I feel bad about posting this because for the most part I only use this account when I'm too beat down by the reality of the last 9 years of my life to cope, so then I log on and vent and then run away and don't respond to the helpful comments I get for months because processing what people say in reply is another Task on the Pile of Tasks, many of which are actively on fire, needed to be done years ago, both, etc.
I'll try to stay engaged this time, I clearly need space to communicate about this shit and people to communicate with more than my therapist (half my age bless her heart, but she listens and has ADHD herself) and my one friend with more profound ASD than me who can really only process 2 to 5 texts a day. Who is super loyal and a big help btw.
I will try to make this as concise as I can but it's gonna be long as fuck. I flamed out of my "career" in software over a decade ago when my biofamily imploded, and lost my home about a decade ago. Since then I've lived in a succession of friends' houses trying to get back on my feet, but what I didn't understand before losing my home was that I have an absolute requirement for a certain degree of 1) predictability and 2) quiet / stillness / social downtime. I have hypersensitive hearing and vision, and if I don't get those things, it drives me into unrelenting autistic burnout which at best decimates my ability to do tech work and at worst destroys my ability to think, make decisions, use written & spoken language, and exist as a human being in my own skin.
Nearly a decade I've lived like this, and I'm currently in the second least-worst place I've lived during that time, and I still don't have access to what I need to pull myself out of it. I live on a couch with no door and no privacy and a WFH housemate around the corner 16 to 17 hours a day who is one of those people who never stops moving and making noise for more than 5 minutes unless actively gaming or watching TV. At which point the speech noise from the game or TV (plus that of the other housemate who is able to remain still but who watches Youtube all day at 1.5x speed) would drive me absolutely bugfuck insane after a couple weeks continuous exposure if I didn't have white noise playing 24/7 and if I hadn't finally broken my compulsive need for situational awareness after years of brute force battle in order to wear noise canceling headphones much of the day.
I am aware I am extremely lucky thru all of this, and that many people in my situation have ended up on the street and/or literally dead (as in physically deceased) whereas I have not. There are a lot of reasons for that, I'm sure white privilege is one, my ingenuity in making it work is another (I taught myself to cook, people put up with a ne'er-do-well houseguest a lot longer when that houseguest can feed them delicious lowkey-gourmet meals on the relative cheap with consistency, so that's one way I contribute back). But this is my last stop before true outdoor homelessness.
I don't have any friends left who I could potentially stay with whenever my time is up here. I've been housing insecure for over a decade and food insecure for at least half of that and the reason I haven't got myself out of it since 2016 when I lost my home is because I've had no control of my physical environment, and I can't meet my sensory or social needs because at least one person in every single environment I've inhabited since then has not behaved like how my parents did when I was imprinting or whatever.
When at rest my parents tended to stay at rest, when in motion they tended to stay in motion, my brain attuned itself to that, that is now "predictable," and the other pattern which many humans have - being relentlessly active at fucking random the entire time they are awake, whether continuously or in intermittent small bursts - is absolute kryptonite which freezes my brain like nothing else. I have been trying to adapt for all these years and at this point I'm maxed out. If people would communicate about what's happening in a shared space so I knew what to expect, I could probably cope much better, but I have also discovered that what I thought was normal human behavior - using words to coordinate living in a house together - is not only apparently rare as fuck, but something a great number of people hate so much that they would rather have their skin flayed off or their eyes gouged out by wild birds. To this day this finding astounds me but I have no choice but to accept the evidence that this is how it is.
I honestly don't even really know if there's a point to this, I came here to lament that even though where I am now is less awful than some of the places I've lived since 2016, the level of emotional nourishment I get from my housemates is absolute zero, and I'd probably be chronically suicidal if not for one of their cats, plus the absolute godsend of having found a highly effective medication stack by 2018. But the total lack of warmth or engagement of any depth here is killing me all the same. I endure all the downsides of living on a couch in a sensory torture chamber with none of the benefits that living with more compatible people in the past has offered. I've been here a year and me and my housemates haven't eaten together even once, even when there's a meal prepared for everyone, which is frequent. Not even on Christmas. I hate it so much. I'm beat down, I'm nearing my existential wit's end, my sleep cycle is a mess due to strong incentive to stay up all night due to that being the only time I can have any peace, and after years of positive control since finding that med stack, I have learned that lax circadian control means I will have a bona fide depressive episode sooner or later. I was grazed by one this spring, and in my situation, getting depressed could straight up kill me because it's a risk factor for ending up outdoors (again).
I had no idea how common quicksand death traps like this are for AuDHD/ASD people. But I personally know multiple others in very similar situations, some worse, some better. My friend who can give me a few texts a day has a body covered with self-harm scars and has been thru electroshock and god knows what else because she is trapped with a loud go-getter parent who doesn't care about the impact their behavior has and doesn't give a fuck about the knock-on effects of that. I have a second-degree relative in the same scenario, minus the cutting and electroshock but with just as many psych ward stays, with a hyperthymic autistic parent of the loud sensation-seeking type who sleeps 6 hours a night max and hoards animals like you would not believe (multiple waterfowl next to the cooking area etc etc etc) and thinks their own flesh and blood needs to "toughen up" and so forth. And then two other friends in lesser scenarios than mine, and me in the middle.
Millions of us have lived and died exactly like this. And now I know it.
I'm getting to the point where I don't really see a way out of this for myself. I've had good luck with physical health thus far but I'm in my 40s and I have a hunch that my luck is soon to run out. I have been trying to get back on my feet as a developer (just doing web shit to start) most of this time because it's so much more lucrative than anything else I could do, when I'm able to do it, which is rare due to chronic sensory & social burnout literally removing my ability to think. I strongly doubt I will survive as long as either of my parents managed to do, and I'm near the point of no longer really giving a shit about that. The friends I still nominally have are burnt out and atomized and completely occupied with either struggle or pointless distractions or both. And I'm one of them! There is less to live for every year, people no longer bother to communicate and just leave each other on read, and now far too many of my friends are dead. It used to be from drugs or stupid behavior but now I'm at an age where it is starting to be from random health problems.
I don't have much fight left in me, even with the relative miracle of pharma propping me up. I manage to get a few precious weeks a year of alone time to keep myself alive and nominally sane by watching people's cats when they go on vacation, but it's never anywhere near enough to make progress on my tech projects that will get me some dev cred and open some doors, and it's nowhere near consistent enough to really allow me to work much or pull myself out of high impact burnout. My best friend died 3 years ago, and nothing has even come within a light year of filling that hole. I haven't had even a glimmer of romance in a decade, and at this point I'm so done with inescapable unwanted social contact that I'm legit terrified that a significant other would end up destroying my peace in the same way that all the people who've tried to help me all this time have done.
My only real approach to pull out of it at this point is to somehow ???-profit my way into owning a vehicle large enough to GO AWAY and obtain solitude, and be able to work (tech work) while I am wherever AWAY is. I don't have the vehicle, but over the last 5 years I have cobbled together the gear and the skills necessary to at least be able to work from anywhere with power and wifi/LTE (which is more complicated than most people think when you do actual development work and are too burnt out to rely on shitty always-changing Big Tech infra, or to consistently pay for cellular data, but that's another story).
I guess I will find out what becomes of me, time will tell.
The nice part is that I do feel better having belted all this out, and as an AuDHD with (well controlled) ultrarapid cycle bipolar 2, I've learned how to lean in to my moodiness and, with the help of the meds, rarely ever get stuck feeling irreparably shitty for too long. And having gone thru hundreds of cycles before getting that mood disorder under control, I have the gift of perspective to know that even the worst feelings can change.
If you read to the end - thank you - I will try not to hide from the cognitive load of reading & responding to any comments for 3 to 6 months like I usually do.
I still believe it's possible, in some future timelines, to get out of this and have a life (more) worth living, even if I can't see how from where I am now. Thanks for reading.
