Disclaimer, this is not a suicide note. It might look like one, but it isn’t. Not yet at least. Sorry for the clickbait.
So it happened. The thing I was afraid of all those years ago happened. Let me elaborate. When I first embarked on the long road of trying to sort out my mental issues there was one thought in the back of my mind that kept bugging me. ‘What if nothing can be done? What if this is the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life?” I tried to push it away, out of my head and while I was caught up in all of the visits to psychiatrists, doctors and experts it didn’t bug me. I was seeing professionals. I was getting help. I was walking through the tunnel, expecting it to reveal the light behind every twist and bend I approached. But as I walked and walked the tunnel was as dark as ever. I kept walking. I kept going to my meetings, I saw a therapist regularly, I got my Asperger diagnosis, I felt like I was laying the ground work for further things to be built upon.
That didn’t happen. After a year I was denied further contact with my therapist unless I paid out of my own pocket. I was dropped by the agency that helped me with the parts of being an adult I struggled with (mostly contact with government agencies, school applications, formal stuff). I was denied financial compensation for continued studies and I can’t apply for long-term sick leave because I don’t have anything to take sick leave from.
Nothing I tried worked. Therapy made me slightly less miserable but that’s about it. And through out this experience I’ve come to realise why it is that I feel so god damn shitty. I am to aware of how horrible this world is. It’s really unfortunate that one of my “special interests” as someone with Asperger is politics and our future as a community, society and species. People constantly tell me that I can’t carry the world on my shoulders. That I have to stop constantly thinking about it. But it’s really hard when literally everything you do somehow impacts the world around you, and everything that happens in the world impacts you. It’s nothing I can turn off. I can try to drown my hyper awareness by keeping myself busy, overload my brain with podcasts, YouTube videos or videogames, or literally drown it out with alcohol or smoke it out with weed. But even that can’t do it.
I spend most of my time doing some sort of political activism. Sometimes it’s very direct like going to or planing for demonstrations and protests, sometimes it’s more indirect, by building and nurturing communities that foster freedom and solidarity.
The podcasts and YouTube videos I consume are mostly political and those who aren’t are about videogames, a shitty industry that’s like a microcosm of society at large.
And no. Don’t tell me to just change how I spend my time and what media I chose to consume. These are the things I live for, even though it brings me down. Everything brings me down. You can stick literally anything in front of me and I’ll ruin it for you.
The world leaders are engaged in a race to the bottom and the people are to lazy, comfortable or afraid to do revolt and take matters into their own hands. I’m not worried about our planet. It will live on. Either with humans or without it. Right now it looks like the latter, and nothing I can do will stop it. The working class is still treated like dirt and the automatisation boom that’s just around the corner looks more and more likely to throw us into a late stage capitalism dystopia. Nothing I can do will change that. I still do it, I do everything I can but it is not enough. It’s pointless. It’s really hard to keep fighting, keep the energy up, keep motivating people around me, inspire them, bring entertainment and joy into the world when everything feel so god damn pointless.
Sergej Tanja Brändén 