Before anything else, it helps to know what autistic actually means, setting aside the clichés and the Hollywood versions.
An autistic brain is wired differently from a neurotypical one. It processes detail where others process gist, noticing what the room sounds like, what the lights are doing, the small change in someone's tone that no one else registered. The background doesn't get filtered out the way it does for a neurotypical brain, so everything comes in at roughly the same volume and has to be sorted consciously. The parts other people use for fast social pattern-matching work differently; the parts that handle sensory detail and systems thinking often work very well. 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. I can do it. It just costs me what 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 but several, stacked, each one making the next harder.
How my brain actually works
What makes you laugh often doesn't make me laugh. The topics that interest you aren't always the ones that interest me. Facial expressions you read in half a second, I have to decode consciously, one at a time. The pauses, the timing, the unspoken rule about when to change the subject: all of it is cognitive labor for me, in real time, while I'm also trying to listen.
And the truth is simpler than people realize: I'm trying harder than anyone in the room, and the result still lands wrong. Sometimes all I hear back is you don't have a sense of humor. One small misunderstanding, one look that didn't match what the other person expected, and the door closes. It doesn't matter how hard I tried before or after.
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, and moves away a little, without knowing 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.
So the first bind is this: a face at rest gets read as absence, and a performed face costs more than the encounter returns.
No place where connection forms
Then there's the absence of any place where connection would naturally form.
No job, so no colleagues. Without colleagues there are no casual lunches, no inside jokes built up over months, none of the people you'd see often enough for something to develop.
Without income I don't go out. Invitations get declined. The small moments in the places where people meet don't happen.
There's no stable residency either, so there's no future to build toward and no reason for anyone to invest in knowing me. Even people who might like me learn to keep their distance from someone whose life could end at the next Bescheid.
No finished degree means no alumni, no cohort, no group I can point to and say I was there with them. The years I spent studying produced no people.
The disability isn't recognized, so the support structures and the community of others who'd understand aren't open to me. Autism organizations exist on paper. None of them opened a door I could actually walk through.
And no family here. None of the infrastructure most people never notice because they've always had it.
Take any one of these away and people still manage socially. Remove all of them at once and there's no ground left for anything to grow on.
The city itself
Vienna is not a warm city, and people who live here know it. People keep their distance by default. You can live in a building for years without a real conversation with a neighbor. 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.
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 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 did nothing except exist in the room.
I've stopped counting the times. Explicit or quiet, the outcome is the same: a door that was already hard to open opens a little less.
So: autistic, Syrian, in a city where the first impression is everything, with no job, income, residency, degree, or community to fall back on. Every path by which a social life normally forms is closed or too expensive to keep trying.
The closed loop
Each of the channels above is closed 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 the social norm allows. So I look serious and unreachable before there's any opening to say why. To be understood, I'd have to tell the story; the social norm allots no time for telling it; so I stay not understood.
Doing it alone makes this worse in a specific way. There's no one in my life here to walk me into a room with context already attached, no one to debrief with afterward and help me work out 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 there isn't enough time.
I have tried in person, on apps, through events, through every channel that promises to fix this. The pattern is the same across each: an exchange ends within minutes if the first beat doesn't land. Trying more places doesn't change the structure of what gets evaluated.
Some connections ran a single day before being dropped without explanation; some lasted a single exchange. What they 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 asymmetry
Here is the dilemma in its plainest form. The protocol that costs me everything, the small talk, the timing, the readable face, the right beat in the first two exchanges, is the same protocol everyone around me runs for free. Two people at a café table are not performing. A group leaving a restaurant is not counting the cost of every expression. The city is full of people doing effortlessly, hundreds of times a day, the exact thing that drains me once.
And the scoring is inverted. People who run the protocol effortlessly get endless attempts, with nothing riding on any single one. I get one attempt per stranger, it lands exactly where autism shows, and the result is final. Practice doesn't help, because the test never repeats with the same person, and effort doesn't help, because it's invisible in the first beat. The only way in runs through the one thing the condition makes expensive, and the price falls due in full every time, for a door that usually stays shut.
Where this leaves me
I get up in the morning. I can think, I can work. What I have not been able to do is arrive anywhere socially: to form the connections, the shared history, the sense of being somewhere and being known. Every channel through which those things normally form has been blocked or never existed for me, and I have set out why, layer by layer, above.
I contacted the organizations meant to help with parts of this. Each said it wasn't their field. The support exists on paper; in practice, none of it reached me.
I write this down because it is part of the record.