Tag: Slice of life

Life update (12/12/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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.

Life update (11/22/2025)

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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.

Life update (11/19/2025)

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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 can’t figure out a better ending to this post.

Life update (11/17/2025)

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These last two days I have gotten decent sleep (about five and a half hours, or six), compared to the previous five days, in which I was lucky if I got two hours a night. I woke up spontaneously, and the first thought in my mind was my beloved cat who recently died. I see her face turned toward me from the bed, her eyes narrowed with affection. A couple of days ago I had an auditory hallucination in which I heard her distinctive meow coming from the spot of the bed where she liked to sit down. I walked over and hugged the empty space, in case something of her was still there.

Whenever I think about my cat, tears rush to my eyes. Even as I try to distract myself, I deal with random crying spells. This cat was my constant during my whole adult life. No matter what, I could always count on her kind, gentle, and loving nature. And now I will never see her again. On one side, I want to jot down, set in stone somehow, all the memories that remain of her. On the other side, I should forget them, as remembering isn’t going to bring her back, and I need to move forward.

Yesterday I wanted to drag myself out of the apartment, but I couldn’t muster the drive to do so. I tried to lift weights instead, but after the second set, I ran out of energy. I feel like I’m filled with lead. It’s not just my beloved cat dying, although that’s sitting on top of it all; I’ve been unemployed since September but I’ve done nothing to find a new job, as I know the routine will just hurt me. The world outside these walls feels utterly wrong and hostile. My only way to interact with it involves the temporary oblivion that my guitar provides, but I can’t bring myself to play now. I wonder if I felt like this back in my twenties during those periods in which I didn’t leave the house for what seemed like weeks. I have retained very few memories of that decade and the person I used to be.

I feel like I’m missing something important I should say, but I don’t know what. I’m encased in misery, and all I can do is sit tight and get used to the dark.

Life update (11/14/2025)

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Six in the morning. I’ve barely slept two hours and a half. I have anguish sitting in my heart. At eight I have to take a shower, get ready, and leave for the other end of town, to take a bus that will bring me to my former place of employment, which is the Donostia hospital. I have a scheduled appointment with an Occupational Health doctor so I can explain to her that I can’t continue working as a technician there, as the stress sent me thrice to the ER, and that in truth, my neurological makeup with autism and OCD is just not compatible with that job. In addition, right now I feel incapable of doing anything.

The other day, my mother suggested I look into employment with one of the big programming companies in the area, whichever I’m “interested” in. But I’m not interested in interacting with this world anymore. It’s been a long time coming. For what seems like months if not years now, I’ve only gone outside for work, to buy stuff, or to play the guitar. Everything else is a mix of painful and hopeless.

Obviously I’m grieving. But the grief also exposes the raw wounds underneath. As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, my mind kept rescuing memories of loss. Not just my cats, but also of seeing my dead girlfriend’s father stumbling down a street, a human wreck of regret due to having caused the chain of events that led to my girlfriend’s death. I see myself doubled over in the pavement in front of my apartment, knowing that I’ve lost the remaining mementos of my girlfriend because my wife threw them in the garbage. I see myself bringing my daughter to the memorial stone of my dead girlfriend, hoping that this grief that pins me to the ground would infect her too, so the memory of my girlfriend would survive me. I’ve never had children, I’ve never been married, I never had a girlfriend die. I’ve never even had a girlfriend that I truly loved. Everything is mixed up in this defective brain. The configuration locked from early development in a state incompatible with leading a normal life. With enduring the pain inherent to life.

Shortly after I woke up at three in the morning, I opened a document I wrote right after another cat of mine died back in 2019. I wrote that I would remember how his other family members regularly slapped him for no apparent reason, and how he found comfort sleeping on my lap. But I forgot, and it took reading those words to remember it. I don’t know if I want to keep remembering any of this. It’s nothing but accumulated pain.

The pressure in the chest, the tightness in the throat, the burning behind the eyes. Anguish with no purpose or solution other than letting it pass. Only to anticipate the next time something like this happens. My remaining cat. My mother. My father. Back when I was a teenager and regularly wished to die, I daydreamed about me coming back from the future and telling me that things vastly improved as an adult. I’m not the kind of miserable that my teen self was, but it’s misery nonetheless.

They’re all distractions: the writing, the programming, the guitar playing. The online videos, the music, other people’s stories. All temporary bandaids against the raw wound that tells me that life is not worth enduring, which I have felt for as long as I remember. As a lonely child, holding an umbrella in the rain, wondering for how much longer it would feel this cold. As a younger child, being dragged by the hand by my mother, my brother with cerebral palsy on her other hand, as she searched for a football that the neighborhood kids kicked down the sloped street as they bullied my brother for stuttering and drooling. That nine-year-old girl, whom I once saw getting hit hard by her father in the balcony of their apartment, telling me that we were now dating. Her approaching me the next day with a smile on her face, asking me if I had forgotten what we talked about, and me saying yes. She turning around and walking away.

So many things I want to tear out of my brain. Every scrape putting something in there that I don’t want to remember.

My cat died

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We got her as a stray when I was nineteen or so. She was pregnant, and ended up birthing three of my other cats. She outlived them. She was good, kind, and loving. She was around during my twenties, during the periods when I couldn’t get myself to leave my bedroom, and she was around during my thirties when I returned home exhausted from my job. Just four or five days ago she just stopped being herself, and a blink later she was dead.

Words are distractions; the truth is that nothing we can think or say is going to stop the joy and love in our lives from eventually withering and dying.

Still, I struggle to figure out if I have something more meaningful to get out of this other than sadness. I could tell myself that I’ve posted this photo to remember her, but the truth is that I barely remember her already. Just a few two-seconds-long sequences of her looking at me from my bed, or asking me food from my plate. The weight of her limp body in my arms is the last thing I’m going to remember of her. She had a good, long life, certainly better than mine, if that counts for anything. But when years from now I look at photos of her, like it happens with all my other dead cats, the notion that I ever interacted with her won’t seem real anymore. And I will need to carry the weight of this sadness for the rest of my life. What was the point? It’s almost pure faith what you need to hold in your heart to believe that all of this counts for something.

Ever since my twenties, whenever I thought about killing myself, the thought came to mind that I couldn’t do that to my cats. I imagined them looking around for me, like they looked around for the other missing cats over the years. Soon enough I won’t feel responsible for anyone anymore, and maybe then it will finally be time to move on.

Life update (11/13/2025)

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I mentioned before that I have two remaining cats: one about 18 years old, and the other about 22 years old. For the last two or three months, the 18-year-old one has shown respiratory issues, and for a while he refused to eat anything on his own. The vet diagnosed him with kidney failure. He has to take medication for the rest of his likely short life, but he now moves more or less normally, climbs stuff, responds, eats on his own.

About four days ago, though, my 22-year-old cat simply stopped being herself. Most of the time she lay there with blank eyes. When she climbed down from a chair or the sofa, she moved in this slow, wobbly manner that clearly indicated that something was wrong. However, there is nothing acutely wrong with her, in the sense that she doesn’t struggle to breathe; she suddenly just stopped eating, and barely moves. She has deteriorated to the extent that, although I have a vet visit scheduled for tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if she dies before then. She’s now wrapped in a blanket, eyes open but blank, breathing but generally unresponsive. I suspect that something has happened to her brain. If so, this must have been the second time; the first one happened maybe two years ago: one afternoon, she suddenly started wobbling around, and got stuck in a loop of drinking water, walking to one end of the room, returning to drink water, and back to the other end of the room, to the extent that she kept pissing herself along the way. Somehow she recovered from that, although she wasn’t quite the same. This time, she looks like the most obvious “my time has come” case I’ve seen personally.

My eyes are teary, but it’s not hitting me as hard as I feel it should. This cat, while she was still herself, was the kindest, sweetest, most loving cat I’ve ever had and will ever have, as I don’t intend to own pets ever again. And from now, after she passes likely today or soon enough, for the rest of my life I’ll get reminded by intrusive thoughts about her death, ambushed no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

On the following photos, the cat on the left was the other’s daughter; she died. The one on the right is the cat I’m referring to on this post.

I guess there’s no much else that can be said. You love someone only for them to end up leaving forever. That always happens. As for why we even endure through all of this is something I don’t believe I’ll ever understand.

Life update (11/07/2025)

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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:

Life update (10/31/2025)

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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.

Life update (10/27/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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).

I guess that was all.