Eleven years in Austria. The whole story, in one page.

My name is Mohamad Sakkal. I'm 31, Syrian, autistic, and I have been in Austria since 2015. Eleven years. In those eleven years I have not seen my family once. I made this site because I have no other way to share what these years have actually been.

What follows is what eleven years of asking has actually been.

Vienna does not make this easier. It is one of the most unfriendly cities I have lived in. People here come across as distant, sometimes arrogant. There is a strictness in the air: you are not allowed to make a mistake, not allowed to be misunderstood, not allowed to ask the wrong question. One small clarification, "wait, I didn't catch that", is often enough to make someone decide you are not worth a second exchange. And when you are visibly from somewhere else, that gets read against you before you have spoken a word. As an autistic person, this is the air I am constantly trying to breathe in. Every interaction has to land perfectly the first time. If it doesn't, the door closes quietly, and no one tells you what went wrong.

In eleven years, almost no social connection has formed. Autism alone makes connection hard. When it stacks with no work, no stable residency, no peer cohort, no family in the country, and a city that defaults to distance, nothing builds. The hardest part is not the absence itself. It is watching, every day, ordinary connection performed effortlessly by everyone around me, and knowing I was never allowed inside.

I studied computer science for five years. I understood the material. What I could not survive was a system that assumed everyone processes information the same way. When I misunderstood a question because of how my brain works, that was treated as my failure. When rules changed and no one told me, that was also my failure. During COVID, everyone got flexibility. For autism, nothing. Five years of trying inside a system that bent for nobody like me. By the end I was exhausted in a way that has not lifted since. There is a depression that comes from spending years asking and not being heard, while your family is in another country and you cannot reach them. It is its own kind of injury, and I am still inside it.

I have applied to over 542 jobs. I speak German, English, and Arabic. I taught myself to code. I walk into interviews, do the tests, get told I did well. Then nothing. No email, no call, no reason. The only thing that does not change across 542 applications is my name on the form.

Without income, my residency was refused. I submitted everything: medical reports, study records, a hospital report stating that my conditions cause significant limitations in all areas of life. In the same Bescheid where the authority acknowledged those limitations, they wrote: if you can study, why can't you work? They took the thing I tried hardest at and turned it into the reason to refuse me.

Then I tried to have my disability formally recognized, because nothing else was working. A neurologist who specializes in epilepsy and Parkinson's assessed me for 25 minutes, noted that I speak German well, and overruled the written report from the hospital that has treated me for ten years, the report that says all treatment options are exhausted. Three rejections, including at court level. The medical evidence is overwhelming. The decisions were written as if looking functional were the same thing as not being disabled.

I contacted ZARA, BIZEPS, the City of Vienna, Caritas, advocacy organizations, ombudsoffices, media outlets. I sent a separate two-month outreach to a long list of bodies whose mandates are fairness, inclusion, diversity, and human rights, every one of them with a slogan, none of whom took the case. Every door reads the file, agrees something is wrong, and says: not us, try somewhere else. The new address says the same. You can watch your case being dismissed in writing, by people whose mandate says they exist for exactly this kind of case, and there is nothing to do about it. There are organizations for everything in this country. For my case there is nothing.

There are things that would actually help, and none of them are reachable for me here. Therapy by clinicians who actually understand autistic adults, not the general counselling I have already tried. A peer community of other autistic people, where the nervous system in the room is something like mine. Legal representation willing to take the residency, the disability, and the discrimination decisions seriously, not as case management but as a case. Financial support, because eleven years of no income while running all of this alone is not sustainable on nothing. And a real possibility of relocation, to somewhere with adult autism services that exist, with peers, with a system that does not treat being autistic as the reason to refuse me. None of these are reachable here. That is not a complaint. That is a description.

I have tried what I was supposed to try. I have done what was asked. Every path that should work in a normal life is closed for me, and most of the people I asked for help agreed something was wrong but could not or would not act. What's left is the same loop, repeated, with nothing changing. Without one of the things named in the section above opening, the situation does not move. This site is what is left of asking.