I want to step back here and explain how this began, because the current outcome only makes sense if you see the arc: not the last eleven years in Austria, but the thirty years before them.
The mismatch did not start when I crossed a border. It started when I was a child.
What I noticed as a child
I knew something was different about how I worked, though I had no name for it.
My memory, for one thing. I can recall exact details, the specific time something happened, the exact words someone said, from ten or twenty years ago. I would mention something to my siblings or my parents and they would say no, I don't remember that. It wasn't that I was making things up. It was that the way I held information was a different shape than theirs.
Approaching people was a separate kind of effort. Not impossible. But never automatic. Joining in, enjoying something the way other children seemed to, finding the rhythm: those did not come the way they were supposed to. I was always working from behind, trying to figure out the rules of a game everyone else seemed to already know.
What it was called
When the people around me noticed, they had a name for it. He's just shy. He's anxious. Social anxiety. The label changed depending on who was looking and what they had heard about that month. None of the labels were autism, because in my time and in my country autism was not on anyone's list for someone like me. So the explanations were always after-the-fact, and they never quite fit.
But the labels stuck. So did the prescriptions.
Treatment in Syria, since 2008
I have been in psychiatric treatment since 2008. Antidepressants. Then more antidepressants. Sometimes anxiety medications layered on top. Sometimes antipsychotics, when whoever I was seeing this time decided maybe the picture was different than the last person had said.
I never felt any of it actually working. Not in the sense of the underlying thing is being addressed. Just temporary smoothing of one symptom, a side effect somewhere else, then a different combination.
But I did not have other options. When you are a child and your parents take you to a psychiatrist who prescribes Escitalopram, you take Escitalopram. When that does not help, you take what is next on the list. You are not in a position to say the framework you are using to look at me is wrong. Especially when no one around you has a different framework.
Over time, the people in my life grew skeptical. You're complaining for no reason. Other people deal with worse. Maybe nothing is even wrong with you. Because the medications never produced the change anyone could point to, and because the labels kept shifting, the natural conclusion for an outside observer was that maybe the problem was me being someone who needed too much.
The actual problem was that a condition that wasn't being named was being treated for the wrong thing for seventeen years.
What I predicted as a child
This is the part I have thought about for years.
Even as a child, I had a clear intuition: if someone like me does not get treated well, does not get support, does not get the chance to grow up with the right framework around them, then the outcome could be very bad. Not normal-bad. Specifically bad. Bad in a way that compounds.
I was right. What I am writing about now, on this site, in 2026, is what I had a clear sense of as a child would happen if nothing ever became right. It is not a surprise. It is the predicted shape of a mismatched life that never got matched.
What Austria added
Coming to Austria did not cause this. The mismatch was already there. What Austria did was add the conditions that turn an unrecognized mismatch into a structural lockout.
The country is full. There are too many people for the institutions to actually attend to anyone individually. Everything is calibrated to a neurotypical person who fits the standard pipeline: apply, qualify, work. If you do not fit that pipeline, there is almost no fallback. The accommodations on paper are not real, in the sense that you cannot actually access them and have them change the outcome.
Vienna in particular has a social culture where everything rides on the first exchange. For someone with autism, where the first exchange is exactly where the difference shows, that culture does not accommodate. It amplifies.
So the country I came to did not create the original mismatch. It made the consequences of the unrecognized mismatch unsurvivable.
What this means
Life is difficult for many people. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the kind of difficulty I am describing here is not generic difficulty. It is what happens when a specific neurodivergent difference is never named in childhood, when it is medicated for the wrong things for two decades, when the person grows up around people who slowly conclude the problem must be them, and when, finally, that person ends up alone in a country whose systems are incompatible with the unrecognized condition.
If I had been born neurotypical, with the same family, the same intelligence, the same effort, I am quite sure I would have succeeded in many of the things I have tried. The fact that I have not succeeded, at any of them, is not the conclusion that I am incapable. It is the conclusion that the thing about me that was always there was never named, never accommodated, and is now meeting a country that has no slot for it.
That is what mismatch from the beginning produces. This.