I'm 31, a foreigner, and I live in Vienna. Since I was a child I have had difficulties. Misunderstandings. Problems with concentration. At school, with people, even with friends. Making friends or building any connection was always hard for me.
For years now, all I have been getting is rejection after rejection after rejection.
No social connections. No professional chance, no job. Almost nothing.
This place runs on a strict ranking. Where you come from counts before anything else. Someone like me ends up with no role, no social connection, nothing. And the pressure is that you have to give the best of the best version of yourself, despite the ASD, despite the depression. You are not allowed to be like this. The system does not accept it and people do not accept it. Everyone expects me to offer them something first.
I am already exhausted, and I know by now that all of these ways end in rejection. But I have no other way. The only thing left is to stay alone, all the time, by myself.
And this is the part that is hardest to say, because it sounds like a contradiction. I know I can do a lot. I have ideas. I have projects in my head that I want to build.
ASD is complex, and that complexity gets used against me, by people and by the law. Both want a case that fits one box, finished or not, resident or not, capable or not. Mine fits none of them. University was never finished. Residency was never obtained. The exemptions the law provides for exactly this kind of situation were never applied.
Instead every day is isolation, frustration, rejection. Imagine living in a place where the only thing you receive is rejection. Imagine what that does to a person after years of it.
The documented part: five years of a technical degree, stopped without any adjustment. 542 job applications in eight years. Residency refused for having no income. Disability refused three times, once after a 25-minute examination that overruled ten years of hospital records. Every organization I contacted said the case fell outside its mandate. In 2026 two institutional acknowledgments arrived: a university research group named it as something no Austrian organization works on, and a human rights research institute acknowledged the assessment practice as arbitrary. Neither changed any decision.
Each of these has its own page, with the documents. The individual cases →
If any of this is familiar, or you just want to write to me, I read everything: contact@invisiblebarrier.org. If you have something concrete, a contact, an opening, an idea, or another kind of support, that is welcome too. What I am looking for is people.
And if you think someone else should read this, pass it on. That is the part I cannot do alone.