Excluded from everywhere. Eleven years in Vienna. | Mohamad Sakkal
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I'm 31, Syrian, and I live in Vienna. Since I was a child I have had difficulties. Misunderstandings. Problems with concentration. At school, with people, even with friends. Making friends or building any connection was always hard for me.
Now I have reached a state where I am filled with depression and frustration. I feel excluded from everything. I have no real life. No real engagement. Nothing. Because all I have been getting for years is rejection after rejection after rejection.
No social connections. No friends. No professional chance, no job. No family here. Almost nothing. The loneliness is killing me.
There are days I just sit and ask myself what I am doing.
All I want is someone who can understand me. Some chances. Family. People I can share things with. And what comes back is rejection, again, and again.
This place runs on a strict ranking. Where you come from counts before anything else. Someone like me ends up with no role, no social connection, nothing. And the pressure is that you have to give the best of the best version of yourself, despite the ASD, despite the depression. You are not allowed to be like this. The system does not accept it and people do not accept it. Everyone expects me to offer them something first.
I am already exhausted, and I know by now that all of these ways end in rejection. But I have no other way. The only thing left is to stay alone, all the time, by myself.
And this is the part that is hardest to say, because it sounds like a contradiction. I know I can do a lot. I have ideas. I have projects in my head that I want to build. I am not asking to be carried. I need a minimum. Just a minimum of support, and I could make those things happen.
Instead every day is isolation, frustration, rejection. Imagine living in a place where the only thing you receive is rejection. Imagine what that does to a person after years of it.
And I watch my brothers, my relatives, the people around me. They found support. They are building families. I am 31 and I barely have anything.
All I have is this: I tried this way, it failed. I tried that way, it failed.
Eleven years of this. I don't know how I am still standing.
I wrote it all down because saying it out loud never worked.
The documented part: five years of computer science, stopped without any adjustment. 542 job applications in eight years. Residency refused for having no income. Disability refused three times, once after a 25-minute examination that overruled ten years of hospital records. Every organization I contacted said the case fell outside its mandate. In 2026 two institutional acknowledgments arrived: a university research group named it as something no Austrian organization works on, and a human rights research institute acknowledged the assessment practice as arbitrary. Neither changed any decision.
Everything above is documented. The individual cases →
One entry says what this page cannot: this site can show the case, it cannot show me.
If any of this is familiar, or you just want to write to me, I read everything: contact@msakkal.me. I am not looking for organizations. I have written to all of them. I am looking for people.
And if you think someone else should read this, pass it on. That is the part I cannot do alone.
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