I'm Done...

This post will never be seen, and it may never be published, but I need to get really raw here in this place I've created.

One of the issues that goes along with having autism, for me, is experiencing a lot of deep depression. This is a kind of sadness that doesn't make logical sense and doesn't really have a source that can be "fixed". It's plagued me for my entire life, and has been worse than ever in recent years as I've struggled to figure out what my life is going to look like in the future.

As I look around, being a month shy of 40 years old, I see a very contrasted image of the people in my life and the people who've moved out of it for one reason or another. I've got my wife, who's been by my side through thick and thin for more than 2 decades, and my kids who are slowly growing into adults themselves and making plans for their futures that I truly hope work out better than the plans I had for my own life.

When I was in my teens the world seemed so promising, with any number of possible futures sitting on my path, though looking back on it now I realize that there was never anything that great in the cards for me. I feel like every decision I've made has been to the detriment of the people I care about, like I've let down my wife and kids and like I'm not really worth having in anyone's life. I've never been able to really make enough money to give the kids the things they deserved growing up, and I've failed at every single endeavor I've ever attempted.

I wasn't a great soldier, only really being able to put up with that life for 6 years, and I've never really been good at the kinds of things that make a person successful in their career. I'm hard to get along with, stubborn, and have been suffering with autistic burnout since before I even knew what that term meant, and I'm tired of trying so hard to be something I'm not and being punished for being who I am.

I believe that people should be straightforward and honest with each other, but that is called rude when I try. I'm overly efficient at learning and doing tasks, to the point where I've actually had bosses tell me I need to learn how to stretch tasks that only take me a couple of hours into several days so the higher ups didn't come to expect that kind of efficiency, making me feel like shit because I feel like that is lying and I don't like it.

I've also tried for years to make a living with various prospects online, and while I've found occasional bits of success, when people get to really know me and see enough of my content they, like people throughout my life in general, wind up moving on and forgetting about me. Most of the stuff I post is misunderstood or seen as pompous when all I'm doing is being myself, and I can't help but wonder if the best thing to do would be to just have AI take over and pretend to be a normal human to connect with people as I don't think that it's possible for me to do that.

I've tried to be a photographer, and I like to think I'm pretty decent at it.

I'm at my wits end because I feel like there is nothing I can do that I will ever actually be truly successful or seen, and I'm worried that any good thing that happens is going to be followed up with a bad thing to equal it out.

Since being laid off in 2022, I've faced nothing but losses, or at least that's how it feels. I got an infection from a spider bite on my leg that landed me in the hospital and nearly cost me my life, my son nearly died and had to have surgery, I had a cancer scare that is still being monitored, and I just can't seem to catch a break professionally as I'm at the whim of other people who are more willing to lie and cheat their way to the top than I am.

I know how talented I am, as conceited as that feels to say, as I've been able to write several books and learned to make some pretty damn good videos on YouTube over the years covering everything from history to philosophy and science. Objectively, I know these things are all pretty good, but I've got no hope of that talent ever paying off because no one gives a damn about my special interests and my personality is apparently too much for people, which goes back to what I said about not being able to be myself.

Just one time in my life I'd like some kind of validation on a large scale, to be able to make a living doing something I'm actually good at and to not have to worry about losing everything because some executive gets a burr up their ass.

But, as I said earlier, the kind of success I'm hoping for will likely only come after I've taken my last breath because even though I don't believe in curses I'm pretty sure I'm cursed.

I look at some of the things that have happened to me, with the health issues and layoff being just the tip of the iceberg, and things like the fall show my wife and I were planning to sell candles at a few years ago being ruined by a hurricane. This is a show that had been running for some 20 odd years, with a history of having great weather, and the year we go there is one of the worst hurricanes in US history that ravaged homes and towns all along the Appalachian Mountains before finally reaching Ohio and dropping buckets of rain and winds that destroyed our canopy and some of our stock.

Now, the hurricane itself caused a lot more people much worse damage, and if not for the fact that it just added to the pattern of weird, random shit happening to me I wouldn't have really paid it much mind. Really, the main reason it sticks out so much goes back to my autistic brain and the pattern recognition that goes along with that.

And I've tried focusing on the positives from my life, as it hasn't all been doom and gloom, but those good things seem to always be overshadowed by some bad thing that was out of my control.

I think to the birth of my oldest daughter, how happy I was to be a father and how much I wanted to be the best I could be for her. I was working as a security guard and trying to get my life back together after making some mistakes tied to poor mental health after the death of my mom, but just as things were starting to look like they might be on the upswing it all came crashing down.

We'd been staying with my father, who'd I'd reconnected with after he'd given my brothers and I up for adoption years before, and he decided we couldn't live there anymore because his wife was planning to leave him and head back west and he wanted to follow her so he wouldn't lose his new daughter. This would be the second time he was abandoning me in my life, and he wouldn't be the only one to do so over the course of the years.

I learned the hard way, through that and other events with other people, that I couldn't count on anyone and that I would need to just do everything myself. To this point in my life, that has held true with the one and only exception being my wife.

And to be honest, if it weren't for her and the kids, I would probably be apt to walk off into the woods and just kind of give up on people and the world in general. I'm tired. Tired of always being the last priority to the people who I thought were my family and friends over the years, tired of trying to be myself around people only to find out that they like me with the mask more than the real me, tired of trying to make the world a better place when all people really want is death, destruction, and negativity.

I don't know if I'll make this public, but I do know that even if I did there wouldn't be anyone who would read it, care about it, or bother to really understand the meaning outside of pretending they want to help by offering hollow advice and words I've heard a million times already. I don't want pity, I don't want advice, and I sure as hell don't want people in my life who don't like me for who I am. I want someone who listens, who truly cares, and who won't try to "fix" me. Because I'm not broken, I'm just lost in the noise.