Help

Dear Bonaire,

For the past months I've been trying to rebuild my life, after an unexpected whirlwind in my personal life turned everything I knew upside down.

My name is Calvin and I need your help.

As an autistic person, this hit me catastrophically. My safe patterns were gone in a single day, and my body marked almost everything I'd been relying on as unsafe. Since then I get panicky when I have to go to work, or completely still and paralysed when I'm forced back into the path of the storm. (And that still has to happen.) I have to do what my body asks in order to feel safe. Not strange, just different.

I also have ADHD. And that's exactly where the problem sits: where the autistic me needs clarity, predictability and few stimuli, my ADHD brain needs the exact opposite. It's a mess and I can't get out of it on my own. Every day I try again, but everything that works I've forgotten again by the third day, and then I fall back into the current (unhealthy) certainty of chaos. Because autistic me is also against all change.

What I've learned from experience: the winning combination is a blend of responsibility & accountability to others. So: you. And that's where I need your help: to build new, healthy structures, and to find work that doesn't make me anxious.

Despite all this misery, my head still works reasonably well. I'm a programmer, and like most programmers, my hobby is also programming. But the ADHD is strong here too: there are few projects I finish before I get interested in a new one, and forget the old.

I want to change that, only I don't quite know where to focus. So I've put together a showcase of my many unfinished projects. Each project comes with a long story, because there's a whole vision behind it. You can vote on the apps you find worthwhile, and through the contact forms you can sign up to use or test something.

For some of these programs, the plan is to eventually offer them paid, through sale or subscription. After all, generating income is what businesses are supposed to do. But not yet: paying customers carry a responsibility, and right now that doesn't feel safe. So for now, everything is free to try.

I can't do this alone. That's why I'm asking it here, honestly.