I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science along with about 2 years work experience, but I have developed schizophrenia as I have gotten older. I am 26 years old male now, and the symptoms are starting to set in more severely.
Due to my mental disability, I find it almost impossible to stay organized on a day to day basis. My memory has become so bad that I cannot remember a single thing for more than a few seconds. If you give me a number, I will not be able to keep it in my head for more than 3 seconds. Furthermore, I (literally) cannot think of words quickly enough to speak out loud. This is hard to describe but imagine someone asking you a simple question, and yet it still takes you 30 seconds to think of the answer. This means I wind up not being able to talk to anybody, which obviously is an awful thing. I have to go in the car and scream and shout incomprehensible phrases, because this is all I can think of, to get the feeling of having talked that day (try not talking for days or weeks at a time and you will see you want to shout to make up for it). I am also uncoordinated and run into things, and make mistakes frequently with my hands, and just tons of mistakes in general. A job, any job, is always a complete nightmare day in and day out, where I have to try extremely hard just to appear incompetent at best. As you can see I luckily can still type and write decent enough, given very substantial time. Edit: This post now has taken me 3.5 hours to write.
My family has abandoned me and hates me (because I am a moron, a career failure and a clear loser, they aren't exactly too closed about it), and people at work at multiple different jobs have called me “Dumb”, “dolt”, “dumbass”, and “moron” and generally seem to hate and also distrust me as well. I have no friends and struggle at socializing with anyone. In fact, people in general seem to strongly dislike me naturally, because they can tell I am crazy just by looking at me or interacting with me for just a few brief seconds. People will point and stare at me and say I’m a moron, and I do not even know why, I cannot help it and do not know what I am doing wrong. Apparently I just look that crazy, it makes me very sad to be judged by how I look but I cannot deny it happening. I am short and weak looking for an adult male so maybe I look the part, like I am not fully developed. I know it is not my schizophrenia playing tricks on me because I do not have audible hallucinations, and more than enough people have made it plain and clear. Going to parties for example, it's just made plain and clear, that I am crazy. They say it right to my face. This sounds weird as fuck because this isn't... a thing that normally happens, right? But it does, have you ever seen someone on the side of the road and said to yourself, that guys looks fucking mad? That guy must be me, because people instantly hate and distrust me even just based on visual appearance alone (and it doesn't have to do with dress or hygiene, I can be wearing full business attire and I'll still get called out, it makes no fucking sense but I must look like the weirdest and craziest freak in the world).
I have even had 2 guys walk past me one time in public and say “That guy looked like a fucking lunatic, I judge people for how they look all the time, he'd better shape up because that’s just the way people are, they judge others”. I wish I was making this up, but I appreciate his brutal honesty. I knew from that moment instantly that this was not my schizophrenia playing tricks on me, as I turned around to glare at him, and even his friend was surprised and stunned silent by the fact that he said it, as they glared back at me. But he did, and he meant it. What could I do but shake my head and move on with my day. This wasn't the first time I'd been called a lunatic, and certainly not the last.
"Lunatic", "Crazy", "that guy has something wrong with him", "stay away from him", are just a small handful of the remarks I have heard. My last girlfriend even started to call me a lunatic and broke up with me, as the schizophrenia symptoms worsened. I would literally just be sitting there studying, and she would look at me with disgust and call me a lunatic.
In this hyper competitive field of software development, I know I will not be able to find another job after I lose my current job. I only have this job because I undercut the average pay for a developer by a LOT, as well as being overqualified (this position is mostly just development support and only requires an associates degree). Even so, they are saying they will get rid of me after 6 months because I am a dolt and not cut out for programming. (To give you perspective, I was even fired from a pizza shop for making too many mistakes and being too slow while searching for this coding gig). So, how can someone pay me to be a computer genius if I have a mental disability. Software engineering requires a near perfect brain and a high IQ, where I was only able to earn a 3.0 GPA during my degree and that was when I was more sane. I had a lot less symptoms, as well as studying 2–3 times as much as my peers and generally struggling through the entire time, super try harding to make up for the lack of natural talent. Towards the end of my degree even some of my professors started to hate me because they could tell I was simply not talented enough to be a developer. I received a C- in both of my final project courses, because I could contribute almost nothing by that point. But, the computer science counseling department and a few kind professors seemed to pass me out of pity, as I had already been there for 6 years and always showed up for tutoring, study groups, etc.
What can I do to at least have a life, even if it’s not the good life I intended and planned for? I mean this very practically, I simply need to make around $1000 a month to live on my own. I do not want to be homeless. I realize I will probably never accomplish much in life. I can feel the symptoms of schizophrenia becoming worse each day, more rapidly even each day. But I just want to have a roof over my head and enough to survive.
Submitted November 07, 2018 at 09:29PM by WeirdoSchizoid https://ift.tt/2PfT5p4
