Frustrated with life and need to talk without going out

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I need feedback on this and rarely get it, perhaps should try different times of the week but tonight was a lot. If there is a better subforum here to put segments of this a bit differently summarized, please indicate it to me.

Background

I was an only child who moved around a couple times as a kid, including across an ocean four times, and my mother has clinical depression as well as connective tissue disease that became sciatica in her old age. So she has been on Lexapro for 40 yrs, including probably when she had me at 40, both the age and the med being possible factors in my diagnosis on the spectrum. She has controlled it well enough but had immense difficulties with the combination of her health challenges, my dad's cheating and lack of understanding (though he still supported me morally if not as much us financially after I turned 18), and my weird cluster of ADHD, anxiety, OCD etc. symptoms before and after my autism diagnosis. I am 10 years into a job and beginning to be irritated with unsympathetic new management since we were transferred to work-from-home as the company can't afford the office rent, since the managers kind of get on our case about stats without having much constructive advice and can't understand why I can't seem to upsell effectively as peers to people trying to disconnect services or move. I'm living with my mother, apart from whom I haven't lived more than 2 weeks in my whole life, in the third rental since foreclosure collapsed our equity in 2010, and between that and student loan debt and job interviews repeatedly not materializing into work in a community that looks cosmopolitan on the surface but has few jobs for the unconnected (I didn't grow up here, at least not in the town, and never fit into the one nearby I moved from) outside of baseline service that usually taxes either my coordination or my social skills.

Popularity Contests

Lately, I try to get into politics (I know, what a time!), over the last five years where I've been pushing socializing, dating, and volunteering to try and make up for a 20s spent mostly just at work and home after college. There's a huge delay with other people, and I feel like I missed out on socializing with people my own age when everyone was fresh and new since I wasn't invited much to anything outside extracurriculars in high school and college and struggled to get out and socialize while mastering work. So I finally find a group of "Young Democrats" that I can hang out with outside of school, basically 20-35 is the mean age but a boyfriend or two of girls there is pushing it so I think I'm still good for a bit. However, I find there's often a barrier, a sense that I just don't connect despite one great evening on a bar rooftop a couple weeks ago, a trivia night, some stuff where I got along I thought. I can't seem to hang out much with them outside the group, don't ask but wonder where the catalyst is. One single I think I struck out with and most were in couples, and for me dating is something I do pretty much through apps but it would be nice to hit it off "normally" without my odd or quiet first impression getting in the way. Maybe I more drop masks or run out of things to say after introductions, but I just don't know if I fit in, especially with a core person being particularly cold I thought. It's just so frustrating because while I know young people involved in politics or activism are often affluent and lucky, it's hard not to get over the feeling that the guys in the group in particular have out-accomplished me in life with relatively stable, independent lives partnered up and living on their own. I've gotten depressed after both seeing them and nixing an event I forgot the time of yesterday.

"They Can Turn Off My Feelings, Like They're Turning Off the Light"

I went off a cocktail of antidepressant/antipsychotic/antihypertensive/antihistamine/statin etc. gradually bit by bit thinking there would be solutions since there were times I was too sedated to enjoy my social life, had too many G.I. issues to deal with, and was too heat-sensitive to enjoy most fully any exercise let alone nature walks and hiking, a hobby of mine I've tried to develop despite dyspraxia that I think does restrict my endurance at many activities. Just wanted to feel a little more real outside of being the Bubble BoyTM, and it seemed like some withdrawals went fine, but as I went off the mood parts of the cocktail (anxiety and hereditary high cholesterol are the core issues, most others are exacerbated by side effects of treatment perhaps) my mother started reinterpreting complaints I've long had as signs my "symptoms" aren't under control, and I saw a side I didn't like. I don't doubt I could stand to have some regulation, and I tried after a weird, airy-fairy winter getting back on Lexapro, then when I was too sleepy after a month to pure 15 mg CBD gummies, then most recently Zoloft with a thankfully brief time dealing with weird penile hardness on Strattera; finally, I'm back on the statin with the Zoloft balancing the best I can.

Mother and Child Reunion

However, for a year since a move to a smaller place as rent inflation bit in a manner only bearable from my going to full-time (from 32.5 to 40 hrs/wk, my biggest jump) this year, my mother has been complaining that I complain too much, that I am in a frenzy when I ask her opinion on situations that bother me. She wants to withdraw and watch streaming TV shows big chunks of the day, pausing mainly to search for gig jobs and complain that nobody will hire her as well as to handle much of the cooking (I help with a lot of raw items but have found the process lugubrious), though we do walk now and then on mornings off. I'm construed as a pest and not trying hard enough to deal with my situation even when I discuss what I'm doing to work through it, and maybe I could try harder to do it silently, but no matter what I take pharmaceutically I just can't seem to stop getting on her nerves and trying her patience. The whole situation is so confusing: I don't know if I can count on my job in any way, shape, or form since we could be laid off by the new boss of the contract client on a pretense; my dating life has been a series of lucky breaks now and then from women in a weird place (other mental or developmental issues like OCD/ADD, bipolar, Turner Syndrome; to say nothing of the recent divorcée on the rebound who took my virginity last year), none of whom tell a soul or stay for long in my life; and my friendships seem so tenuous. A trivia group about 5-15 years older than me on average and a coffee group 10-30 years my senior average have been the only ones to really stick save for one gay autistic socialist who I count as a true best friend; the political groups, including the ones that have more time for his more dogged tunnel vision than my greater desire to fit in, seem to be a source of frustration since I agree on so much but don't fit in with my relative poverty and difficulty demonstrating my intelligence.

Coming Out as What?

Case in point, my BFF heads over to help set up a table at the latest Pride Picnic, to which I go hoping to show solidarity in a time of shameful vitriol, and I arrive circuitously and chitchat with some people I know on my way in, then he's fanning himself on a hot day and not wanting to hang out and mingle much more. I go over to my former co-worker's great taco truck and plan stupidly to mingle with a decent-sized burrito and a water bottle, half of which I down and give to the friend thinking I'll walk and eat the thing while I chat with people. I go booth to booth in the single block and find I have nothing to say, just awkwardly eating as I look at stuff for sale, then check out the gelato menu, finally circling back to a booth I was at before talking up my friend's truck, then I see the single lady I met at the event 2 weeks prior, a quiet but decent-seeming woman who overcame alcoholism and changed scenery before working here to help others recover, and we talk a little. I think it was hopeless already so I don't know why I mentioned the event later that afternoon that I didn't know was at 3:30 and not 5; I find out as I'm shopping with the friend and later getting a shake that I have spilled burrito contents on my light-ish brown shirt, so that's that for that. She's probably seen worse, but only on hopelessly drunk men barely getting back on their feet, but the whole exercise seemed to confirm that I had made a fool of myself as a truly failed heterosexual man at this event. And that's the thing, my mother talks a good game about her "high functioning" son but is frustrated by the fact that the answers don't come as easy to me as the son she could have had, people don't understand my social orientation, and I fear I'm often only welcomed grudgingly and perhaps feared as implicitly predatory in some way; I just don't think the kind of support the best of the community offered these young people will ever be offered to my differences, and yet I keep trying I guess to prove I'm at least not below average. Maybe I need to learn something from the gay friend and appreciate being unique, but it's difficult when I come home and my mother is just sick of the same old whine, brings me back to those days I cried without anyone to understand me in an empty house save for a tired, withdawn mother and whatever pets were there at the time. How do I come to terms with life?

Primary thing I get from it:
There is a lot of frustration there.
Which has accumulated over time.


With the mess my own health is, there aren't solutions immediately springing to mind to offer as possibilities.

This is a very long post. You will be more likely to get responses with a much shorter post that is clear and to the point. (Not that this post isn't clear.)