Before anything else, it helps to know what autistic actually means. Not the clichés. Not the Hollywood versions.
An autistic brain is wired differently from a neurotypical one. It processes detail where others process gist. It notices what the room sounds like, what the lights are doing, the small change in someone's tone that no one else registered. It doesn't filter out background the way a neurotypical brain does. Everything comes in at roughly the same volume, and the brain has to sort it consciously. The parts of the brain others use for fast social pattern-matching work differently; the parts that handle sensory detail and systems thinking often work very well. It isn't a deficit. It's a different way of being tuned.
In practice this means the world most people live in, the one built around small talk, background noise, casual eye contact, assumed rules, is a world I'm constantly translating in real time. It's not that I can't do it. It's that doing it costs me what doing it doesn't cost anyone else.
That's the starting point. The rest is what happens when a brain like that meets a world that wasn't built with it in mind.
When people say "social life," they mean something that builds itself quietly in the background. You go to school, you go to work, you go to the same café for a year, and connections form without anyone planning them. Most people have never had to think about how it happens. They only notice when it stops.
I've had to think about it constantly, because for me nothing in that background works. The reason isn't one thing. It's several, stacked, each one making the next one harder.
The first layer: how my brain actually works
What makes you laugh is not what makes me laugh. The topics you find interesting are not always the topics I find interesting. The face expressions you read in half a second are the ones I have to decode consciously, one at a time. The pauses, the timing, the unspoken rule about when to change subject, all of it is cognitive labor for me, done in real time, while also trying to listen.
And the truth is simpler than people realize: I'm not trying less. I'm trying harder than anyone in the room. The result still lands wrong. Sometimes all I hear back is: you don't have a sense of humor. One small misunderstanding is enough to close a door. One look that didn't match what the other person expected. That's it. It doesn't matter how hard I tried before or after. The door is closed.
If I stay with my face at rest, just neutral, no performance, I can watch it happen. There's always a shift. The other person reads absence where there is only calm. They move away a little. They don't know they're doing it.
And if I mask, if I perform the expressions and the tones and the scripts, I can feel the cost of it in real time. It's exhausting in a way that doesn't go away after sleep. When I'm alone, finally not performing anything, I'm not lonely in that moment. I'm resting. That's what rest looks like when acceptance isn't available: solitude becomes the least painful option.
The second layer: no place where connection would form
Now remove every place where connection would have naturally formed.
No job means no colleagues. No colleagues means no casual lunches, no inside jokes that accumulate over months, no people you see often enough for anything to develop.
No income means no going out. No invitations accepted. No small moments in places where people meet.
No stable residency means no future to build toward. No reason for anyone to invest in knowing you. Even people who might like you learn to keep their distance from someone whose life could end at the next Bescheid.
No finished degree means no alumni, no peer cohort, no group you can say I was there with them. The years I spent studying produced no people.
No recognized disability means no support structures, no community of others who understand. Autism organizations exist on paper. In practice, none of them opened a door I could walk through.
No family here. None of the infrastructure that most people don't notice because they have it.
Take any one of these away and people still survive socially. Remove all of them at once, and nothing builds. There is no ground for anything to grow on.
The third layer: the city I'm in
Vienna is not a warm city. People who live here know this. It's a place where people keep their distance by default. Where you can live in a building for years and never have a real conversation with a neighbor. Where friendly is not the word anyone reaches for first.
For someone who already has to work twice as hard for any connection, Vienna adds another layer of resistance. The small openings that would exist in a different city, the casual warmth, the willingness to be approached, aren't there. You have to do more, to people who expect less, in a place that doesn't reward any of it.
The fourth layer: who I'm read as before I speak
I'm Syrian. That's a word that does things in Austria before I've said anything else. Before my autism is visible, before my history is known, before anyone hears me speak German, I've already been categorized. I've lost count of the times I've been dismissed or treated differently in situations where I didn't do anything except exist in the room.
I can't count the discriminations. I've stopped counting. It doesn't matter if it was explicit or quiet. The outcome is the same: the door that was already hard to open opens a little less.
So: autistic, in a city where the first impression is everything, as a Syrian, with no job, no income, no residency, no family, no degree, no community. Every path by which a social life normally forms is either closed or too expensive to keep trying.
The fifth layer: the closed loop
Each of the four layers above is a closed channel on its own. Underneath them is a deeper trap. The thing that would explain me to a stranger (the eleven-year context, the seriousness with a reason, the careful pacing) cannot be delivered in the first one or two exchanges that the social norm allows. So I look serious and unreachable before there is any opening to say why. To be understood requires telling the story; the social norm allots no time for telling the story; without telling it, I am not understood. That's the loop, and the loop is the system, not me.
Doing it alone makes this worse in a specific way. There is no one in my life here to introduce me into a room with context already attached. No one to debrief with after a failed interaction, to help me calibrate what landed wrong. No friend who can say, before I arrive, Mohamad is autistic and Syrian and has been through a lot, give him a second. Every encounter starts from zero, and zero is not enough time.
I have tried in person, on apps, through events, through every channel that promises to fix this. The pattern is consistent across each: an exchange ends within minutes if the first beat doesn't land. Trying more places does not change the structure of what gets evaluated.
What this looks like in writing
Of countless messages like this one, most are deleted. This one survived.
A planned meeting in Vienna. Time agreed (Saturday 19:00), place agreed (Karlsplatz). The other person wrote "freu mich drauf" (looking forward to it). On the day, the message: "I'm sorry to cancel so last-minute. But somehow this doesn't really fit for me with us. I don't want to waste your time." No reason. No second exchange.
This is the unpredictability the loop produces. The plans land. The conversation works. Excitement is expressed. Then on the day, the message arrives, the door closes, and the closing reason is something inside the other person that I never saw and cannot answer.
Some of the connections ran a single day before being thrown out without explanation. Some lasted a single exchange. What they all share is that nothing was predictable, and there was nothing I could have done in the first exchange that would have changed what happened in the second.
The hardest part isn't any of the above
The hardest part is that I can see it happening around me.
I go outside. I walk through the city. And I see people living ordinary lives, talking, laughing, meeting, making plans, going somewhere with someone. Not elaborate. Just ordinary. Two people sitting across from each other at a café. A group leaving a restaurant together. Someone waiting for a friend at a tram stop.
And I watch it and I wonder why I don't have that. Any of it. Any version of it.
It's the most painful part of all of this. Not the absence itself, but watching the thing I don't have, every day, all around me, performed effortlessly by everyone else.
It always feels like there's an invisible barrier between me and other people. When I watch how others interact, it looks like they have a skill I was never given.
It makes me feel like I am a completely different species from the rest of the world. Like there's some rule everyone else knows and nobody ever told me. Like I'm watching a life I was never allowed inside.
Sometimes I don't want to go outside, because seeing it hurts. And sometimes I don't want to be inside either, because the silence of the apartment makes it louder. Everything feels incredibly heavy. Not because I'm depressed. Because there is nothing where something should be, and the absence has a weight.
What "barely alive" actually means
I am breathing. I can still think. I get up in the morning. That's survival, and I've been doing it for eleven years.
What I can't do is arrive anywhere. I can't form the things that make a life feel like a life, the connections, the progress, the sense of being somewhere and being seen. Every channel through which those things would form has been blocked or never existed for me.
That's what barely alive means. Not a mood. Not depression. A condition.
I've contacted everyone who was supposed to help with any part of this. Each of them said it wasn't their field. Support exists on paper. In reality, there is nothing.
And I keep writing this down, because it's the only thing left that I can do.