Almost 30 and nothing to show for it

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I'm sick of living like this but don't feel like I have the instincts I need to change. No friends, no girlfriend, part-time job, basically how it's been since puberty and I'm 29 and a half.

A little background. I was born in Chicago to intellectuals who graduated from the school there, but when Dad moved to France to run a study program there, I lived there from about 3 to 8, when my autism symptoms grew unmanageable in schools and it seemed my intelligence kept getting short-shrift. I had friends in the way children do, and continued to when I went to a therapeutic day school on the North Shore of Chicagoland from 8 to 12, the happiest days of my life though I was still pretty symptomatic, but it fell apart at the middle-school level and the mainstream one wouldn't take me. My mother stopped working to call back and forth to schools and deal with people's reactions to my behavior (almost never violent, just weird). I fooled around with a girl at 12 in the basement, the closest I ever got to intimacy.

Meanwhile, my parents divorced when I was 12 and I was moved by a rent-conscious mother to the other end of the state, a Tri-State backwater town on an orchard next door to a sheltered workshop, as I accumulated diagnoses like Tourette's (on the basis of ticks I almost never display now) and depression. A local therapist's testimony and some of my test scores got me into the high school, but I was targeted by bullies from beginning to end. I made very close acquaintances, even a friend or two, as I participated successfully in quiz bowl and less so in drama club, got great grades, but never was part of the informal groups and never dated.

Same deal, but without the extracuricculars since my major didn't have any, in college, which I went to at the local hub of Dubuque at a Catholic school with a majority female body that quickly decided I was a weirdo after I blew up at a girl on Facebook who I thought was being disingenuous about hanging out with me the first half of my freshman year. No dating, no close friendships, no dorm life, and I didn't get my drivers' license until a year after college graduation (at 22) because my mother thought I wasn't ready and wouldn't provide the required driving time, which I had no friends or relatives (only child save for stepsiblings 20 years older and younger). Extended family were always distant, rarely lifting a finger to help, and to top it all off the last owned home I lived in was foreclosed on in the town I went to high school in as my Dad retired and stopped sending alimony, leaving me renting and my Mom with no equity as she tried and failed to get back into the job market as an older woman with an old degree and a huge work gap. I can't see my college counselor anymore, nor my old therapist who was very good and now blows off my messages on Facebook, and my current one isn't as creative.

I graduated with a B.A. in Spanish and a History minor I never got to use, and after some few-week stints at jobs where I quit not being able to handle them, I got my first real job two years after graduating college, in 2013, and almost broke down trying to fit in until I went from full-time to part-time, 24 hours, at a call center working customer retention. I was made to go up from 24 to 30 hours 9 months ago, so I'm a little more normal, but I still pull down $8.50 an hour and make less than $15,000 a year, barely enough for gas and groceries hence my being on the Medicaid dole while Mom, whose life savings are gone, tries to get work and polish a screenplay while paying for utilities and insurance through her Social Security and getting savings or family friends to pay rent by hook or by crook. Everyone else, it seems, has grown up and gotten to live their lives, and she tires of my complaining deeming me ungrateful sometimes.

After years keeping to myself with cheap hobbies on the Internet and morning walks on my days off, hopelessly procrastinating on a music industry database I toyed with ten years ago with some sketches but little in shape to publish, I spent the last three months or so trying to dig myself out, socialise with people who share my progressive politics, going to meetup groups, online dating, etc., only to feel I can't grok the learning curve to really feel like an attractive person in the space (save for one great Saturday last week in convo with some new people) and to be ghosted by the three women I thought I had a chance with in communication. The girl I'm talking to now lives an hour away, followed up on her answers with questions pretty regularly over the last week and just moved to text on her suggestion, good signs and all but are they enough? A girl yesterday joked about a crush on me at work (can't act on that sort of thing), and like the self-sabotaging, lazy sack of s**t I am, as I deal with what feels like an incurable month-long cold, I'm depressed today thinking about a different co-worker getting engaged on vacation with a boyfriend who can afford to take her to Panama. I'd have to save money for a hundred years with what I make to do that, and it just sunk in how, as someone 5 foot 6, with a boring personality, and no money, I have nothing to offer and as a 29-and-a-half-year-old, I'm afraid that if I continue on the long, painful process of turning my life aroud, I won't be able to be an attractive guy with stuff to offer and people looking up to him rather than seeing him as a lazy cautionary tale until I'm 35 or something, without anything fun to look back on from my youth. I just feel like such a mewling, feeble, indecisive infant next to all these powerful, sexy guys that get whatever they want, or at least a heck of a lot more than me. I'm so far below average I don't know if I should even bother, since trying to take the risks I have to take to break out of my isolation, especially in a part of the country where so many people grow up together and don't really give poor, unglamorous newcomers a chance, it's like quitting my job to win the lottery. HELP ME!

Why don't you strike up a friendship with Marknis here? You guys are alike in a lot of ways. You could be each other's support system for changing your situations and moving forward in life.

Lotsa times autistic guys dwell on not having a girlfriend and are so obsessed with that, that they overlook how important same-sex friendships can be.

That is a good idea about making a friend with someone on the spectrum. Typically there is a progression of social skills, in which you learn to socialize with friends and co-workers before forming a serious romantic relationship.

In Temple Grandin's time, being able to socialize with co-workers was the end goal, so that you didn't end up being institutionalized. But, contemporary politics has pretty much gotten rid of that threat. Instead people end up on the street instead of an institution.

We have progressed to the point where the autists now desire to have romantic relationships, but help to get there is largely lacking.

While everyone on the spectrum is different, it does seem that 30 is still young in terms of achieving romantic goals, even though that is old for "normal" people. Autism is a developmental disability, so perhaps this should not be surprising?

Well at least your mom tried. Mine pretty much threw me away early in life..she was in search of blonde NT popular girl for a daughter and that's where all the family meager resources went when my sister was born.

I think you are incredible. You are taking care of your mom. You are smart, a lively personality and honest.

Of course I'm partial to other history peeps.

Don't give up. Go hug your mom.