Hi there!

Welcome to the Corridor of Gratitude.

If you’re here, it’s because you did something nice.

Aww, that was sweet of you.

In this case, the nice thing you did was buy something that supports this community.

That probably helps more than anything else.

Seriously. We’re going to get into why it’s such a big deal in just a minute here.

To say thank you, I’ve sent a couple of hot teachers to explain why that was so awesome of you.

Here’s why purchasing items and services from me is the single most useful thing you can do to help:

If I can turn this place into a business, then it can be a viable, long-term thing.

Donations are awesome, don’t get me wrong, but it feels like this place will be more sustainable if I can reliably sell things.

It feels better to sell you something that’s valuable and useful to you, too.

Then, it doesn’t feel like charity, it feels like a proper exchange.

It feels fair and reasonable.

I provide you with something that you would like, you give me money for it.

If I can make those exchanges regularly, this place can be real.

It can last.

I can rest.

Every time someone like you makes a purchase - any kind of purchase - it makes this place a little more stable.

That makes me a little more stable.

It means that I don’t spend as much time lying awake at night, petrified that I won’t be able to truly get this place off the ground.

Most nights, I stare at the ceiling for long, cruel hours with my stomach twisting and pulling, distending itself to pull itself back together in a multitude of tight, convulsive knots.

The paralyzing fear that I will never be able to make a living off of this penetrates and punctuates every single day.

This is not a side option.

It cannot exist as something I do on the weekends or nights outside of regular working hours.

There’s too much to do.

There’s too much that’s needed in order for things to truly change for people.

It plagues my thoughts night and day. I can’t get it out of my head.

I will never be able to give my full attention to something else until I feel like I’ve made a significant dent in a couple of things…

I can’t attend to anything else until I’ve made a dent in the following things.

I don’t know how to explain it.

Many people have said I’m biting off too much.

They’ve told me that it’s an uphill battle.

They’ve explained all the many ways it could go wrong and the thousands of hurdles that people will throw at me.

I know.

I know all of this.

But I must, anyway. I don’t know why, but I must help make these things better in a substantial way for the men of this community:

  • Male loneliness epidemic.

  • Touch starvation.

  • Lack of confidence.

  • Corroded self-esteem.

  • Loss of potential.

  • Aimlessness.

  • Not having it as good as you could.

I don’t know why I’m like this.

Why can’t I just go live a normal life like everyone else??

Why do these compulsions pour like a chemical spill through my brain?

Is it going to destroy my life and everyone around me?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I think about them a lot.

Bad things will happen if I quit, and every non-sale leads this project to a dangerous place.

There are two sides to me:

  1. The superstitious side.

  2. The logical side.

My superstitious side says that I’m destined for this.

That side of me says that this is my duty and if I shrug it off, I’m delivering a giant ‘fuck you’ to the universe’s plans and to my fellow humans.

That side of me is wickedly grandiose.

Grandiosity comes with the diagnosis.

I’m well aware of it.

The logical side of me says that we make certain things our destiny through cleverness, listening, reading, learning, strategy, and sheer, flabbergasting will.

If a person has the delusion that they must, then that person just might be more likely to actually pull it off through the copious amounts of mind-fucking audacity.

Another part of me feels like this is my last option.

It feels like this is the end of the road for me.

Why is this particular thing the key to my long-term survival?

Because it bends the working process away from the areas where I struggle towards the areas where I’m strongest.

Some of the areas where I struggle are:

  • Consistency.

  • Organization.

  • Composure under pressure.

  • Doing things the normal way.

  • Neurotypical vibe.

  • Not having a delusional episode very suddenly.

…just to name a few.

Some of the areas where I’m strongest are:

  • Raw, expressive writing.

  • Creativity.

  • New, unusual perspectives.

  • Experimentation.

  • Autistic problem-solving.

  • The sheer audacity.

I feel like these things come together to create the perfect storm for something like this to work.

It helps me see the everyday things that neurotypical people take for granted through an entirely alien lens.

When we see things from the outside looking in, many things that seem obvious to the main group need to be taken apart and analyzed by someone who doesn’t operate the same way.

It must be studied and learned in order for the autistic person to integrate into the culture of everybody around them.

That makes me understand it in a completely different context.

My therapist was talking to me the other day about her friend who is also autistic, and she described one of the ways that her friend processes things that my therapist described as, “more logical.”

I told her that what she described still sounded heuristic to me - just in a different shape from the neurotypical heuristics.

What I took away from that realization is that neurotypical people and autistic people both have their blind spots - they’re just different blind spots.

Perhaps you can see my blind spots better and I can see your blind spots better.

The difference is that there’s more neurotypical people around to observe and they control everything, so I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out how to adapt to neurotypicals, but probably less so the other way around.

I think that unintended requirement of me has molded me into something that understands the majority of people in a way that’s completely different from the way neurotypical people understand themselves.

It also helps me to better comprehend and care about how to reach fringe groups that are often passed over by corporations and other hustlers out there because catering to fringe groups is not how you maximize your bottom line.

But I’ve always been in that fringe group.

And nothing is written or created to speak to me in my terms.

Which feels shitty.

And I don’t want it to feel that way for you.

So, I create materials that aren’t meant for the majority - but they are meant to help you understand the majority better.

They’re designed to help you understand yourself better, too.

I wrote out an entire page like this one on the careful strategies I’m using to fight the things we talked about earlier: the male loneliness epidemic and other such things.

Each part of the site, each dark corridor, is there for a different purpose.

It is engineered to meet a different need.

I don’t want to bore you with it if you’re not in the mood, though.

If you want to read the over-arching plan, it’s here:

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…but if you don’t, thank you so much for reading this far.

And thank you for your purchase.

I hope you better understand now just how life-altering every single dollar is.