I want to step back here and explain how this began, because the current outcome only makes sense as an arc: not the last eleven years in Austria, but the thirty years before them.
The mismatch started when I was a child, long before I ever crossed a border.
Something was different early on
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. My memory simply held things differently than theirs.
Approaching people was a separate kind of effort, never 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.
The names they gave it
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.
The labels stuck, and the prescriptions stuck with them.
Treatment in my country of origin, since 2008
I have been in psychiatric treatment since 2008. One prescription after another, the combination changing whenever 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. It was 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, you take what is prescribed, and 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. 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.
In reality, a condition that had no name yet was being treated for the wrong thing, for seventeen years.
What I foresaw 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 or supported, if he does not get the chance to grow up with the right framework around him, then the outcome could be very bad, and worse with every year.
I was right. What I am writing about now, on this site, in 2026, is what I already sensed as a child would happen if nothing ever became right.
What Austria added
Coming to Austria did not cause this. The mismatch was already there. What Austria added were the conditions under which an unrecognized mismatch turns into a situation you cannot get out of.
The institutions are overloaded, with too little capacity to 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 makes the difference bigger instead of smaller.
Austria did not create the mismatch. But here its consequences became impossible to absorb.
Where this leaves me
Life is difficult for many people. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the difficulty I am describing here came in a specific order: the difference was never named in childhood, it was medicated for the wrong things for two decades, the people around me slowly concluded the problem must be me, and in the end I was alone in a country whose systems have no place for an 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. That I have not succeeded at any of them points to the thing about me that was always there and never got a name or support, in a country that has no place for it.
That is what mismatch from the beginning produces.