I HAVE A DEGREE I AM FINALLY FREE

For the last 6 years, and arguably even more that that, I continuously worked 24/7 from deadline to deadline without a single day of relaxation and free time. Maybe now, finally, I may find some peace after being crushed by the grindset that is the German educational system, and of course highly accelerated by being multiple neurodivergent, and especially by living with OCPD.

The reparation payments of my lifegivers end, and as detailed in Men, I said and sighed dis_ability and mental illness, autism and especially the rigid ruleset of OCPD make it nearly impossible to do any kind of labour for me. But as the iconic Arno Dübel famously said anyways: “Anyone who works is really stupid”, and I think he was absolutely right there.

We people with OCPD are the most self-disciplined people of all, and we work our asses off, and what do we get in return? Nothing. Maybe being insulted by ableist and trans*phobic cis people online and irl.

As German university students doing it all in Regelstudienzeit due to not having the financial privileges: We are sick, we are tired, we are suffering. No freetime, no friends, only hustle. And to top it all off, we are regularly getting insulted by teachers, which I experienced at three different universities.

ZWANGSGESTÖRT UND TROTZDEM DA – OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE ANTIFA

6 years+ of people interfering with my compulsions, making them worse in the process.

In my case it is both autistic burnout as well as “normal” burnout, but also as Hartmut Rosa says, burnout doesn’t come from working or overworking, but from a lack of hope and future perspective.

At all three universities I’ve been to, I rarely ever encountered classes that I was genuinely interested in, it was always just about choosing the lesser evil out of a generally just underwhelming selection of topics. I’ve been talking about ableism and transphobia and German universities at various points over the last 6 years; Germany is still just generally massively lacking behind in these things. When I had to verify myself at Jobcenter for applying for unemployment money back in July, I was glad that they excepted my second ID card with my trans* name, even though I could clearly hear them whispering and giggling about my “weird name” and misgendering me nonetheless.

When the Jobcenter forces me to work for some democratic or conservative people who I absolutely despise from the bottom of my heart, I will still have to do crunch time in order to achieve my creative work, which I then would have to do during the nights. Or whenever I'm as bored at work as I was at every job experience I ever had and thus secretly wrote literary texts while nobody was watching. Since my work speed and my brain are usually too fast for neurotypicals anyways, I can easily do the soulless work in a fraction of the time that others would need.

i did my second degree in media art because i didn't know what to do with my first one in creative writing, and also to have a "backup plan" of doing a phd. but i of course know very well that i could never picture myself working in academia, or working for/with anyone. i am an artist, i make art, and in my case it is literally a compulsion. even if i wanted to, i couldn't stop making art: and i deeply believe that's totally fine. this is what makes me an artist. i have visions and hallucinations and poetry in my head 24/7 and that's oftentimes super annoying, but also great. i embrace mental illness. i am myself my very best audience.

i have a working class background, when i say that i make art, nobody can imagine what that is. and nobody could even imagine what not being heterosexual is, and all the other stuff. since i am artistically at the forefront of – something – as well, other people have a hard time believing me too. but i do. i do believe in me. i know that my stuff is super important, and that's the most important thing in the end. (and in the end we have to smash capitalism. if even the capitalism inside of us.) there are societal norms, and i've always been falling out of all of them. the only person who knows my path is me. so i walk forward on the silly little trail that is future, trampelpfad zukunft. nobody has seen this path before, but i always did. right there behind the tall grass! yes, there, can you see it!? CAN YOU SEE IT, FREDERICK?! YES?! THEN LET'S GO, FREDERICK, LET'S GO!!!!

i do not have any interest in monetizing anything whatsoever. money is a totally irrational concept i don't subscribe to. but right now it exists, and one unfortunately has to deal with that. luckily, in germany there is bürger*innengeld (formerly known as hartz iv), so i might not be homeless & can continue my art-making addiction. also, I will put some little price tags on stuff going forward. people of course won’t buy anything, but you can donate or sth idk idc.

I am at my lowest, I am at the bottom of society, lower would only be homelessness. It can only get better, even though I will never reach my livegivers' standard of living, and that's okay. Intersectionality means being an outcast. I am vibing in ways neurotypical cishets could never understand.

Since my school days I've always been conditioned to put myself and my artistic work behind everything else, behind "the outside stuff". During work, during my academic years at three universities, without ever having quality freetime for like more than two days. Creative work blurs the boundaries between freetime & work, especially challenging when you are additionally obsessive-compulsive and it is all part of your compulsions. It gradually totally exhausted me, during my burnout symptoms during my bachelor's, and during my master's in my weird mental state that was notably less energetic than ever to a worrying degree. I cannot function by an outside schedule, it will always clash with both autistic traits as well as OCPDs scheduling. The last decade has shown this to me. And of course, deadlines and schedules as means of productivity enhancement are inherently capitalistic and should be reconfigured in the post-capitalistic society that we all yearn for (even Friedrich Merz is secretly exhausted from capitalism!!!! look how exhausted he always appears to be!!!! fr fr fr!!!)

For the first time now, I can really focus on my own stuff (thx German unemployment money 💋). ((Especially dis_abled people would hugely benefit from basic universal income, but of course, anything that would be positive for us is unwanted if it isn't directly related to productivity & boosting the economy.)) That's a huge & seemingly overwhelming change (& I'm of course not good at dealing with even the smallest of changes), even though it is everything that I always ever wanted for as long as I can remember. Now the actually real work starts. And just the act of (re)starting is oftentimes already a really scary thing in life.

At art schools you have to defend yourself for every single f-cking little decision you are making, and it is utterly stressful, and you really internalize that you always have to defend yourself all the time, and also that you have to act as if you like everybody. That’s also an unlearning process that I would like to do, to unlearn those things again.

At Literature Institute Hildesheim day 1 they said that we are authors now. In art, there is no line between “professional” and “nonprofessional”. You just do what you do. I did this stuff to justify my existence to my lifegivers, and look what it brought me: as always, a lot of pain. They are bad people. this environment was really toxic to me, a lot of dishonest people just interacting with you for “the fame” & stuff, or just because you just got some shitty little literature awards. i don't want people to interact with me just because of my little fame, because i don't fucking care about my little fame – i only care about high quality literature & high quality art. and whatever this even means, but mostly: art that fulfills OCPD’s art rules as much as possible. it is thus always incredibly funny to me when people say that my art breaks rules, because uhh gyrrrl, maybe your rules, but definitely not mine – your rules are dead, only my rules exist, and my rules rule 💅

i hate networking and social capital as the basis of the art world, because it isn't just deeply structurally anti-autistic ableist, but it also essentially fakes art history: when people always have gotten their fame, status, recognition just because they happened to know a person instead of actually making good art, than that's weird. like really, really weird. and very dishonest. it excludes people like me who been sitting in their basement for decades. but we've always been there, we've always existed on the margins of society. when hilma af klint's work was "discovered", they didn't want to rewrite the history of abstract art. but history is fake, narratives are fake.

a class on experimental theatre writing would have been nice, a class on literature in the digital age would have been nice, a class on living as an independent writer and selfpublisher would have been nice feat. finances and all that stuff, a blender class would have been nice, a cooking class for autistics would have been nice (for real!).