do, so I can see that a full implementation is likely out of the question. But so far, it’s keeping me occupied.

Life update (10/26/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

In a couple of days I’ll attend another therapy session, the second in about eleven years. That got me thinking about what my worst current issues are other than the fact that I remain unemployed and I can’t be arsed to seek a job.

My main personal problem is that I’ve lost most of my curiosity and interest. Back in the day, I used to come across subjects that interested me and seek out YouTube videos and books about them. I recall a long period in which I was obsessed with prehistory, the last ice age, the Younger Dryas, etc. But now, at forty-one and isolated, I simply don’t give a shit enough about this world and the people in it to care about any of what’s going on or has gone on. It also feels like any exposure to it is going to wound me without giving me enough in return.

Even starting a movie or show feels like a hassle, the risk of investing emotion into an activity that may leave a worse residue than if I hadn’t bothered. It doesn’t help, of course, the fact that most everything I come across is just disappointing. Forget about most novels, movies, TV shows produced in the last twenty or so years; I offer my time and attention only for some shitheads to lecture me about something I disagree with.

I think that most people don’t have to worry as much as I have to about the residue that experiences may leave inside me. But I have Pure O OCD, and every day is a churning of every random shit that has ended up in me. And it seems I only retain bad stuff: painful, humiliating, shameful moments. Even bad stories can leave in me cringe-worthy memories that will show up at random to make my day a little worse.

I haven’t sought out anything new music-wise since 2016 or so. I think back on how much music used to mean to me. The Clientele, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Spiritualized, The Walkmen, The Stone Roses, Built to Spill, Wilco, Joanna Newsom. Some of them already washed out by the time I discovered them. Some retired. I was obsessed with Joanna Newsom back in 2011-2013; I thought that her Ys and Have One on Me were some of the most grandiose artistic achievements of the modern era. Then her 2015 album Divers came out and I didn’t really vibe with it. She hasn’t released another album since, and now she’s a middle-aged woman with a family. I’m a slightly younger middle-aged man without a family and with constant physical aches.

The songs I loved captured complex emotions that can’t be properly translated into words. And they still do; earlier today, I took a long walk with my earbuds on, and recalled how meaningful songs by The Clientele, The Stone Roses, The Walkmen, and Wilco have been to me. But I guess I’ve reached that point in my life in which the stuff that truly mattered has become stuck in the past, and nothing the present has to offer fits me. I guess I don’t even want to try it. The old songs still reach me, but what I seem to have lost is the desire to go looking for anything else.

I feel done as a human being. If I had a job that didn’t try to kill me, like my old IT job did, and I could rely on a steady paycheck for years, I would just disappear from reality the rest of the time. But this uncertainty, not knowing where I’ll be in a year, contributes to me feeling that I can’t relax or lose myself in anything. And fully losing myself is exactly what I yearn to do: all my daydreams involve me being someone else, visiting the past. Sleeping is a respite that helps keep me sane, and most times I wake up, I’m overwhelmed with disappointment for having to endure more time in this world and as myself.

The seventies are the period I keep returning to. I keep returning to the same two years: 1972 and 1973. Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western killed herself in 1972. Sissy Spacek filmed Badlands in 1972. Old photos in my grandparents’ home, which I haven’t visited since I was 18 years old and never can again, were from that era, likely early seventies, and a girl in one of those photographs haunted me as a child and teenager; a depth, a presence in her expression that told me this was a person worth knowing. A section of the path behind a gym and bordering the Bidasoa river, which only became truly walkable in the last couple of years, has a conspicuous, inexplicable “1973” etched into it. An old time-traveling story of mine was set in that era as well. Somehow I’ve always been drawn to the seventies, as though I’d missed the years I was supposed to live through. I keep walking past the dates but I’ll never be able to enter the time they name.

Back to the Future came out the same year I was born. In it, Marty traveled to the fifties, thirty years before his era. That would be as if we went back from now to 1996. My obsession with the seventies would be like if Marty traveled to the 1930s in the movie. The seventies are long dead, despite how close they feel to me. If it weren’t for the reasonable quality of the recordings, photos, and movies, it might feel like exactly what it is: a world that has been gone, inaccessible, for a long time.

I wonder what I did to be cursed with all these yearnings for impossible things.

Life update (10/19/2026)

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I think I’ve reached a dangerous point: I’ve done the things I most wanted to do that were within my reach, and I can’t seem to want anything else badly enough to pursue it. I’ve written the stories I needed to write. I learned how to play the guitar and played for years. I produced dozens of songs. I programmed the projects that truly captured my interest. I dated someone for a while, and found out that I’m not about that life. The stuff that I would truly want to do at this point in my life is either out of reach for me (moving out to a more peaceful, quiet region; I can’t do that because of money and a lack of connections) or literally impossible (living through a previous decade, meeting certain people long gone or who never existed, being someone else).

I’ve tried to push myself through this conviction, but my attempts reach the same conclusion: I’m not really interested in what I’m doing. I don’t find it compelling enough. I’m just trying to find something to do. And I remain uninterested in virtually everything, including things I used to love.

I no longer read novels; not only do I despise what has happened to Western culture in the last twenty years or so and I can’t connect with any of it, but I also find my own daydreams more compelling than other people’s stories. You could say that I should just read old novels then, but I’m not interested in them either, because they depict a world long gone; reading about a vanished world only reminds me that I can’t inhabit it. Cormac McCarthy was my favorite writer for years and I connected with his stuff, but I’ve already read his best. His work gave me something so particular that I don’t feel any pull toward another writer. As a result of not reading novels anymore, I don’t feel like trying out writing experiments unless I’m compelled to do so by my subconscious, and that hasn’t happened for a long while.

I manage to watch movies from time to time, but they mainly feel like distractions. I go outside and I feel that I don’t belong to this world. I certainly don’t want to meet people in person. I’ve grown old enough that exercising is basically annoying maintenance in a body that can handle less every passing year.

I went to my first therapy session in eleven years about a week ago. I’m worried about the next one, because I’m afraid I will have little else to say. I should be looking for a job, but I feel that there’s nothing for me out there that would be tolerable. My therapist asked me if my reluctance to search for a job involves fear of rejection. I told her that the problem would be the exact opposite: my fear is getting hired and ending up at an office, surrounded by human beings, having to deal with other people to solve problems. Such circumstances sent me to the ER three or four times in my IT job due to unmanageable stress, and I’m fairly certain that if I had continued working there, I would have ended up suffering a stroke. My body would have broken down in some manner. The job circumstances that are suitable for a high-functioning autistic man with Pure O OCD are narrow.

One of the therapists asked the absurd question that I was also asked by another therapist many years ago: “Would working retail, as a cashier or so, be okay?” The fact that I could be asked that question as if the answer could possibly be yes shows the chasm between me and other people. For me, that would mean spending the day doing precisely the thing I struggle to tolerate. Apart from that therapy session, my only in-person conversations during these thirteen months of unemployment have been brief, reluctant exchanges with my mother and with cashiers. The only circumstances in which I feel safe are alone in a room. Having humans in my space makes me feel like I’m surrounded by unpredictable wild animals. To earn a paycheck, I forced myself to power through it, and my body proved that it couldn’t handle that strategy. I have my clear needs, and I need to respect them.

Virtually the only things I look forward to these days are sleeping, eating, and orgasming. Plain biological rewards. Once again, I wish I could just retire somewhere surrounded by nature, where I could focus on the barest facts of life and disconnect from everything else.

Revising this post reminded me of a novel I read ages ago: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. He wrote it, and set the novel, during the very late sixties and 1970. The book was published in 1971. Close to the exact period of time I would love to live through. It was also set in Grass Valley, close to Nevada City, which has special significance for me given that it was Joanna Newsom’s hometown. The protagonist of Angle of Repose was writing a book about a relative of his who died long ago. His goal was to recreate, to inhabit in the only way he knew how, a life that he would have loved to witness. To come to comprehend it. Whenever the narrator returns to his contemporary late sixties setting, you can feel that he doesn’t belong. I recall an instance in which a young, pretty woman visits him for some reason, and he notices something appealing about her breasts in her top, but it only reminds him that being involved in romance is out of his reach. His whole focus in what remains of his time on Earth is on recreating through his writing a period of time, and a life, he can’t experience. I would like to say that I could see myself writing such a book, hoping that it would whisk me away to that other period and life, but I wouldn’t even find that worth the bother.

Life update (10/16/2026)

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These past few days, I’ve been unusually exhausted, and the things I normally enjoy have stopped appealing to me. I’ve always been a low-energy person, but recently I was tired enough to return to bed just a few hours after sitting at my desk. When I forced myself to go for a walk for about an hour, my body felt like it was dragging me down, and when I returned home, I was wiped out. I fell asleep around nine and slept seven hours straight, which is rare for me. Usually I wake around two and stay awake for hours, until hopefully I manage to get my remaining sleep.

The anhedonia was even more worrying. Until a few days ago, I was using Suno to turn the remaining lyrics in my Odes to My Triceratops cycle into songs. I was enjoying it, and it felt meaningful to me. But suddenly, I couldn’t be bothered to get through that process again. I also couldn’t figure out what repository to work on. I couldn’t muster the strength to even put on a Sissy Spacek movie. Nothing whatsoever seemed worth the effort.

I went to my first therapy session in about eleven years while this was going on. I told them about it, which didn’t really change anything. The following day, I found myself still unable to focus on anything and without any energy. I had also been constipated for about three days; I have IBS, so going through cycles of constipation and semi-diarrhea is just the norm. But this time, my guts felt wronger than usual.

This morning I woke up at about half past four, feeling like shit. My guts were bloated and burning, and something kept bubbling up my esophagus. Then I got that extra salivation that announces vomit. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited a tan, brownish liquid, along with what seemed like the rice from Wednesday, two days earlier. By about one in the afternoon, I’d vomited five times, and when I wasn’t rushing to the bathroom to vomit, I was shitting liquid.

I have a mild fever now. Standing up makes me feel as though I’ll vomit again. Lying down brings the pressure into my throat. I’m guessing it’s food poisoning or a stomach bug.

Over this last year, I’ve had warning signs that maybe something more serious was going on. Blood when wiping, which could have come from hemorrhoids or some minor fissure. More frequent bloating, and feeling full much of the time. I also get the sense that it’s become more troublesome to process food; about two months ago, I went with my family to a Chinese buffet. After the first dish, I was uncomfortably full; in the past, I wouldn’t have felt full after a single dish. I pushed myself to eat two more dishes, of noodles and rice if I remember correctly. I do love Chinese food, so I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. I ended up vomiting most of it.

I hate vomiting. So much. That queasy sensation, that pressure against your throat, the painful retches, the way your esophagus feels afterwards like it’s been burned. I’m sure there are many other horrible symptoms or bodily experiences that are far worse (for example dying from bone cancer, like my grandfather did), but I would be reluctant to repeat any experience that could lead me to vomiting again, or any supposed remedy that would cause it (like chemotherapy). It’s not uncommon for me to wish to be dead, but thankfully, the rest of the time I’m not bent over the toilet while it feels like my whole stomach is trying to escape through my throat.

I’m taking it real easy today. Haven’t eaten anything other than yogurt. Been drinking an oral rehydration solution. Mainly I’m trying to distract myself until this goes away. I don’t know whether the fatigue and loss of interest were early signs that I was getting sick, or whether two different things have hit me at once.

Every time something weird goes on with my guts, I get suspicious that maybe it’s bowel cancer. But my blood tests don’t suggest anemia, blood while wiping could be from hemorrhoids or fissures, and the bloating and common pains could be regular IBS. What troubles me most about seeing a doctor is how I might react to a diagnosis. I think I would feel relief. Someone enduring cancer treatment is excused from having to find a job. It’s okay to die if cancer does it. I would publish Motocross Legend, Love of My Life so it doesn’t disappear when my blog goes offline, and I’d hope to carry with me to my last breath the daydreams of the women, real or not, I’ve been obsessed with over the years.

I’m not planning to jump out a cliff at the moment. But when even ordinary waking life often sends me over the edge into wishing I wouldn’t wake up again, having to endure sickness worsens the generally awful experience of being alive.

Life update (10/14/2026)

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This morning I attended therapy for the first time in about eleven years. Between seventeen and thirty, I saw about six therapists. Honestly, none of it truly helped, but I’m not sure if I can blame any of them: my problems are mainly neurological in nature, so I might as well have asked them to rewire my brain.

When I was in my early twenties, I worked briefly as a teacher. First and last time I did that. A company where I’d taken a course hired me to teach. I will never forget the moment when the three workers who came for the course met me, all of them in their forties. They were disappointed by my age. “You’re our teacher?” From their perspective, I was some young know-nothing that they had to subject themselves to learning from. I don’t know whether they truly learned anything from me, and honestly, I didn’t care either. I did my best to prepare the work and to explain it, but whether or not they got anything out of it, that was their problem. The company was shady about paying me, too: they wanted to do it under the table. In retrospect, I wish I had rejected that job. I wish I hadn’t gotten involved in so many things that only linger as bad memories for my OCD to exploit.

Now, at forty-one, I found myself in the opposite situation, although I was far gentler than the shithead worker who asked me that with a disappointed face. When I entered the room where the therapy would take place, I found out that my two therapists seemed to be in their mid-twenties at the most. I’m not good at judging people’s ages, though, so I may have been mistaken, but they looked that way to me.

Until this morning, for the last year and a month that I’ve been unemployed, I hadn’t talked in person to anyone beyond my mother and cashiers. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t have any trouble talking to them despite the usual anxiety of being an autist outside my room. I didn’t have trouble telling them any of the horrible stuff that has gone on in my life, or what goes on in my brain: my OCD-related intrusive thoughts, my terrible work experiences, ending up at the ER due to work stress, my failed relationships, my childhood trauma, my suicide attempt, my hikikomori period.

The sole moment that nearly got me to tear up was when I told them details about the best story I’ve ever written: Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. Izar Lizarraga, the central character in that story, has been burned into my heart as if I had truly known her and still mourned her, and in a way, of course, I do: she’s the incarnation of the childhood trauma that undid me, from which I will never recover. I mention this because it surprised me; I had told them so much nasty, disturbing shit about my life, and it was when I was simply trying to explain to these two young women the effect that Izar had on that story’s narrator when I had to control my speech, as I feared tearing up.

The two therapists were nice and seemed kind. I live the kind of life in which, if I want another human being to listen to my problems, I have to pay them. I was going to say that AI listens too, but that also requires paying.

One of the therapists surprised me by sharing that she also has sensory processing issues. I won’t specify much, but she understood my problems with light, noise, etc., because she’s also wired wrong that way. She explained that she uses earplugs named Loop, which I didn’t know about, to handle noise when needed. It was nice to talk to someone who also struggles with the basic reality of sensorial existence, but then again, my sensory issues are small in comparison with my inability to form emotional attachments to flesh-and-blood human beings, the daily torture of Pure O OCD, the fact that I can’t keep jobs or even be hired most of the time.

I talked about my Sissy Spacek obsession, because of course I did. I mentioned that people are remembering her, or finding out about her, because a modern reimagining of the Carrie story has become popular. The therapist with the sensory processing issues said, “Oh, so she was the original Carrie?” I felt a bit proud for Sissy then.

One of the therapists asked me how come, given that my daydreams are about hanging out with the people I’m obsessed with, I don’t form attachments to regular people. Something to that effect. Fair question. The problem is that the scenarios in my head are controlled. In person, my anxiety, the fact of my body, my guts constantly bothering because of IBS, the fact that I can’t read people’s faces or even follow a normal conversation, all of it keeps me from feeling connected. And likely, I simply can’t connect with human beings due to my fucked up neurological makeup. I’ve felt true grief, pain, etc. for characters from my stories, while I wasn’t bothered when my own mother was going through a surgery that could have killed her. It’s just what it is.

They asked me what I expected out of these sessions. I told them that I wanted to snap out of the paralysis that means I can’t even be arsed to look for a job. I’m really putting a burden on those poor women. She asked whether I was afraid of applying for jobs and being rejected. I told her no. My fear was that I’d get a job and find myself back in an office, surrounded by people for eight hours a day, not counting the commute.

I asked them to look at their own lives and imagine how they would feel if their attachments to other people disappeared; not just the relationships, but their capacity to find satisfaction in them. What truly remains to keep you in this world? Your intellectual interests, your artistic pursuits. Pure pleasures of the flesh that don’t involve other people. None of it truly enough to want to stick around, at least not for me.

It was an interesting first session. I doubt this will serve me in the long run, but I won’t deny that talking to them for as long as it lasted was compelling enough.

Life update (10/12/2026)

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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.

Life update (09/19/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m reluctant to write this post, because I don’t know what acknowledging the stuff I’ve been feeling recently is going to do to me. I’ve always relied on what my subconscious brings up, or what it becomes attached to. It’s the sole true way I have of knowing what truly matters to me beyond the lawyer-like justifications of my conscious mind, to which I pay very little attention. And what should have become obvious to anyone following my last couple of weeks of posts is that I’ve become obsessed with a living person as she was in the 70s.

Obsessing over a living human being is not new to me, but it’s by far my most dangerous tendency; not because I may become a danger to others, but because it risks unraveling me completely. My biggest one was Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. She became to me the height of beauty in terms of what artistry could achieve. When I thought of what range and depth of emotions I would need my own works to produce and whether they were even possible to render, I only had to experience Joanna’s music (mainly her albums Ys and Have One on Me). Her genuine sincerity of feeling, her devotion to her subconscious, her meticulous attention to detail to capture every little nuance of her feelings, her uncompromising individuality. It was mesmerizing to me. And although I was obviously attracted to her physically (very much so), she remained this remote, intellectual being that I couldn’t imagine myself having a conversation with without feeling like a troglodyte. She was far sillier and playful than that as far as I could tell, but it didn’t change the fact that for me she was like remote royalty.

With 70s Sissy Spacek, it’s different. She feels nearer to the possibility of companionship, not only to the beauty an artist can create. When I experience her, I feel a raw longing that tells me inequivocally “If I could love someone like that, I would be happy.” That causes in me something akin to terror. I have never loved anyone beyond that subconscious female presence I communed with in my childhood until neglect and trauma ruined my development, whom I have rendered in a myriad little ways in the stories I needed to write. I became attracted to girls in my teen years, but I didn’t feel love toward them. It was mostly biological urges. There was one girl I truly, truly liked, although I didn’t allow myself to know her enough to figure out if it could blossom into love.

I dated one young woman from 18 to 21 or so, but I never loved her. By then, I had this idea in my head that love was work, a conscious matter. You loved by being there for them, by performing love, by making it work. But she wasn’t pretty enough to the extent that I could call her beautiful and feel it. She wasn’t fascinating in a way that I would yearn to run to her side just to talk to her. She really wasn’t compelling enough just to be around. She was just a girlfriend. That experience of meeting someone in person and being utterly struck by how much I need to be with her for the rest of my life has never happened to me, and I don’t expect that it will. I’m not remotely lucky like that (in fact, my track record is having some of the worst luck imaginable).

After that relationship, with ended up in a sour, bitter note (to put it mildly), in twenty years I haven’t felt any need to be involved with another human being in an intimate way. I had three online “relationships” that were significant to me, but they were only relationships in the sense of accepting emotional exchanges, being there for the other to some extent, etc. And eventually they all fizzled out. I haven’t talked to anyone outside of work since 2023 or so. During this year of unemployment, I haven’t talked to anyone at all other than shopkeepers and my mother.

Suddenly, I had the terrible luck of coming across Terrence Malick’s Badlands and setting my gaze on Sissy Spacek. At first, of course, I thought, “My god, she’s utterly gorgeous.” But the more I’ve come to see and learn of her, it has opened something terrible in me: the certainty that I yearn to have someone like that by my side, along with the knowledge that I will die without ever experiencing it. I’m high-functioning autistic and I can barely tolerate being in the same room as someone for five minutes without wanting to crawl out of my skin. And yet, I feel that if I knew in my personal life someone with the essence of that young woman from the 70s, my main concern would be figuring out how to be with her for the rest of my life.

Before this, being without a partner did not feel like being deprived of something I deeply wanted. Now I’m dangerously approaching that point. This damn actress as she was in the 70s has made something else imaginable: not only an experience I can visit through art or daydreaming, but a relationship I wish my actual life contained. Someone I would want to be beside, listen to, touch, and come home to. Not because having a romantic partner is what you’re supposed to want, but because I would genuinely want her company. This must be basic to normal human beings, yet alien to me.

I must be losing my mind. Maybe this is part of what happens to middle-aged autists with profiles such as mine. They suddenly become achingly aware emotionally of what they were lacking all this time, and they end up throwing themselves off a bridge because they can’t take it anymore.

Life update (09/15/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve been cursed to be the kind of human being that suffers for impossible things. I’ve never genuinely wished for a particular car, a good job, a marriage. I suffer because I wasn’t born as someone else; because I didn’t grow up during a particular decade (particularly the 1970s, for a long time now); because I didn’t get to meet certain people, if only to have a five-minute conversation with them.

Easy for me to understand why I have, for most of my life, yearned to be someone else. Born with a screwed-up brain. Tormented by intrusive imagery even as a child, before I had any business knowing most of the things I was being shown. Born with a pituitary tumor that was discovered late and that permanently fucked up my body. Grew up through trauma and neglect. Merely being awake involves a baseline of psychological and physical discomfort that never goes away.

I depend upon the moments every day when I can distract myself from my consciousness to be able to endure being myself for yet another day. Most of the time that involves losing myself in daydreams. Sometimes that involves writing stories, creating songs. Reading doesn’t do much for me anymore, not with my kind of vivid imagination. I don’t create things because I want to be known or because I want to leave beautiful things for others. I make things because I’m compelled to do them, and because that allows me to forget I’m myself for as long as their production lasts.

A weight that I’ve been carrying all my life is my obsessive nature. I doubt regular people feel even an inkling of how that’s truly like. When my brain switches on the obsession for something, I live and breathe it every day. I think about it even if I don’t want to. I have to consume more details about it, and being impeded from doing so feels like mental torture. Most of the time the subject of my obsession is some topic or project, which proceeds to consume most of my waking life. Sometimes the obsession is a fictional person. I fell tremendously hard for Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western for whatever reason that my brain won’t entirely share, and she remains one of the main subjects of my daydreams to this day.

The worst subjects of spontaneous obsessions are, by far, real humans. I got it so bad for Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012 that listening to her albums (mainly Ys and Have One on Me) felt like the sole connection to beauty in this world. Throughout the day, I wondered what Joanna would think about this or that. And to this day I can’t think of Joanna Newsom, let alone listen to her music, without being dragged back emotionally against my will to that period in my life in which she felt like the sole salvation that existed from the ever-present risk of losing my mind.

I’m not sure what sparked it, but somewhat-recently I asked ChatGPT to recommend me movies from the 1970s, a period that as I mentioned, I’ve felt the absurd ache of wishing I had lived through while conscious enough (and I didn’t experience it at all, as I was born in 1985). I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. The 1970s felt to me like the last chance we had as a civilization, perhaps as a human species, to be real. As if there was a turning point that could have gone in the right direction but instead we ended up in the image-obsessed, cocaine-fueled 80s. Even as a child I felt that pull. There were photos from the 70s in homes of relatives in which people seemed more alive than what I was experiencing in the 90s. It felt like they were able to be idiosyncratically themselves. It still feels like that when I listen to music or watch movies from that era. Likely this is just one of my delusions, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling that way.

The request for movies led me to Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces. I realized soon that it had been a clear inspiration for McCarthy to produce his last two novels, which he started writing or at least researching in the mid-to-late seventies. That led me to figure out what other movies McCarthy had appreciated. That led me to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. That led me to Malick’s Badlands, starring Sissy Spacek. And now I’ve been cursed again.

Fifty-three fucking years ago. Somehow feels like yesterday. Badlands led me to Altman’s 3 Women. To the godawful Welcome to L. A. Just to be able to experience whatever was captured of this creature during the 70s. It’s not just the beauty, that somehow appeals to me perfectly. It’s every single detail: her voice, her little expressions, her mannerisms. Something in my brain is telling me “this is the most special being you’ve ever encountered.” And as a 41-year-old man, I have to suffer because I can’t go back in time and just talk to her for five minutes. Why I had to be born so late and as myself.

This is going to be one of those nights in which I close my eyes and wish earnestly that I don’t wake up again. And I’ll surely wake up to endure yet another day as myself.

You Stay Eighteen (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

I’m on the curb, bent over a split bag of trash,
When a knife goes into my ribs, or maybe my heart.
It’s another vision of you bleeding in the dirt,
Your red hair spread over mud and grass.

Your parents are dead.
You can’t see, you can’t read.
You don’t know where you’re going.
You strayed into the road,
Blind to a truck roaring down.

I drive back to my room soon after dawn.
I lock the door, sit on the edge of the bed.
I grab my guitar, but my hands are shaking.

I see you splayed on the road.
Body crumpled, bones snapped.
Blood mixing with rain.
Tire tracks across your torn dress.

I got a bottle of gin in the car,
And the heater’s busted.
City lights on the fogged glass.
They’re like stars, but colder.

You got into a stranger’s car.
He promised to take you somewhere safe.
He tied you up, raped you.
Buried you alive.

I’ve buried a body in the woods
With my own hands and my own blood.
I know the smell of fresh-turned earth.
I know the silence when it is done.

I see a familiar splash of red in the blur.
A girl down the block is wearing a scarf
The color of your hair.

In a truck stop sink, I wash up as best I can.
I pull on cleaner clothes, spray deodorant.
I drive my shitbox to the worst bar I know,
And sit at a sticky table with a drink.

I remember the smell of your hair
When you leaned on my shoulder.
The taste of your mouth
When we kissed on your porch.
The warmth of your hand
When we walked in the park.
The light in your voice
When you sang along to my songs.
Those are the things I have left of you,
The only things that keep me alive.

Your body slammed into a windshield.
Glass and blood sprayed the dark.

I wake up sweating, my chest seized up.
I check my phone: no new voicemails.
I wonder if anyone would care
If I didn’t wake up again.

I don’t know where you are.
I don’t know if you’re alive.
I don’t know anything.
I just see you dying
Every day,
Every night.

Your face, pale and rotting.
Your eyes, empty sockets.

I called my mother, told her I’m fine.
Her voice was slurred; she didn’t say much.
I hung up, turned my phone off.
I don’t want to talk to anyone.

The sound of you humming along
As I strummed my guitar
On a clear summer evening
When the world was young.

You stay eighteen.
I get older every day.

Life update (06/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

These are very strange times in my life. I’ve been unemployed for what feels like a year, I haven’t been looking for a new job, and I know I can’t return to my previous job because it sent me three or four times to the ER due to stress. But there are silver linings, I guess. I recently decided to translate my beloved Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, the best story I’ve ever written and will ever write, into Spanish. I gave it to someone I know in person. Something they said back bothered me. It wasn’t about the quality of the story. What they said is actually a spoiler, but they said it in a way that suggested I had architected it to happen. And it bothered the fuck out of me. That story already existed as it came to me; I merely used my agency to render it as best I could, because I knew it was important.

But the comment actually sparked in me a new story regarding authorship and responsibility toward your creations. My new protagonist is a failed comic book artist, whom I already know lives in the coastal city of Zumaia. Yesterday, I figured out all the major scenes in what will likely end up being a novella. Tomorrow morning I’ll take a train to Zumaia, where I’ve never been, to take photos and notes to ground me in the setting.

Here’s the thing: I can’t immerse myself in the creative process of putting together the story like I did for We’re Fucked and Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I can’t emphasize how psychologically destructive that level of obsessive attention to detail is. It drowns out everything else in your life. I did it in the past out of a desire for self-erasure, and pure masochism. But these days, I don’t think I can take it. Not as an unemployed person whose heart is permanently broken and whose brain may actually have been damaged by one of the emergencies I had at work about a year and a half ago. But I’ll do my best with what I have left.

I don’t believe in writing stories because you want to write one. I have dabbled in exercises for fun, but that’s not the same as a story that comes to you and you feel you need to render it. This new one is one I need to tell. It’s not going to be as great as the tale of Izar Lizarraga; nothing will. But this one will make me laugh at times instead of making me cry literally at every chapter. We’ll see how it goes.